From abusive sex tourism by the privileged to Love Island

I have been reading a terrible book. It's called Sultry Climates by Ian Littlewood. The book's subtitle is "Travel and sex since the Grand Tour". Within its pages, you will find an uncritical, morally lazy look at sex tourism of the privileged without any voice given to the people with whom these men - and a few token women - were having sex.

A direct line can be drawn between the apologia for pederasty by men such as Byron, as recounted in this book, and the horrendous advocacy of sex between grown men and 13-year-old boys by deeply insecure, attention-seeking troll-for-hire, Milo Yiannopolous, who is rapidly becoming a fringe figure as he desperately tries to stay relevant. 

For many, Milo's comments were a bigotry too far - after being totally fine with his racism, sexism and Poundland economics - just as the fan bases of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris rightly withered away after revelations of their sexual abuse of minors came to light. It is a sign of an improved society that child rape - for that is what paedophilia is - is looked upon by most people as being abhorrent. 

In Sultry Climates, Littlewood quotes the writings of white, wealthy British men (and the rather dreadful Paul Gaugin) who could afford to travel to Europe as well as countries such as Algeria, Morocco and Tahiti, in centuries gone by. Some of these men are gay and the book does nothing to dispel the myth that all gay men are paedophiles. Excerpts, mostly from diaries and letters, about seeking out inevitably "beautiful boys" and men procuring these kids for each other, are published without any real critique, except to say that travelling away from conservative Britain was a blessed release for gay men in a less enlightened time.  

There is no attempt by Littlewood to find out who these boys were, whether they were prostituted at the behest of poor families, what physical and emotional damage was left behind when these selfish, self-indulgent men returned home. Obviously, it is appalling that until relatively recently, it was very difficult and indeed illegal to be openly gay on Britain - but that does not excuse child rape. 

And it's not just gay men getting their rocks off with children who are romanticised by Littlewood. There is an account of a man having sex with a girl of 12, again written about with any real thought to what the experience would have been like from the point of view of the victim. It's just something men do because they can, because while abroad, they are free of the apparently terrible constraints that prevent them from raping girls. That particularly disturbing passage was all about how the man in question could not believe his good fortune.

And when the book shares accounts from further afield in South Pacific, you can almost hear Littlewood's hand furiously grinding away in his underpants as he again lets the privileged men describe their encounters with local women. These women were, as far as they were concerned, all willing participants, offering themselves to ship-weary travellers. Like the "beautiful boys" who were picked up in Europe and North Africa, all the women of the South Pacific are described as physically magnificent to the point of fetishising them. He describes the men who were drawn to the South Pacific as "rebel spirits" when "rapists" is more accurate. But there is zero research conducted into the lives of these women by Littlewood or the real consequences of men landing on their shores and colonising their bodies as well as their land.

Indeed, women take a secondary role across the entire book, aside from a few paragraphs here and there. The women are, like the men in this book, wealthy enough to afford to travel in pre-Easyjet times to places where they can enjoy sexual freedom away from Victorian expectations of marriage and childbirth. The stories of their sexual encounters, in which they miraculously seem able to steer clear of abusing kids, are dropped in with minimal research. 

Embarrassingly, the book concludes with references to Club Med as a latter day equivalent to the sexually free tours of abusive posh gits in days of yore. I had forgotten Club Med was still a thing and, having taken a peek at their website, I am amazed that it still is a thing - their prices are ridiculous and the search engine is terrible.

Obviously, the "what happens on tour stays on tour" mentality still exists for many people (most of us know of at least one married or partnered-up person who uses business trips as an excuse to shag around) and there are still plenty of British men who sexually exploit women while on holiday - and this is no longer limited to wealthy men in this era of more affordable international travel. It would be naive to think otherwise - but these exploits are not necessarily romanticised in the way Littlewood does in his pitiful tome. 

And that brings us to Love Island, which has people across the nation glued to ITV to see which of the nubile young contestants will be "coupled up", who will get "mugged off" and whether it is possible to form a serious relationship while doing "cheeky challenges" for the cameras.

