I know I’m going mad when I read a sentence that refers to an “AI-assisted sexualised picture of a little girl in a bikini”. Clearly, our culture is blissfully unaware that putting little girls in bikinis is already sexualising them. A time-machine taking you back forty years would show you that little girls on Irish beaches, just like their brothers, wore nothing on top. Back then, making litle girls wear a bikini top would have seemed obscene, On the continent, it was a norm for children under five to be completely naked, and nobody thought anything of it. The very idea of Elon Musk being responsible for “sexualising children” is ahistorical nonsense, and a reminder of how quickly – to slightly paraphrase LP Hartley – how quickly the past can become another country.
It already is in London, where the difference between private and public has already been erased. Young men in the underground routinely view lurid, explicit pornography on their phones, which can be seen by other passengers. Would you outlaw that? I certainly would, and quite simply, by propelling the culprits under the wheels of a train roughly between Battersea and Cockfosters: namely, the brand new phone-perv station of Battercock.
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