Yo Doc, talk to the kids about your willy
Erm…what?
A hospital is encouraging open conversations about sexuality with its staff members in the Paediatrics department? A hospital is encouraging staff members to start cozy chats about sex with child patients?
Is this hospital staffed entirely by priests by any chance?
Why would that be “inclusive” of anything? Such conversations would be intrusive and inappropriate for adult patients, unless they were directly pertinent to the reason for the hospital visit. For children? This is a huge safeguarding red flag. Are the people who came up with this so completely unaware of this fact? Or are they envious of all those Drag Queen Story Hours and yearned for that kind of access? Because access is what this is; no child is going to initiate conversations like this because they wouldn’t know to do so. No; this is for staff to strike up conversations about sexuality with children who are supposed to be in their care. Whoever proposed this should be struck off immediately and their hard-drive searched. They are completely oblivious to appropriate boundaries and child welfare regulations. Q. How long before this Twitter post is deleted? A. Right after someone from the hospital’s legal department gets wind of this freelance grooming proposal.
I remember a story told me by a Scottish literary agent friend of mine (who was involved, as I recall, in helping a feminist press – it may have been the Virago Press – get started up in the UK before he came to Japan). He was gay, and was sent to a Catholic school, where the boys had to go regularly to confession. One day, the priest asked him through the window, “Do you fiddle with yourself, my boy?” My friend was of course enraged and disgusted, and the obvious prurient interest in the question was one of the things that put him off religion for life.
And that is what strikes me about the kind of mind that certain religions encourage: a sly, oily and intrusive prurience — a prurience that is in fact a kind of sexual violence inflicted on the child.