#MARY WHITEHOUSE EXPERIENCE RADIO PROFESSIONAL#
#MARY WHITEHOUSE EXPERIENCE RADIO TV#

#MARY WHITEHOUSE EXPERIENCE RADIO PROFESSIONAL#

But PIE managed to gain support from some professional bodies and progressive groups. It's an ideology that seems chilling now. They presented it as the sexual liberation of children, that children should have the right to sex,' he says. 'They didn't emphasise that this was 50-year-old men wanting to have sex with five-year-olds. Journalist Christian Wolmar remembers their tactics. The real aim was to normalise sex with children. It offered support to adults 'in legal difficulties concerning sexual acts with consenting 'under age' partners'. It wanted the government to axe or lower the age of consent. It campaigned for 'children's sexuality'. We only need to look at the National Council for Civil Liberties (now known as Liberty) and the Liberal Party (now subsumed into the LibDems) to see what can happen when ill-informed and over-optimistic people take others at face value and suspend all critical thinking.

I was born in the early 60s and looking back now I would say a lot of rather naive and idealistic people thought we should essentially start again with none of the social taboos and conventions we'd had before they came under attack in the 1960s and in some cases then disappeared. It’s really not a difficult concept to grasp it’s just like the rest of us. She was right about some things and wrong about others. Both serious ones and less serious, but there are a lot of cases where, once they are gone, people realize they did actually serve a function. There was an idea that society could function just fine with the removal of all kinds of normative behaviours and structures and institutions that might seem old fashioned. It wasn't a popular view at the time among liberals and not only with regard to sex related subjects. If sex becomes a commodity or a no-strings hobby activity (in person or through a screen) inevitably that will affect how people think about it's use and misuse. Her views on abortion are good example, women are actually more likely than men to think abortion should be restricted to some degree, but if you frame that as an anti-woman view you can dismiss it out of hand.īut yes, she had a good sense of the way in which the things people think about and what they do form their attitudes toward sex more generally. Frankly I think it was convenient to do so because it allowed their views on women's issues to be discredited without really addressing them as the considered views of women. MW was from the conservative side of feminism - which has tended to be unrecognized as such by liberal and left wing feminists.

But yes, I think she was ahead of her time with her concerns.

Her views, as pp said, around homosexuality were just plain wrong and I believe towards the end of her life she made some fairly strong objections to innocuous items which were picked up by the press leading to further vicious parody. I believe she would get lots of poisonous letters ( Twitter of her time) and I would guess that no one was brought to justice over the threats etc… not a lot changes, it seems The taunting and baying at those who express concern around sexualisation, pornography etc has increased and I do wonder of the permissiveness around the abuse Mary Whitehouse and her group endured set the scene for what people who voice concerns now face.

#MARY WHITEHOUSE EXPERIENCE RADIO TV#

The tv portrayal of her by Julie Walters was interesting particularly as it was made by the BBC. and totally agree that her concerns around pornography and it’s effects on people were spot on. shudder…Īm I correct in thinking that she was influential around the watershed ( is that still a thing? Live abroad now and don’t watch terrestrial UK tv in the usual way). However, I was ridiculous enough to think the ladette culture was ‘ freedom’ and lad mags were ‘empowering’ eughhhh…. I too was very critical in the 90’s and joined in with the bullying/ taunting/ ridicule.

Mary whitehouse experience radio