Porn in schools? No – what students need is James Stewart

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/19/porn-schools-james-stewart-sex-consent

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Jenni Murray reckons schoolchildren should be made to watch porn films in class, as part of a wider discussion of sex, consent and behaviour. Nope. For a real insight, the film every pupil should see is George Cukor’s 1940 black-and-white classic The Philadelphia Story.

Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn star as Dexter and Tracy, wittily sparring ex-spouses from high society, and James Stewart is Mike, the tough journalist who is more than a little in love with Tracy. At a swell party one night, Tracy gets wildly drunk; she and Mike start quarrelling – then kissing – and head for a naughty midnight swim.

Now, she isn’t used to wine. The next morning, everyone assumes that Mike has taken advantage. But Mike announces to one and all that nothing happened! A hungover, amnesiac Tracy complains sarcastically: “Was I so unattractive? So forbidding?” Not at all, he says. “But you were also a little the worse, or the better, for wine. And there are rules about that.”

There you go. Jimmy Stewart’s declaration of “rules” may seem quaint. But when I first watched this movie at 11, I’d never heard of those “rules”, and I took the idea seriously from then on. I can’t think of any other Hollywood film that puts it as clearly as that.

Bake and flak

Is it the gravest crisis in the “special relationship” in the last century? Is the US ambassador Matthew Barzun going to be called in to explain himself? Are the British bank accounts of NBC about to be frozen? All of us Brit fans of the US TV show Saturday Night Live are in shock. We used to watch it on YouTube, thrill to its satire, hug ourselves with glee as Kate McKinnon impersonated Hillary Clinton, while Larry David did Bernie Sanders and Alec Baldwin was Donald Trump. We felt that we were all on the same side, the same wavelength.

But oh dear. SNL’s now notorious Great British Bake Off sketch was not just horribly unfunny but misconceived. It’s like taking a sledgehammer to kill a butterfly. They had a Brit in the cast, too – Emily Blunt – who could have told them how wrong all the dialogue was. I

It’s painful to realise that we’re not SNL’s friends, and stupid old Britain (Jon Stewart called us America’s deadbeat older brother) is just as alien, just as laugh-at-able as Trump. Perhaps the SNL Bake Off is our karmic justice for Boris Johnson’s crass claim that Barack Obama is anti-British because of his Kenyan ancestry.

Gorillas in our midst

When the American dentist and big-game hunter Walter Palmer got into trouble last year for shooting Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe, many pointed out how very, very unwise it is to kill an animal that has a name. In London Zoo at the moment, things are quiet now that they have recovered the alpha male gorilla that got out. He has a name, too: Kumbuka. (It’s Swahili for memory, with the connotation of “memorable” or “impressive”.) Maybe crowds will specifically want to see the rebellious bad-boy gorilla Kumbuka from now on – and perhaps they will toss Kumbuka a catcher’s mitt and a baseball for him to throw up against the wall in captivity, like Steve McQueen does in The Great Escape.

Kumbuka might start a debate about how we regard zoo animals. Already David Attenborough has said that Kumbuka and the other animals should be kept behind wooden walls with peepholes, not sheer plate glass, which encourage people to clown around and wind the gorillas up. Sir David has a point. Kumbuka could have another go at escaping – and he might well be in a memorably bad mood this time.