It is all too easy to sneer at Love Island, to consider oneself to be socially, morally and intellectually above the contestants. But it is more honest and wholesome than any of the abusive behaviour that happened when wealthy, privileged men escaped Britain to chase sex elsewhere with scant regard for consequences or consent. Sure, Hayley thought Brexit might mean that all the trees will be cut down, but she epitomises the not-uncommon phenomenon of the physically glorious young woman who has only had one lover. For all the moral panicking going on out there about teenage sexual behaviour, research from the Next Steps Project found that one in eight people aged 26 are still virgins, a much higher proportion than around one in 20, as studies of earlier generations found. 

So far, only two, maybe three, couples have had sex in the current series of Love Island, with the first couple "doing bits" on episode 16. Only a seriously tedious prude would consider that rate of shaggery as some sort of orgy. The fact they refer to sex as "doing bits" tells you everything you need to know, bless 'em.

And unlike the wealthy creeps of centuries past, the sex that's happening on Love Island is consensual. Nobody is underage, nobody is being exploited, nobody is bothered about social class, and even if "doing bits" is a euphemism that makes me think of grinding things with a mortar and pestle rather than one's genitals, the young men and women are able to talk about what they're getting up to without rushing to either confession or their mothers. Only the nation's dreariest wet blankets are getting upset. 

Give me a society where sex is consensual and discussed without embarrassment over one where sexual freedom is only for the privileged few at the expense of the vulnerable in faraway lands. Whether they realise it or not, the Love Islanders are flipping a massive bird at past hypocrisies and for that. I salute them.

Photo by Oliver Sjöström from Pexels

The State of it all

On the morning of the Parsons Green terror attack, I was not in London. Thankfully, I was safely in a long queue waiting to check in luggage and clear some pretty onerous security at the airport in Marrakech. The Parsons Green story came to my attention when I spotted it on someone's phone as we waited to have our carry-on X-rayed after our Moroccan adventures.

Morocco's security situation is a confronting one for anyone who believes that those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither, the context of Benjamin Franklin's quote notwithstanding.

"A pretty police state" is how my husband described it, as the bus from Marrakech to Essaouira cleared a checkpoint on a major highway. Morocco is not a democracy as we understand it in Britain - it is a constitutional monarchy where no party can win an outright majority in the 395-seat parliament. As a result, Morocco is permanently under coalition governments with the king holding ultimate power. He did give up some authority during 2011 protests but for Morocco, any Arab Spring-style activity was muted in comparison to other states across the Middle East and North Africa.

In April this year, the king managed to break a six-month post-election deadlock and agreed to the latest coalition. The election was won by the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) and there were concerns about such a party having so much power, particularly among royalist. It took six months to broker a deal where PJD shares power with five other parties.

Crucially, PJD lost control of the Ministry of Justice and Public Freedoms in the new deal. This ministry had been led by Mustafa Ramid, who was an outspoken critic of the Moroccan security service when he was a lawyer and human rights activist. 

While there has been much scrutiny of terrorists of Moroccan origin in Europe, extremist activity in Morocco has been seriously limited. The last major terror attack was in Marrakech in 2011 when some dickhead bombed a restaurant, killing 17 people. And prior to that, there had not been a terror attack in Morocco since 2003 when 12 delusional idiots blew themselves up in multiple locations across Casablanca, killing 33 people.

The 2003 attacks were the start of Morocco taking security measures that we look on as draconian in the west. Dozens of cells have been dismantled in Morocco, making it very difficult for would-be jihadists to operate from the North African country. The government has surveillance powers for telecommunications beyond anything that would be legal under British law.

But there have only been two terror attacks 14 years and only one attack since the security laws were beefed up. Is this an acceptable trade-off for the depletion of civil liberties? The "I have nothing to hide so why would I care if the government read my emails?" brigade would probably think so and would warmly welcome that level of scrutiny here in Britain.

