My post on British reticence to mention the race of a wanted criminal has got me a lot of mail. I thought this email from the Netherlands has an interesting twist on the practice:
"Sounds familiar enough. Here in the Netherlands the race of a criminal is generally only mentioned in news stories and elsewhere when the suspect is caucasian. If the suspect is Asian or North African they simply say "coloured skin", if the suspect is black they don't say anything. As a result everyone implicitly adds "black person" when no race is mentioned, which of course has the exact opposite result of what's intended: people are filling in the blanks and starting to consider blacks more prone to being criminals than others (which may be true, given the high percentage of them among the prison population, especially compared to the percentage of them in society).
Wonderbra Sales Sag
To feminists, push-up bras are of course anathema. They represent "pandering to the patriarchy" -- or whatever the politically correct phrase is. So feminists are no doubt rejoicing that sales of such items seem to have fallen off in recent times. One English female writer was however refreshingly frank in suggesting a non-feminist reason for the rise and fall of the pushup. Excerpt:
"Sales of push-up bras have plunged 10 per cent in the past year, and the reason, I suspect, is that women are fed up with the Wonderbra. And who could blame them? The torture is over; we are free at last, free from the slavery of the most uncomfortable contraption ever invented for the female form ..... Indeed, the older we get, the more we are in need of a quick lift. It is not surprising that the biggest market for the push-up bra is now women aged 45 to 54. They're not trying to defy the laws of nature. They are simply recognising that age and gravity are a girl's worst enemies..... Discomfort aside, there always came the awful moment when we undressed for the first time and our Monroe cleavage was exposed for what it was: more Watford Gap than Twin Peaks. With one tug of the clasp, the breasts of Wonderbra wearers are transformed from Susannah's melons to Trinny's poached eggs".
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