Beauty salon for children creates a stink

"A beauty parlour has become the first in Britain to offer makeovers, fake tans and facials exclusively for children and toddlers, it has emerged," says everybody's favourite Conservative broadsheet The Daily Telegraph before going to list the services available at the salon, Trendy Monkeys of Brentwood, including "fruit smoothie facials, mini pedicures, manicures or make-up application, hair “up-dos” and haircuts." And all this in the same week as the Government's new proposals to combat the sexualisation of children! Keen eyes will note that brazilians and vajazzles do not appear.

Trendy Monkeys. Doesn't look all that sexual, does it? Unless monkeys in tutus do it for you. They probably do for some people, but we'd prefer not to Google anything like that just in case we see images.

Apparently, girls as young as one year old can be treated to ""Princess pamper parties", which costs several hundred pounds" which begin with them and up to five friends being "picked up in a pink limousine" and taken to the salon, where doting parents "can pay for extra services including spray tans while having a photographer follow them around."

Professor Judy Hutchings of the Centre for Evidence Based Early Intervention told the paper that the salon represents "not just the sexualisation but the commercialisation of children." We dislike the sexualisation of children as much as any other normal adult, but the commercialisation bit is stretching things a bit far. The same could be said about The Beano, Ladybird books, Dinky cars and all the other kiddies' products that were with us in that delightful bit of the 1950s with the rosy glow around it, when children were innocent creatures of joy and light and went around with scabby knees saying "brilliant!" and drinking lashings and lashings of ginger beer. Precisely the same thing is going on in the half-timbered cottages of the Black Forest where Geppetto hand carves toys for sale to tourists, in the Tridias shops that were so beloved among the upper middle classes for their traditional toys and lack of the latest kill-em-up videogames, and everywhere else that toys or anything else marketed at and for children has ever been sold.

Tellingly, the Toryrag points out early on in the story that the salon, which opened last weekend, "is located in an area featured in the ITV reality television show The Only Way Is Essex." Two members of the cast were in fact at the opening of the salon, as revealed by The Daily Mail which, predictably, takes a similar line to the broadsheet and has a picture of the celebs in question in Marbella ("Marbella? How vulgar!"). Which rather begs the question: what do we have here? A story which raises legitimate concerns over the way children are being raised in modern society or an opportunity for the newspaper's readers to enjoy a spot of "haw haw, look how tasteless the working classes like the ones in that dreadful programme (which none of us watched, of course, because we're much too highbrow) are, aren't we so much better than them?"-style upper middle class snobbish solidarity over their breakfast coffee this morning?

Beauty queen does pole dance - not news. Daily Mail is prejudiced - also not news

According to the Daily Mail, the newly-crowned Miss USA Rima Fakih - a Muslim, which is apparently worthy of much discussion in the US of A - took part in a strip show back in 2007, albeit a strip show in which she seems not to have stripped. Just so readers can get really shocked, they have photos of Miss Fakih, now aged 24, dressed in a white vest and very short shorts as she dances next to a pole.

The admittedly-very-pleasing-on-the-eyes Rima Fakih

Miss Fakih won the Miss USA pageant, which still attracts a surprising amount of attention despite more than 40 years of feminism, on Sunday night at some hellish facility known as the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino which is co-owned by Donald Trump. And...er...well, that's it, really. Young woman does a very mildly naughty pole dance. Not much excitement in the news this fine morning, but this one's boring even by Daily Mail standards - surely they could have done better?

However, one small section of the story deserves further attention - this being the almost throwaway snippet that when asked whether she thought birth control should be paid for by medical insurance, Miss Fakih replied, "I believe that birth control is just like every other medication even though it's a controlled substance" and that it should be covered as it's expensive. Not quite sure what they're trying to suggest there, but it sounds rather as though they're trying to tell us that since Miss Fakih seems to have some knowledge of birth control, she must have used it - which means, horror of horrors, she has had sex and therefore is of questionable virtue in the morally-superior eyes of the Mail. The story goes on to tell us that the pageant has been mired in controversy in recent years, including last year when winner Carrie Prejean, was stripped of her title after she was found to have made a sex tape.

No mention of the controversy over beauty pageants upholding the sexist concept of a woman's worth being equal only to her aesthetic qualities, though. If we assume that the Daily Mail's omission of this demonstrates it has no ethical argument against such events (which is also suggested when it ensures it makes note of the supposedly high standards of the pageant by emphasising Ms. Prejean's expulsion), while it finds the idea of a young woman having sex and taking control of her own body shocking, the story can be viewed as much more than mere space-filler on a slow news day - it shows just how backward, sexist and ultimately horrible a "newspaper" it really is.

Pity Rima wasn't dancing next to a Pole - the Mail could have aired their anti-immigrant prejudices then as well.

Interesting...

Did the Daily Mail fake the results of its readers' poll so David Cameron won last night's Leaders' Debate? Fascinating stuff from refpls:journalism, science and politics.

