I grew up in a part of North East Scotland that was still politically Conservative. But more important it was morally conservative. In those parts of rural Aberdeenshire that were too far to easily commute into Aberdeen we spoke Doric as our everyday language with friends and in the shops. There was a whole vocabulary of farming language for which I don’t know the English equivalent. There was something direct and plain about these words and the people who spoke them. The idea that a quine [girl] could rape a loon [boy] never even occurred to us.
Church going was already in decline when I was young.
Sometimes a place that was called a village, but was merely a few scattered
houses would have a church the whole population of the surrounding area could
easily fit in, but it stayed empty apart from funerals. The sort of survey that
the SNP wants to ask school children would have been met with a mixture of
bafflement and embarrassment by adults in those days let alone those of us at
the school.
We giggled in first year science as we flicked through
the book to the sex section. It involved stylised anatomical drawings that explained
the differences between men and women and how they reproduced. We learned about
the biology of human beings in exactly the same way as we learned about the
biology of rabbits.
We were taught nothing else. There was nothing about homosexuality,
nothing whatsoever about sexual practices or positions beyond the most obvious.
The idea of anal or oral sex didn’t even occur to me as a child. There were childish
insults relating to homosexuality, but we were all rather vague about what it
might involve. The idea that a mannie might become a wifie was equally beyond
our idea of the possible, it would be like thinking a coo could become a ewe.
Farming and fishing are grounded in reality. You have
to know the soil and the weather and which crops will work this year. You have
to know the sea and your boat and where it is safe and profitable to fish.
There is no room in such an environment for words to self-defined. There can be
none of the vagueness of thought that could allow you to wonder what a man or a
woman is and what makes them what they are. If common sense were allowed to
depart so much as to think that women could rape women, how could you make a living
in such a harsh environment of strong winds and rain continually blowing in
from the sea. The soil was good, but only because of a battle won over centuries
against the rocks by people who were made by the landscape and spoke directly
or not at all.
There were two or three girls I vaguely knew who got
pregnant when I was at school. They had been going out with older lads with
cars. But teenage life for most of us was quite innocent. There might be a puff
on a cigarette a snog at a disco, but usually nothing more at least until university.
We would have been insulted by the SNP’s questions if we had known the words.
Something odd has happened to Scotland in the past 30
years. It makes my childhood appear out of the mist as if it were Victorian
times and I am one of those girls with ringlets peering from an old photograph.
But it’s not that long ago. We had television, we had video recorders, we even
had primitive computers. But it might as well have been that we were driving
horse drawn carriages.
I knew one or two girls who had sex when they were sixteen
or seventeen and still at school, but it was enough of an adventure to manage
that, without trying anything more exotic. The suggestion of any other orifice
would have been met with bemusement and then disgust. The request to send a
naked picture would have simply been refused with indignation and indeed
horror.
Either it is necessary to ask school children today
about their drug use and advanced sexual practices, in which case I want to ask
what sort of society has the SNP created where such things have become the norm,
or it is unnecessary in which case why is the SNP trying to corrupt minors?
It is still illegal for children to have sex when they
are under sixteen even with each other. It is still illegal even for them to
buy cigarettes let alone cocaine and heroin. But it is as if the SNP simply
accepts that such illegality happens, that nothing can be done about it and so
we must have a survey along the lines of “what is your favourite colour?”, “what
is your favourite book?”, “what is your favourite sexual position?”, “what is
your favourite way to get drunk/high?”
The SNP is creating a new normal in Scotland. It is a
world where women can rape other women, where a sword can redefine itself as a sheath
even though it still has the means to penetrate and we are not supposed to
notice any difference between swords and sheaths. If the police are unable to
tell the difference they are going to struggle with knife crime let alone rape.
After all, how are you supposed to catch a suspect if a witness describes the
person fleeing from the scene as a man, only for that man to define himself as
a woman. It wasn’t me I’m a woman. Welcome to a Scotland where everyone has an alibi.
Everyone I grew up with would look at this world where
lesbians can rape each other with swords unsheathed and children have anal sex
while high on drugs with incomprehension. This is not the Scotland we knew. A government
that created such a Scotland we would have considered to be full of perverts, weirdos
and strangers to everything we valued and held dear.
In those days no one much thought about Scottish
independence. The few SNP odd bods and obsessives were safely ignored because
they could do no harm. But my younger self looks forward to the harm they have
done and a Scotland she can scarcely recognise.
