If we were really an island of strangers, as Sir Keir Starmer attested this week, then it might be OK. The real problem is that we have to interact with the bastards, so they cease being strangers and start being people who have a function in our lives. The old cliché had it that in the UK you were never more than ten metres from a rat and this is probably still true, except it’s five metres in Birmingham.
But it is also true that you are never more than ten metres from a skank. A foreign skank, a British skank, makes no odds. Someone pig-ignorant and witless but possessed, nonetheless, of a kind of neolithic cunning. Probably tattooed, probably insistent that they shouldn’t be judged.
I thought all this while reading Gus Carter’s Spectator cover story on Scuzz Nation last week, which – excellent piece though it was – rather understated the case. A Soylent Green nation whining and endlessly grasping for handouts, narcissistic and entitled. I suppose the term ‘Scuzz Nation’ sums it up quite well: a place where, to borrow from Tom Waits, ‘No one speaks English and every-thing’s broken.’ Waits had been referring to Copenhagen and it may well be true there, too.
Broken things – trains, health services, people – do not arrive here unbidden by accident; they are not visited upon us in a vacuum. We bring down a state of scuzz by buying into patently stupid ideologies and electing the wrong people. Much of it is simple. If we want a nation where people work for a living, then don’t pay them more than the entry-level salary of a job for not working. Don’t tell them they’re all ill, either, when they are patently not. If we want children brought up in a two-parent household, don’t reward single-parenthood and divorce. If we want a generation who values discipline and the acquisition of knowledge, don’t send them to schools where both notions are thought otiose by the idiotic staff. And yet there is no great rebellion against any of this stuff: the majority of the public goes along with it all and then looks surprised when their train is cancelled or their rubbish not collected. What we believe in has its consequences somewhere down the line.
Expensive candles and greasy unctuous oils are not an adequate substitute for a sense of humanity
There was the perfect example of Scuzz Nation on TV this week. It was a Channel 4 show called Virgin Island which, if you haven’t read or heard the hype, consisted of 12 virgins – the oldest aged 30 – despatched to a Croatian island to lose their inhibitions at the hands of self-proclaimed ‘sex therapists’ who – not to beat about the bush (ho, ho) – acted as whores for these inexperienced young people. By whores, I mean they took part in sexual acts with the youngsters for money paid by Channel 4. That’s whoring, isn’t it?
The first thing one noticed was that the virgins, the people who had so far not had sexual intercourse, were charming, kindly, likeable and, for the most part, intelligent, while the smug, preening sex therapists were the most revolting group of people I think I have ever seen on screen (and I have watched Downfall). In an early scene two of these charlatans demonstrated simulated intercourse up against a tree – grinding away as the young virgins hid their eyes, mortified, or just laughed. I would argue that this is precisely the right reaction to have when libidinous, amoral, past-it show-offs cavort in front of you, although chucking a bucket of water – ice cold or boiling, your choice – over them seems reasonable too.
The virgins lacked only one thing – self-confidence, especially the strutting and sulphurous self-confidence that attends to sexual conquest. Otherwise they were fine. They didn’t require schooling into how to touch people, as enacted by one wizened hag putting her hand on the groin of a poor lad. But it was the whole premise of the exercise which most galled: that there must be something wrong with these young people because they haven’t had sex. It reminded me of the Scottish graveyard headstone about a lady called Elizabeth Charlotte: ‘She was aye a virgin at 17 – a remarkable thing in Aberdeen.’ These young folk had been pestered and badgered by society into believing that virginity was far from something worthy, but was evidence of a mental deficiency – and so they sought help from Channel 4 and these clap-trap gibbering monsters in ‘curing’ them.
Their explanations for having remained virginal were, for the most part, expressions of modesty and self-restraint. But we will have no modesty and self-restraint in Scuzz Nation. The second thing these awful therapists did was de-couple the act of sex from any notion of a relationship, meaningful or otherwise. Marriage, of course, was not even mentioned (except by one or two of the young people, one of whom pined for a kindly man who might love her).
In other words, sex became entirely de-humanised and the whole thing about the act which enthrals – the intimacy, the trust, the anticipation – was jettisoned altogether. This was sex simply as a recreational pursuit and these kids should be having their fill of it, willy-nilly (fnarr fnarr). But expensive stinking candles and greasy unctuous oils are not an adequate substitute for a sense of humanity.
Don’t be surprised if, once the cameras have retreated, the young men from Virgin Island run into a spot of consent trouble, having popped their cherries with some amenable whore who believes everybody should have sex at the drop of a hat. And don’t be surprised, either, if some of the women later discover that there were salient reasons for saying no, back in the old days when they were supposedly mentally deficient.
But then Virgin Island is only the latest in an endless series of shows which, essentially, promulgate the same paradigm: endless sex is your human right and if you don’t want it there must be something wrong with you. Scuzz Nation. If you build it, they will come. So to speak.
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