Never mind San Francisco or Hampstead, Brussels is the true home of the radical student left. Still as committed as ever to the anti-ismism crusades of the 1980’s, they continue to dig away at the foundations of our ‘bourgeois values’.
Seems they have just struck another seam:
The Commission is in the final stages of drawing up a directive to ban sex discrimination, with implications for the media, advertising and insurance industries.
The draft directive, revealed in Tuesday’s Financial Times, would leave it to the courts to decide whether programmes or advertisements were sexist or “did not respect human dignity”. An explanatory note says: “The purpose of this provision is to avoid throughout all forms of mass media all stereotypical portrayals of women and men, as well as any projection of unacceptable images of men and women affecting human dignity and decency in advertisements.”
The law could have profound implications for institutions such as Britain’s topless Page Three girls in The Sun newspaper and vast swathes of Italian television. Advertisers using sex to sell could also be affected.
If it wasn’t so offensive and inappropriate, I’d say that they’ve just discovered a motherlode.
The real devil in this detail lies with the apparently reasonable proposition to ‘leave it to the Courts’ thereby providing a fig-leaf of objective justice. Actually, though, this is a charter and blessing for looney-left activists to drag any number of advertising agencies and media companies through any number of Courts on pretty much any pretext they damn well please (as these things are usually drafted in the widest and vaguest possible terms).
However, in practice, this will only need to be done once or twice for the wicked capitalists to get the message and, in order to avoid the risk of a ruinous lawsuit, start censoring themselves. That is the ideal solution because why bother with all that messy and troublesome enforcement business when life is so much easier for the ruling elite if everyone just internalises their own repression.
The European Union: if it didn’t exist, we would not have to invent it.
If their tax system made tax havens flourish elsewhere, this sex ban… hahaha
As any libertarian would expect, the far left is again finding common ground with the far right.
All of you in EU land should be very gratefull for one thing.
You live in a time after the internet has been invented. The “Yuck” cannot prevent you from being educated and informed. And they will try.
Byna, Glad to be a Yank.
As the co-editor of a Brussels based private eye type venture – which has an occasional column called sterEUtypes, this little wonder of legislation puts the willies up me, I actually called Commissioner Di a man on top of you’s press team to ask if we would be affected by the legislation, there answer. Well we do not envisage this legislation being used in that way. Note, not It will not be used in that way, but they cannot forsee it being used. The ECJ is an activist court and it is charged with defending the good name of the EU(Uh?). If you tie this together with the piece of law being flagged up last week that will affect bloggers you can see where this is all leading./
You underestimate the will of capitalists to litigate the buggers into the ground when billions are literally at stake. It will only take one or two failed actions (with ruinous costs) for less well-strapped loony pressure groups to get the message and lay off. On the bottom line, it is no surrender.
Dave, I’m afraid that it is not that simple. The broadcasters and suchlike may well have a lot of money for litigation, but it won’t be pressure groups paying for the other side. It will be the EU itself prosecuting those cases, paying for the litigation with tax money. The pressure groups will inspire the prosecutions, but they won’t pay for them.
bloody ridiculous!
“avoid throughout all forms of mass media all stereotypical portrayals of women and men”
err… ok, so that’s like, just about every bit of TV you can think of… No women doing the dishes, no men sitting in the pub. Men playing football? no thanks; bit stereotypical. Women shopping for clothes? Sorry, that’s demeaning. What would we have left? Even open University… “sorry, these physics professors are all male”.
Almost as ridiculous as Blunkett’s recent attempt to allow the confiscation of cannabis smokers’ homes. What the hell is up with these fools?
Yes, you’re right, I wasn’t thinking straight. But how much appetite will the Eurocrats have for billion-dollar litigation involving large companies with political influence (to put it politely). I suspect such legislation will prove very difficult to police and any significant prosecution will certainly be used to open up broader questions of free speech.
I will concede that most government authorities tend to end up using bad laws “in ways not originally intended”. But so far even, for example, hate speech law in the UK has failed to produce any actual convictions I am aware of (and I realise I may be wrong there). Germany has specific prohibitions on trying to argue there was no Holocaust, and such speech certainly has been prosecuted sucessfully there. But that is a very specific and extreme example. How many Islamists are likely to be prosecuted for urging the murder of unbelievers in Europe, for example, or denigrating Jews? I suspect the answer is none. So unless the prosecuting authorities take a clearly DISCRIMINATORY line btween different types of prejudiced expression, where will prosecutions for sexism and gender discrinination start? Will men be able to bring them? The law would have to say yes. And so on.
“…leave it to the courts to decide whether programmes or advertisements were sexist or “did not respect human dignity”
WTF? EU Commission and its pawns plan to censor just about everything?
Who’s appointing the judge’s in the court? Will there be a jury? (Take a wild guess…) The ones in control of that will run the whole thing as they want probably. It starts with something “small” like this, and will end up with regislations on just about anything and everything, deciding what will be allowed to say, write and think.
Johan: yes, that’s scary part. They write the statute deliberately vague and leave it to a judge to interpret at trial time…? So there’s no way of knowing if you’ve broken the law until after you’ve done it and been taken to court for it.
What’s the difference between having a law that only a judge can define, and having no law at all and letting judges go ’round smacking people at will?
As a first cab off the rank I plan on destroying Michaelangelo’s David…….
Hand me my sledgehammer.
S. Weasel: Indeed, there’s no “difference between having a law that only a judge can define, and having no law at all and letting judges go ’round smacking people at will” The judges will probably use their own political, person criterion when defining vague laws, such as the one concerning male and famale stereotypes. As A_t was touching on; how do you define male and female stereotypes? It sounds easy first, but really, think of an absolutely ordinary behavior for a male, which it has been for the last decade or so, and “Watch Out! A stereotype!”…yes? No? If it’s not even that simple to define something that should be fairly easy and straightforward (such as stereotypes), what could be more simple?
Of course, crimes such as murder and so should be simple, but we all know what simple means for the EU (ie. pages of pages when defining the properties of a strawberry…..)
There’s the new slogan!
Join the EU and lose our boobies!
Keep stalling and let the EU come up w/TV content. You’ll never vote in.
The late A. Waugh was anti U.S. and pro E.U., in large part, because he thought that “P.C.” stuff was from the United States and “Europe” (by which he meant the E.U.) would resist it.
Sadly P.C. ideas are all over the Western World – administrators love them, and the E.U. is an administrators dream.