PITY THE SEXUALIZED CHILD

New Zealand Media Council joins the Herald in celebrating (Trans)sexualization of children

I’ve covered in a previous Substack a video published on the Herald’s website celebrating a seven year old boy performing a bit like a little drag queen. The video – funded they NZ On Air (i.e. your taxes) - was joyously entitled Seven-year-old quad-drifter in stilettos!

In that Substack I ventured to suggest that the best avenue to complain about the Stilettos video was to the Herald and then – if the Herald rejected the complaint – to the New Zealand Media Council.

I duly went on to complain to the Herald and then – with the Herald predictably rejecting my complaint – to the New Zealand Media Council. Here is the Media Council’s decision:

Media Council - John McLean against the New Zealand Herald

It’s apparent that the Media Council’s decision to reject my complaint was at a meeting of the Council members on 2 December 2024. But the decision was only “dropped” on the Council’s website just before Christmas. (A bit like news of the de-registration of John Tamihere’s Waipareira Trust as a charity.) The Media Council upholds very few complaints.

The Stiletto decision is one that the Media Council is clearly – and entirely understandably - trying to hide, just as the Herald tried to hide its publication of the video by deleting it. But you can still view a sympathetically edited version of the video on Family First’s website, here:

McBLOG: Yes, the NZ Herald did sink this low - Family First NZ

The Media Council’s decision represented a terrible early Christmas present for New Zealand children. In essence, the Council decided that the Herald didn’t not override the child’s interests because the sexualized depiction of the child was positively in the child’s best interests. Revealingly, the Media Council does not state or even imply that the child was not depicted in a sexualized manner because, of course, it’s incontrovertible that the child was sexualized. According to the Council’s decision:

It is explained that the boy has been performing in films, adverts, theatre and TV since he was a baby. He is shown catwalk strutting in a number of bright outfits and exhibiting the dance that saw him ‘banned’ from a dance class aged four. This dance shows the boy sticking out his hips and slapping his bum in what might loosely be described as twerking.

The Media Council acknowledges that the child is depicted “twerking”. Here are some authoritative definitions of the strange dance moves known as “twerking”:

Wikipedia: “Twerking” a type of dance to popular music in a sexually provocative involving throwing or thrusting the hips back or shaking the buttocks, often in a low squatting stance”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines twerking as “dancing in a sexually provocative manner using thrusting movements of the bottom and hips while in a low, squatting stance”.

Merriam-Webster defines twerking as a "sexually suggestive dancing characterized by rapid, repeated hip thrusts and shaking of the buttocks especially while squatting".

Words matter. “Twerking” bears its ordinary meaning. The Herald therefore unashamedly – indeed gleefully – depicted the child doing sexual things, and the Media Council was fine with that.

The Herald and Media Council are therefore totally down with Kea Kids and the Herald being used as a channel to promote, to other children, the desirability of children being depicted in a sexualized manner. The glib defence is that the child’s parents are apparently delighted with their son being depicted performing sexualizing acts. As if that’s any legitimate defence at all. What if the Kea Kids brigade had depicted a child being prostituted, with the child’s pimping parents delightedly consenting? Would that be okay to the Herald and Media Council?

Let’s name and shame the Chair of the New Zealand Media Council, Raynor Asher, together with Media Council Executive Director Margot Chandler. Raynor Asher is a King’s Counsel and ex-Judge on New Zealand’s Court of Appeal. Raynor should know better than to condone the sexualization of children. And neither should Margot be majorly condoning the sexualization of minors.

Raynor’s fellow members of the Media Council should also be named: Ben France-Hudson, Katrina Bennett, Rosemary Barraclough, Hank Schouten, Jo Cribb, Marie Shroff, Jonathan MacKenzie, Richard Pamatatau, Judi Jones, Tim Watkin, Reina Vaai, Scott Inglis and Alison Thom.

What’s up?

The Media Council’s decision represents some sort of new low in Aotearoa’s Weird World of Woke. But the Council is unlikely to celebrate all sexualization of children. The real reason for the Council’s decision is of course that the child’s videoed performances were camp/effete. The celebration is of the Transsexualization of the child.

We know what the Media Council’s decision would have been if the depiction was of the child engaged in heterosexual performance – simulating heterosexual sex with a female child blow up doll, or something like that. The double standards at work here are as indisputable as they are excruciating.

This is all playing out in a Woke environment where children are seen to need State sanctioned “safe spaces” to protect them from having their delicate feelings hurt. But where was the safe space for the Stilettoed Kid who the Herald and Media Council are so desperately keen to see grown up to be homosexual or, even better, body dysmorphic (“Trans”).

A child is completely incapable of knowing where his or her best interests lie. That’s why they need the protection of their parents, other adults and the State. Part of the Media Council’s flawed logic in pretending that the video was in the boy’s best interests is that the boy appears to be enjoying himself. That’s as illogical and dangerous as saying youths are quite capable of deciding for themselves, without parental involvement, that they’re living in the wrong body and must take puberty blocking (sterilizing) hormones and have secondary sex characteristics (mammaries, penises, that sort of thing) cut off or otherwise surgically altered.

Sexual perversion is a real thing, and the laudatory sexualized portrayal of any child is perverse. To try and pretend otherwise is abominable.