Until now, Marks & Spencer has been unconsciously racist. To atone for that deadly sin, it has gone consciously woke.
The holy spirit of the secular saint George Floyd wafted into the M&S lingerie department and begat a redemptive concept of a new line of neutral or nude-coloured underwear. Suddenly, the designers of knickers and bras saw the light: their products had been racist.
The idea behind nude-coloured underwear is to make a woman wearing knickers and bra appear as if she’s wearing nothing at all. Personally, I think that’s cheating, and I can also anticipate a situation where such a trompe l’oeil may endanger male health.
Just imagine a young, strong and impetuous chap led to believe that no physical barrier separates his passion from the woman’s body. Unable to contain himself, he lunges… Well, you know.
However, I’ve been reassured that the desired illusion isn’t so realistic as to produce penile trauma. Apparently, one can see that a woman is wearing knickers, even though they more or less match the colour of her skin.
Yes, but is it more or less? That’s where the retailer’s vision was enhanced by what its spokesman described as “the global conversation on racial inequality following the horrific death” of the serial criminal George Floyd.
St George II acted as a conversation starter because he was brutally killed by a racist Minneapolis cop for being black. That’s the accepted thrust of the narrative. The less accepted but truer version is that Floyd was a drug-addled recidivist thug who resisted arrest for yet another crime he had committed. His death was unfortunate, but it had nothing to do with his race.
Yet our biggest retailer of underwear chose the accepted version, which inspired a closer look at its nude-coloured underwear. It turned out that the line was designed strictly for the milky skin associated with a typical English rose.
However, the apparition of St George II removed the scales from the M&S people’s eyes. They saw the light and realised that some of Britain’s fair maidens aren’t, well, fair, if you get my meaning.
The female population of our multi-culti land comes in different shades of skin colours, at least five of them. And four of those had until then been ignored.
The knicker designers gasped with horror and went to work, the image of George Floyd never quite leaving their line of vision. So inspired, they produced a new “bold and relevant” line of inclusive, racially sensitive bras and knickers – in five different colours, approximating the racial makeup of our society.
Now, I happen to think that this whole hullabaloo about Floyd is so much hogwash acting as subversive propaganda against our whole civilisation. But I realise that some people may feel differently, for whatever reason.
They swear by the new, fake take on virtue and are serious about signalling it urbi et orbi. They do think that George Floyd is a martyr for the noble cause of racial equality, a deficit of which indicts the West for the greatest infamy in history.
I only wonder if communicating that grandiose message through bras and knickers may just trivialise, nay vulgarise, that great cause. No mockery like self-mockery, and this knickers-and-knockers campaign brings that notion into sharp focus.
One observation is in order, I think. I’m not buying the seductive idea that all wokers of the world are stupid. Some are, some aren’t.
Even rather intelligent people may feel the emotional need to fall in with what they see as majority opinion. It probably isn’t in the population at large, but it may well dominate within some swathes of British society, which is where wokers wish to belong.
So some of them may have some intelligence. Not an excessive amount, but some. What they absolutely can’t have under any circumstances is taste. Revolutionaries, cultural or otherwise, are always tasteless, simply because they’ve pledged their loyalty to a tasteless cause.
Anyway, I wish M&S every measure of success in their marketing venture. That’s guaranteed because the new line can’t lose even if it flops commercially.
A financial loss won’t prevent it from scoring a moral victory. After all, some things soar above filthy lucre, and I’m sure M&S shareholders will see it that way.
Yes but England beat the Czech Republic and Scotland is out, so it’s not all bad!
The way they played, I wouldn’t have cared if they lost.
I have arrived at a stage now where I just laugh at all idiocy. Almost every day I think, “now our society cannot sink deeper”. But no, there is another news article, a statement by a greenie (the worst of all), an action taken by a corporation (like M&S) that defies my wish that the bottom is now finally reached and we can start making our way up towards the surface. How much more can we take before…….?
“in five different colours, approximating the racial makeup of our society.”
I will never look at a burka-clad woman in quite the same way again.
I’m never sure she is indeed a woman.
Victoria’s Secret just did the same thing with oversize women. It is all part of a conspiracy I am telling you.
Large women deserve special attention. As the Russian writer Benny Yerofeyev once quipped, “A recent survey has found that 85 per cent of all men prefer fat women — and only 15 per cent, very fat ones.”