When I was thirteen and helped out a local film festival my Dad was organising, I got a mention in a write up by a local journalist as the 'luscious piece in hotpants'. My parents reacted by showing me the article hoping it help me overcome my feelings of self consciousness and feel more confident about the way I looked. And yet in this day and age, and in the current social climate, the parents would more likely sue the newspaper. Of course it's a good thing that abuse is brought to light and victims are able to speak out and that it's no longer acceptable to reduce women to objects. But I think maybe it's gone too far and turned into a kind of paranoid obsession in present ay society. Roy is being a lot more explicit in this song than that local reporter - but I do think he has a point when he says it's what most men really feel and he's just being more honest about it. Feeling an attraction to or admiring a young female is still not the same as actually abusing them or having unlawful sex with them, and there is a difference between a young teenager in the process of becoming a woman, and a child. I think, going by what he said in the interview, it may well have been partly him putting the V's up to Mary Whitehouse and her attempts at the time to control and censor any portrayal of sex. Perhaps his only crime is being frank and honest about his feelings and desires, in a society that is becoming increasingly Orwellian and with 'thought police' and 'double think'.
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