America -- Home of the Prudes
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There's a general feeling, thanks to our constant exposure to Hollywood, that American society is more liberal than our own.
But with the exception of a few places like New York (or 'Jew York' as one guy from Oregon once referred to it while having a beer with your humble column) and San Francisco, America is still a remarkably conservative and stuffy place.
And the latest example of their prudishness comes with the news that a cheerleading coach in Casa Robles High School in California has been sacked after posing for Playboy.
The 20-year-old was outed after she cut some cheerleaders from the squad and the irate mothers of those who didn't make the grade sent her Playboy pictures to the headmaster. Who promptly sacked her.
It's a curious mixture of spite, prurience and malice, and after spending hours of exhaustive research on the web this column can make one categorical statement on the matter -- she's hot.
But why the big deal?
After all, when this column was younger and attending school, we had one teacher who also liked to pose nude and encouraged everyone to embrace their body.
Granted, he was a priest who later served five years. But his lessons were always entertaining.
STEP AWAY FROM THE QUESTION
How do you answer the question 'Does my bum look big in this?'
Well, this column has learned that giving a simple reply 'Indeed it does'. Have you put on a load of weight or something? Because your arse looks like it has its own gravitational field' seldom works well, so it's best to say what they want to hear.
But the thought police have done it again -- banning an advert for a beer that suggests it could actually give you enough courage to give a straight answer to that famously vexed question.
'Courage' beer has been told that they can't use the ad because "three members of the public believed that the poster would give the man the confidence to make negative comments about a woman's appearance".
Um, what's the betting that the three people complaining are complete munters with pass-remarkable husbands?
PROPER ORDER TOO
We really do have a lot to learn from Islam, and not just about blowing yourself up. Take the current Afghan regime, for instance.
Their latest crazy law, which allows marital rape, has received a lot of criticism from those nasty, racist Islamophobes here in the land of civilisation.
But according to one senior Afghan cleric, the law doesn't allow men to rape their wives -- but it does allow them to stop feeding their wife until she agrees to sex.
"If a woman says no, the man has the right not to feed her," says Ayatollah Mohammed Asef Mohseni.
Some people have suggested bombing the Taliban-controlled areas back to the Stone Age, but really, that would be the Afghan equivalent of The Great Leap Forward.
Nice idea, though ...
