In a TV stunt, a Brazilian actress recently lay on a beach asking male passers-by to rub suncream into her back. Many were eager to oblige only to recoil, when she turned over and they saw a bulge – a prosthetic penis – in her bikini. It is a good job she didn’t try it here, else she might be facing the best part of a decade behind bars.
There have been many times since the accusations against Jimmy Savile came to light three years ago that I have wondered whether Britain’s traditional prudishness over sex is developing into a national psychosis. Is there any other nation where a dozen police officers would raid the flat of a pop star who had been accused of groping a teenage boy 30 years ago, any other country where police would call the accusations of a man who claimed to have been abused by a government minister as ‘credible and true’, when we now know they were anything but?
The psychosis is confirmed with the sentencing yesterday of Gayle Newland to eight years in jail for fooling her female sexual partner that she was a man by means of a prosthetic penis.
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