I spotted The Sun this morning at the station and was curious to see what three nice looking young girls where doing on the front cover clutching their offspring. It didn’t take long to realise they where today’s scapegoat, the latest figures of hate for ‘The currant bun’ to point and sneer at on behalf of its readership.
Essentially the story is about three teenage sisters – Jemma, Natasha and Jade, who had children at the ages of 12, 16 and 14 respectively. Worse still, they’re living with their Mum who, shock and horror, has been divorced twice! NO!!! You can almost see the fabric of society disintegrating around us as we read.
Luckily there’s a racist daily paper on hand to keep things in check with a moral crusade against young women, immigrants, gays and anyone else who doesn’t fit the white clean living majority. Angry columnists like the balding and middle aged Richard Littlejohn queue up to cast judgement on those who don’t live their lives by a dreamlike vision of a white lower middle class society of footie loving graduates. In that sense his bigoted and Blairite right wing views have come to epitomise New Labour.
However, The Sun’s rant against teenage mums is of course flawed by its own hypocrisy. The Sun has a history of sexualising young women, whether it be on page 3 or in sensationalised stories of brutal rape, which in turn backs up the idea that sex sells in any form. For The Sun then to get on its high horse and sneer at young women for sexualising themselves is almost laughable.
This country is run by angry white men with unfulfilled sex lives, who hate the idea that young women are having sex and probably enjoying it. These are the same men who comment on groups of girls who drink and shag their way round Mediterranean resorts every summer.
Simply, it boils down to jealousy. They didn’t get any of that when they were that age and it’s definitely not going to happen now that they’re boring lumpen 40 year olds with bad breath.