Young minds . . . and the dirty bits (in Aristophanes)

From A Don's Life by Mary Beard, Times Online:

I am pretty much in agreement with the Mumsnet line that there is something truly ghastly about young kids and aggressively sexualised clothing... what on earth goes on inside the mind of someone who designs a padded bikini for a six year old or a pink T-shirt (size 18 months) with "Come up and see me sometime" blazoned across the front I really can't imagine.

But the David Cameron view, as reported on the radio and in theGuardian this morning, prequelling Reg Bailey's recommendations, that it should be BANNED (along with a whole raft of other things that are "inappropriate" for kids) is quite another matter. For one thing, how on earth is it going to work? It's all very well being strict on enforcing the 9 o-clock watershed, but when any self respecting 5 year old can use iPlayer on his/her computer, what exactly is the point. (And the rules for post watershed are pretty odd anyway. Our Pompeii documentary was a post-watershed programme -- and what young minds would that have corrupted?)

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But anyway isn't the effect of a ban (or a brown paper bag around a lad's magazine) to make it more intriguing to the curious child, not less?

That's how it worked when I was 13 or so for the dirty bits in Aristophanes. (A photo of a recent production of Lysistrata is at the top of this post.. just to remind you of the bawdiness.)

Ok it took me about a year or so of reading this particular Greek comic poet at school to realise that the reason the line numbers apparently went from 1205 to 1210 in only 3 lines of verse was NOT to do with problematic and corrupt textual transmission -- but because some Victorian nanny-state editor had taken out a possibly corruptING couple of lines that were something to do with sex (or occasionally bottoms).

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