BDSM is not for four-year-olds. Apparently, that’s a controversial statement these days. Only a bigot would want to protect little kids from images of old blokes in fetish gear snogging the faces off each other in public. If you think under-fives should be reading books about hungry caterpillars or tigers coming for tea, not books featuring pictures of ageing men in dog collars and studded leather underwear, you’re a queerphobe and you need to pipe down.
Truly we have reached the seventh circle of woke lunacy. This week it was reported that a mum and dad in Hull in the north of England pulled their four-year-old daughter from a pre-school after she was shown a book called Grandad’s Pride which contains illustrations of ‘men who are partially naked in leather bondage gear’. The pre-school’s response? According to the mum and dad, it branded them ‘bigots’. Yes, who else but a hateful phobe would want to stop a toddler from seeing a tattooed, half-naked, grey-bearded homosexual kissing his boyfriend?
Grandad’s Pride is written by Harry Woodgate, an award-winning children’s author who uses they / them pronouns. Of course he does. Or of course they do. Whatever. It tells the story of a girl called Milly, who is playing in her gramps’ attic one day when she happens upon an old Pride flag. She asks what it is and grandad suggests they organise their own Pride march in the village. As you do. Then come the iffy illustrations: old men in fetish gear; a ‘trans man’ (ie, woman) with mastectomy scars under her nipples; an activist in a spiked dog collar waving a placard that says: ‘Break the cis-tem.’ And you thought Where the Wild Things Are was scary.
Hellbound and Down 