Thousands of disease-ridden foreigners ready to invade UK

Acid Rabbi doesn't often even bother to look at the Daily Mail, finding little of interest in the paper due being the sort of person who likes to make his own mind up rather than a small-minded nimby fascist with middle class pretentions and an inability to form opinions of his own without being told what to think. Once in a while, however, we trawl the Internet's murkier depths where the light of reason and common sense cannot reach and stumble upon their webpage.

It's the usual Mailesque stuff we've all come to know and despise: a story about a woman who could be murdered after her lover was doused with acid, illustrating the supposed inherent evil of Islam and all Muslims (odd that. All the Muslims we know seem to be quite nice - and since a lot of shopkeepers are Muslims, they probably account for quite a high percentage of the Daily mails sold each day); another about a female teacher charged with sexually assaulting a schoolgirl, thereby proving beyond doubt that all gay people are evil too; a man attacked by chavs who feels "let down by the system" and - shock, horror - news that the Church of England has thrown off 2000 years of history and will now allow children born out of wedlock to be baptised at the same time as their parents get married, effectively meaning that the Church has now caught up with the rest of society and will no longer damn those who have sex before being legally declared man and wife. Oh, plus one article about a police chief being investigated following racism claims (the paper is unexpectedly not surprised that the chief in question - who also happens to be a woman - has managed to reach such a responsible position despite the supposed limitations of her sex) and another about a "racist BNP teenager" who has just been convicted of driving a pupil at his school to the brink of suicide (with a terrifying photograph of two teenagers in hoodies, the Mail's favourite enemy ever since changes in the law prevented them from printing headlines saying "We Hate Wogs") - they need to get those stories in there somewhere just in case anyone remembers the paper's sympathy and support for Hitler, Mussolini and Oswald Mosley's British fascists just before WW2; after all, though the paper is designed to appeal to a particular type of racist, racism is a dirty word nowadays and nobody likes to be called it even if they would try to stop their daughter marrying a black man.

Ever the traditionalists, the Mail's "journalists" do their utmost to keep old customs alive and one example on which they are particularly keen is stirring up hatred toward those cheese-scoffing barbarians across the Channel, the French. Never mind the fact that 50% of Brits would up sticks and bugger off to the Dordogne for a life of cheap quality wine and olives given half a chance, the Mail does everything it can to remind us Pierre's an ill-educated snail-eating slob and his wife Vianne's a slapper who, worst of all, doesn't shave her armpits. Let's not forget the Hundred Years' War either, nor Trafalgar. As a result, they've devoted several of whatever the online equivalent to column inches is to the story of a group of innocent British school children who were treated like "dangerous criminals" because they were showing 'flu-like symptoms before being booted out of the Republic. "Go back to your disease-ridden country!" they were allegedly told - wonder what would happen if a coachload of French kids showed up at Dover for their yearly exchange visit with signs of a highly contagious disease right in the middle of a nation-wide panic-demic? (Ooh, have any of the red-tops thought of "panic-demic" yet? That could be worth trademarking before they start printing the "false alarm" stories... Ed.)

That's not all they have to say on the topic of Jean le Foreigneur today either - it seems dear old Blighty is on the brink of being invaded by thousands of Frenchies "carrying potentially fatal diseases" too. But, just for once, the Mail's not taking a pop at immigrants - or not human ones at any rate. These plague vectors are chipmunks, no less. Apparently, the little devils have been spreading across Europe in much the same manner as Albanian gypsies and have already reached Paris, which is good timing on their behalf because they'll be there to see Bradley Wiggins (allez!) on the winner's podium following the last stage of the Tour de France on Sunday. French experts say that the animals, which can carry rabies and the ticks that cause Lyme's disease, will soon get as far as Calais where they could sneak aboard vehicles and hitch a lift over here.

Bloody foreigners! I expect they'll be pickpocketing, stealing our credit card details and taking jobs from hard-working British people too, not to mention living in all the council houses and putting a burden on our cash-starved NHS. You know chipmunks aren't Christians, don't you? - it'll only be a matter of time before our politically-correct Liberal councils ban Christmas to avoid offending them.

How will you protect your children from the froggie chipmunk hordes?

UK tax-payers shell out £53k for private river, the Daily Mail gets annoyed

A private river was upgraded (how precisely does one upgrade a river?) by the British Environment Agency at a cost of £53,000 to tax-payers, says the Daily Mail.

Access to the mile-long section of the river, known to be one of the best trout fishing spots in the country, is limited to owner Stefan Persson - who also owns the H&M fashion retailer and is said to be worth £10 billion, his guests and anglers able to fork out £1700 annually for a permit.

However, just for once, it seems we can't slate the mega-rich in this instance. Mr. Persson's estate manager claimed that the estate originally applied for permission to carry out the work and to fund it themselves - but the Agency said they would pay for it, allowing them to improve a longer stretch of river than that owned by the tycoon.

So it seems that it's unfair to attack him - anyone who wishes to do so only needs look at his company's record on ethical trading if they're looking for a reason - but, surprise surprise, yet more proof of how you can't even use the Daily Mail to wipe your arse: you'd wipe more shit on than off. Might have been nice had the EA, considering the credit crunch, have accepted the £53k for that one-mile section and paid for the rest though, thus saving us all a bit of cash in these tough times.