Morality Redux

A day after my previous post, two articles appeared showing how much we're still prone to getting wound up about sex . . . for no reason other than an inherited and irrelevant moral sense.

Exhibit A Actress and sometime bollywood starlet Tania Zaetta is accused of having sex with soldiers while on a tour of Afghanistan.

Firstly: who cares? And secondly . . . no, that's it. Who cares?

I am utterly incredulous about this. She's an adult. The soldiers concerned are adults.

As long as she makes it to her show on time, which is what she's paid to do (and there's no suggestion that she didn't) then there's no problem.

If anyone can explain this to me in terms other than puritanical outrage, I'd be very interested to hear it.

Exhibit B An enterprising idea to distribute condoms with Vodka Cruisers was quickly stopped.

Again . . . what's the problem? In what possible sense (other than again, the puritanical) is this not a good idea?

The recent moral outrage over binge drinking has been happy to use the spectre of teen pregnancy as ammunition.

And this sort of beverage is precisely what's been targeted by the new "RTD tax" to, in theory, control binge drinking.

So giving out free condoms with every purchase makes perfect sense.

I'm very uncomfortable about all of this. This sort of thing should be left at the pulpit where it belongs, and not repeated ad nauseum by the supposedly serious media.

It's precisely this sort of nonsense that leads to abstinence-based sex education in schools, and soon after that, spiralling rates of sexually transmitted diseases.