In 2016, 10.3 million tourists visited Morocco and that figure is set to grow this year. The economy would not survive without tourism and Morocco has no interest in ending up in the tragic hole in which Tunisia finds itself after some pitiful bellend gunned down 38 people, mostly British citizens, in 2015.

I ask again, is it worth limiting freedoms to preserve security? Has Morocco done the right thing in order to achieve a lower body count since 2011 than the UK? Thirty-eight people in Britain have lost their lives to terrorism since 2011, compared with 17 in Morocco. With 35.28 million people in Morocco compared with 65.64 million people in the UK, there isn't a whole lot of different in the number of people killed in either country as a proportion of the population. But the frequency and events that are "not as bad as they could have been", such as Parsons Green, continue to scare people.

Of course, the incredible work that goes on behind the scenes in Britain in thwarting terrorism is never reported for obvious security reasons, whether it is high level intelligence work or stopping potentially dangerous people coming in and out of our borders.

And when citizens of either Morocco or the UK end up fighting with Daesh in Syria, the prevailing attitude in both countries seems to be "Good riddance to bad rubbish and I hope they end up dead and forgotten for there will be no virgins in heaven for them".

But what of the people who join Daesh and then want to come home again? It's pretty hard to feel any sympathy for people who would give up the relative safety of either Morocco or the UK, to turn their backs on countries which, for all their differences, do offer their citizens education and opportunities.

Yet that is one of the more controversial aspects of The State, a Channel 4 drama which screened in August this year. The meticulously researched Peter Kosminsky drama managed to perform the Piers Morgan-like feat of simultaneously pissing off elements of the left and the right. There were voices from the left who thought it was unnecessarily brutal while voices from the right disapproved of the humanising of characters who left Britain to join the vile forces of Islamic State.

Both sides are being ridiculous. The brutality portrayed in The State was accurate and, as such, was not gratuitous. There is nothing pleasant about a scene where you can hear a knife slowing sawing through the neck of an innocent man, or a beheading where the neck is first scored by the blade and filled with salt before the final blows of the sword, or a woman having the soles of her feet lashed for talking briefly to an unrelated man. But the apologists for Daesh need to see this, to realise exactly what violence and misogyny they are giving a despicable leave pass.

The humanising aspect is also important, particularly of the characters of Shakira, the young mother and doctor who stupidly believes she will be able to do Allah's work in the occupied hospitals, and Jamal, the young man who is labouring under the misapprehension that he can be a heroic martyr like his dead brother.

Terrorists are made, not born. They are not created in a vacuum. Nobody is born wanting to leave their friends and family and everything they have known to fight for a sickening cause. To know this is to still have hope that the current insanity will pass, that we can live in a world where no young man or woman thinks that joining Islamic State is a reasonable thing to do.

For both Shakira and Jamal, they realise they have made a terrible mistake. Shakira was happy to put up with the passive-aggressive Mean Girls In Hijabs environment of the women's compound in order to work as a doctor but her final straws come when she is asked to remove both kidneys of injured American soldiers for transplants and when she spots her son playing football with a severed head. Jamal, meanwhile, found almost homoerotic camaraderie with his fellow recruits but realises he has not got the stomach to either watch or carry out beheadings. When he rescues a Yazidi rape victim and her daughter, he treats them tenderly but ultimately cannot save them.

The ending is pitifully appropriate - as Jamal is led away after being unable to behead a pharmacist he has befriended, you know his future is not bright. As for Shakira, she manages to escape with her son but upon her return to the UK, her ludicrous dream to stop more young women leaving for Syria by speaking out in the media about the realities of life under Daesh is crushed by the authorities at the airport.

Instead of becoming the poster girl for reformed jihadi brides, a BBC talking head as opposed to a severed head, Shakira's reality is that she will have to be an informant, constantly looking over her shoulder as she seeks out possible cells of radicalisation and reports back to the authorities on their activities, all the while living with the horrendous guilt of exposing her son to vile ideology and some of the worst violence on the planet.

