Sporting Girls in LBDs

This is a follow-up to my latest Seventh Seal blog, now that I know the dime-store Jezebel who imposed the sight of her scanty assets to the public won't be prosecuted, as a group of ten right-wing reps of the people (Osons la France, Daring France) who still do blush about some things had wished. Her case was dropped on the grounds of freedom of expression. Watch out, next you could have a gay man exposing himself on Notre-Dame rooftop with the placard ''I do like a bit of weathercock'' daubed all over him, or straight guys raiding a Pigalle club in their birthday suit chanting to the ladies ''It's Raining Men Halleluiah!'' Europe, who do I call, EMTs or Pinkhas?

Nobody officially in charge of the French state has the guts to do anything about outrages to common decency or defrauding the audience who paid good money for their theatre tickets and their TV licence. They are spineless cowards on an easy, cushy job who live with the delusion they can still salvage a few left-wing votes and their own backsides in next year presidential election, that's all. If the tart had been a Le Pen supporter or a conventional right-wing one, she'd have been arrested and charged asap. But she is a Communist Party member who had the gall to declare that vulgarity was the people, the vulgus in Latin, commoners, people the Left despises because they haven't found a way yet of getting rich by turning to corruption and stealing public funds, so what's left of the Left won't touch her. Covid-19 is a disaster for the entertainment industry, there was no need to kill it off. If the French state hadn't trained their people like Pavlov dogs to dribble at the sight of degrading nudity and debasing behaviour, they would have some brains left to produce a blooming all-national vaccine that could have saved many national lives instead of destroying them with filth and slanderous anti-AZ propaganda. It is not a war against Covid-19 they wage, it is setting defamation as the norm at the height of a pandemic. Another criminal act. And then, they go lecturing the Turks and the Chinese on human rights, perched on a Napoleonic supremacy that has long turned to greasy dust.

Once upon a time, no one could do tarty dresses and floozies quite like the French. They are now Finnished, and so is their hegemony on fashion - and on everything else. I remember pell-mell of course the legendary Bardot, an institution who gave us the classic eponymous top, Mireille Darc (!) sporting a low-cut black dress cum higher glutes simultaneously and at the same time in The Tall Blond With A Black Shoe, more style meaning more back as Dickens would say in Dombey&Son*, Marlene Jobert in a grisly purple-patch tunic in Don't Take God's Children for Wild Geese (!!), the extremely popular Daniele Gilbert, the Doris Day of French days that were, who got sacked like a pig in 1981, for having been born in the same village as the then-ousted president Giscard. She ended up modelling for a naughty magazine, mooning the newly established politically correct ''leftist'' elite and their graceful manners towards the most popular, family-friendly, unostentatious female TV host of all French times. After which stunt she got onto the supermarket opening circuit. The notorious divorcee Pierrette Le Pen recovered the French-made tradition a few years later; naughty publications have their uses to clean up the grime scene.

We do have naughty mags, openly sexy shops and massage parlours of ill-repute in the UK, however we also have the Sexual Offences Act 2006, by which intentional exposure of genitals to cause harm or distress will get the guilty party a fine and up to two years of imprisonment, without speaking of the long-lasting, damaging social stigma associated with such offences. Employers and partners would ditch the guilty without second thoughts. Newsagents have to place moonlit scenery on top racks away from children's sight and reach, and everyone who watches TV has heard of the ''9 o'clock watershed''. It is not complicated to organise.

Alors the French can't do tarts and LBDs any more. They can't do anything any more. They even put their national baguette up as entry candidate for museum piece status on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Next to Turkish whistle birdcalls and Neapolitan pizza ripe tomatoes.

*Erratum: although I strive to bring the uttermost care to the prose I regale my readers with, I do apologise for my initial error. It was not in Great Expectations as previously mentioned, but in Dombey and Son that you should find the back story, if you have the time to go through the thousand pages of this very savvy Dickensian novel, something I can't possibly do at the moment; see as well the rose-coloured curtains in chapter 37, More Warnings than one.