Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What are we supposed to say when a grooming ring comes to light?

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It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit of right-on morality, the NSPCC, girls these days feel compelled to act like porn stars in order to ingratiate themselves with boys. I am not sure quite what, in day to day life, this involves. I only know that they made no similar attempts during my adolescence, or if they did I didn’t notice. I vaguely recall one young lady in my school class telling me, when I was 14, that she had engaged in sexual intercourse the previous night with a boy from a neighbouring town. ‘What was it like, Debs?’ I asked, wide-eyed. ‘Didn’t touch the fucking sides,’ Debs spat with all the contempt she could muster. I suppose that’s quite a porny thing to say, in retrospect. She was cute and scary, Debs, and I was terrified of her. But I never felt that there was an ingratiation process going on; quite the reverse, really. Girls held the whip hand when I was a teenager: it is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times.

Back then, girls were less likely to be seen as ‘victims’ of male sexual aggrandisement, either because nobody cared if they were victims or not, or because they really were not victims to such an extent as they seem to be today, if you follow my drift. They were the ‘gatekeepers’ of their sexuality, and those gates were — in most cases, if not Debs’s — guarded with rather more vigilance than is the case now.

It is also true that back then we did not have gangs of semi-educated Muslim men preying on young white girls on the basis that since they were not Muslim their degradation did not matter one jot in the eyes of Allah.

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