On balance, I endorse such actions by our authorities, if the fictional dealing with a Daesh escapee is the reality. Only time will tell if the British approach or the Moroccan approach will be more successful in stamping out terrorism.

In the meantime, I would urge people to check out The State if they haven't already. Hell, it's worth it for the cheeky adverts Channel 4 has included in the download. I'm not sure if it was by accident or design, but it was a perverse joy, amid some of the hardest television I've ever watched, to be regaled with adverts for things that make the extremist lunatics really mad - the secular Jewish family getting together for food, wine and piss-taking in Friday Night Dinner, the sex-and-drug-fuelled rampages of teenagers in Skins, and Father Ted, featuring Roman Catholics laughing at themselves in a way the extremists never could.

Photography by Gwydion M. Williams/Flickr

Channel 4's Ramadan bonanza

As far as manufactured outrages go, this one was entirely predictable. Channel 4 announced plans to broadcast the call to prayer throughout Ramadan, the holy month of the Islamic calendar, which starts today. The plan is to have a three-minute broadcast around 3am when fasting begins and a 20-second broadcast for the other four calls to prayer throughout the day.

The usual suspects freaked right out. Here are some of their choice whines...

"RAMADAN IS BEING FORCED DOWN OUR THROATS!"

No, It's not. Watching Channel 4 is not compulsory. If you don't like it, nobody is compelling you to watch it.

"THE CALL TO PRAYER WILL BE INTRUSIVE!"

Really? You're planning on getting up at 3am every day during Ramadan to watch a three-minute call to prayer broadcast? And even if you did happen to be watching TV at the time, you can always change the channel if you're genuinely offended.

As for the other four broadcasts, they're 20 seconds long. Twenty seconds. Most TV commercials go on for longer than that and they are generally deeply annoying and stupid. Are you really so suggestible that a 20-second call-to-prayer broadcast is going to cause you to instantly embrace Islamic extremism? If there was a 20-second advert on instead of the call to prayer, would you feel compelled to rush out and buy whatever was being offered?

"I don't need a jasmine-scented electronic air freshener but that damn telly-box told me to buy one so I'm off to the shops!"

Frankly, if you are that suggestible, you have bigger problems than Channel 4.

"CHANNEL 4 IS JUST PANDERING TO A MINORITY!"

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realise every single thing on every single TV channel had to cater to the majority. On that basis, there has been so much pandering happening on our TV screens. Friday Night Dinner is a sitcom about an English-Jewish family - why no outcry? After all, Jews only make up 0.5% of the population in England and Wales. The multi-cultural Albert Square of EastEnders is broadcast twice five nights a week as well as a weekend omnibus. Surely that is political correctness gone mad, no? What about the contestants from Big Brother or The Apprentice who aren't white Brits? Are they there for the purposes of pandering too? Ah. I get it. You think they're pandering to a minority that you don't like. It's all clear now!

"CHANNEL 4 IS JUST DOING IT FOR THE PUBLICITY!"

Well, obviously, they want the publicity. No shit, Sherlock. The powers-that-be at Channel 4 want people to watch their programmes, to talk about their programmes (#averybritishramadan trended on Twitter for them last night) and for businesses to buy the advertising space between the programmes.

Channel 4 is a commercially funded business that has not-for-profit status so it reinvests revenue back into programme development. It is independent of government. Your taxes are not paying the salaries of whoever is producing the call to prayer broadcasts. As such, Channel 4 has no obligations to British taxpayers.

They obviously want to produce programmes that might make money and if lots of people watch programmes like A Very British Ramadan in between Channel 4's usual offerings of jaw-dropping documentaries, re-runs of Come Dine With Me, Sarah Beeny restoring houses in varying stages of pregnancy, and the pus-filled fun of Embarrassing Bodies then so be it. Who knows? You might even learn something.

"BUT WILL CHANNEL 4 DO THE SAME FOR CHRISTMAS? BRITAIN IS A CHRISTIAN COUNTRY!"

Seriously, if you turn on your TV any time from about mid-November onwards and you don't know Christmas is coming, I don't think I can help you. Go away.