Totally forbidden gender stereotype!

You’d think there were no real problems to be dealt with anymore, the way governments keep zeroing in on bulls*** like this.

In the United Kingdom, the government’s Advertising Standard Authority has acted to prohibit “gender stereotyping” in ads… because it “might be harmful to people” (http://www.mrctv.org/blog/uk-ban-ads-promote-gender-stereotypes).

How could it be harmful? It could “lead to unequal gender outcomes–” What? what the blazes are they talking about?–“in public and private aspects of people’s lives.” Which is silly, isn’t it, because if the government’s going to step in and regulate some “private aspect” if your life, it isn’t private anymore, is it?

What exactly is a “gender stereotype”? Search me. Any acknowledgement that there are men and women and that they aren’t exactly the same, aren’t interchangeable… but how, then, do you go about creating ads in which “gender stereotypes” do not appear? Sure, you can show people playing bridge, or some other activity in which “gender” is irrelevant. But, see, if you were to show a woman sitting at a sewing machine–well, that would be unforgivable! From now on, you can only show men using sewing machines. Oops–just created a new gender stereotype.

Do they have nothing more serious with which to occupy their time?

We don’t have a bunch of commissars in charge of advertising in our country–not yet we don’t. But even these dorks in Britain could surely find something more important to do, if they really put their minds to it: presuming they have minds. How about coming down on blatantly false advertising, eh?

But no–these are the whoopee crowd, our betters, the enlightened ones: and by thunder, they’re going to tell us what to say and what to think, and they are going to re-mold our culture in their own little know-it-all hands and bring forth Social Justice if it kills us…

As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, the robber will reach a point where he’s satiated; but the self-righteous do-gooder will never reach that point, will never have enough of meddling in other people’s lives. And if his ministrations are actually killing them, he will be quite unaware of it.