Hi °C | Lo °C When the Irish Rugby Football Union issues philosophical essays on gender politics, it's rather like watching one's great uncle Albert get down and boogie at a teenage disco.
One would prefer to have one's eyes gouged out, just to be spared the embarrassment.
And as he gambols rheumily around the floor like a tortoise tap-dancing on a searing barbecue, and making eyes at the 19-year-old with her thong round her wrist, you swear that when you get him home, you'll break his legs with an iron bar and then chain him to the bed.
Everyone outside the ranks of the Miserable Seventies Demented Feminists knows what the Hunky Dorys ads are about.
F-U-N. To be sure, Fallopia Whynge, Deirdre Desolee and Ovaria Martyr won't get the simple joke about the sexy girls in skimpy togs playing rugby. That's fine. We don't want them to get it.
The only place where they feel really happy is in the vet's clinic, watching bulls being turned into bullocks. If they started laughing at anything, it probably means that Armageddon has arrived, only it's spelt Armagelding.
The rest of the world knows the ad is classic end-of-pier comedy. Sexy teenage girls wearing tiny sports-pants and revealing bras goes back to the 1950s and St Trinian's. Before that, saucy postcards from Blackpool and Brighton. As for cross-dressing, and girls being boys, but still flirting as girls: take your pick from half a dozen Shakespeare plays. Everyone (apart from MS DemFem) knows that this kind of thing is a harmless staple of Anglophone humour.
Everyone, that is, save the chaps in the IRFU, who upon seeing the Hunky Dorys ad for crisps pompously issued a statement declaring that “this blatant exploitation of women is tasteless and base and is quite simply unacceptable”. And that's the lords of the IRFU for you: getting it wrong, as usual. I haven't got the time, or the inclination, to check, but I suspect that in the 1970s the lords of IRFU issued a similar statement ringingly denouncing the latest craze of so called “teddy-boys”.
They bestirred themselves in the 1980s to condemn the feckless and dangerous condition known as “hippies”. And in the 1990s, they probably weren't too happy about another trend that went by the name of “beatniks”, hanging around in coffee bars.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the lords of IRFU have just denounced the widespread use of the term “daddy-o” amongst young people. So now they've picked upon 1970s feminism, all victimhood and oppression and priggishness, with the grim and repressive instincts of an aggrieved and frigid old governess. They clearly haven't got a clue how young women today think or behave.
If told that after the ads were made, a lot of Californians were in evidence in the showers, the lords of IRFU would no doubt exclaim: “Impossible: almost no one plays rugger on the westernmost shores of the Americas.”
So what does IRFU stand for: Invariably Risible, Famously Unimaginative? Yes, yes, yes, Ireland won the rugby Grand Slam last year, for the first time since the Crimean War. But everyone else has won it many times over in that time, except Italy: and to expect Italy to win the Grand Slam in rugby is like expecting Congo to split the atom.
So look, I don't want to hear opinions on gender politics from such people. And I certainly don't want to hear what the lords of IRFU think is “tasteless and base and simply unacceptable” in attitudes towards women. Because I remember about a year ago, when one of the Irish squad, Ronan O’Gara, met the elderly female head of state of some of his team-mates, he just stood there smirking, with his hands in his pockets.
And about this show of outrageous bad manners towards Queen Elizabeth, the lords of IRFU had nothing to say.
