Ah. So, uniquely in Europe, Ireland has banned an advertisement to promote voting in the EU elections that consists of a baby trying to choose which of his mother's bare breasts to feast upon.
(A happy dilemma indeed. Being a twin, I had no such luxury.) In Britain they're slightly less prudish: there, the video is simply being doctored to cover an offending nipple with the baby's hand in one shot, and with the shot of the baby's mouth closing over the nipple being removed completely.
Excellent! Civilisation is thus saved! Our own civilisation-saver, Jim O'Brien of the European Parliament's Irish office, declared there was nothing "improper" in the image itself. Oh good man, Jim: nothing improper about a woman breast-feeding her baby - heroic stuff, indeed. But, he added, whereas it would be appropriate if the breasts were promoting something of a scientific or medical nature, they weren't when promoting something even as important as democracy.
But why should the female nipple, of which I've been a huge fan since the age of about two minutes, be allowed to promote science or medical products, but not democracy? Are nipples not about life? Are the European elections - at least notionally - not supposed to be about political life? And is a baby pondering, hmmm, left or right: which scrummy, pendulous orb shall it be, not a pleasing little allegory? The explanation for the answer, No, resorted to that odious little politically correct reptile, "appropriate". When American feminists found they really didn't want equality - such as in the use of lewd words in their hearing - and the "lady" argument was a flush they themselves had busted, they devised "appropriate" and its opposite as watchwords to justify their prudishness.
So, had the EU advertisement consisted of someone trying to choose between cars, or sweaters or tinned foods, we all know there would of course have been no recourse to the a-word. For that is trundled out only when prudery is being invoked; and since no-one admits to being a prude any more, how much more comfortable it is to appear to be censorious in pursuit of the modern: hence that grim, po-faced snivelling arbiter of PC moral rectitude, "appropriate".
This is clearly an Anglophone affliction: the 24 other EU countries are carrying the breast-feeding advertisements - and to judge from the photograph which appeared in this newspaper last Saturday, jolly fine breasts they are too. However, The Washington Post would probably not have carried the picture the way we did. When Alexandra Kerry, daughter of John, appeared at the premiere of Kill Bill 2 at Cannes, she was not wearing anything beneath her upper dress, and the thermonuclear illumination of a hundred camera-flashes revealed the outline of her nipples. So, the newspaper which gave us Deep Throat added Bogus Bra to its credentials: it pasted its very own brassière on the picture over the Kerry nipples.
This did more than conceal some erectile female tissue: it revealed the paper's own wretched ambivalence, because of course it had not been obliged to show the photograph in the first place. It clearly sought to titillate - look, we can see through Alex's dress! - yet to do so without showing the nipples, and thereby angering a possible future president, or even arousing an ardent teenager or two. Thus "The WIMP": The Washington Invisible Mammaries Post, and a perfect example of the central truth of prudery: we conceal in order that we may peek.
This happened not in Saudi Arabia, but in the capital of the world pornography industry, one in which no male reaches adulthood without having seen more nipples than there are stars in the Milky Way. Indeed, the US sometimes seems to be a dysfunctional mammarchy in which the breast is simultaneously and passionately both fetishised and stigmatised. Thus the hysterical howl of indignation at the exposure of part of Janet Jackson's breast at some recent awards ceremony - though not of the areola, which remained artfully covered. The US media nonetheless went into a hysterical fever, almost as if an errant brown Jacksonian nipple the size of a bucket had leapt out of the dress and danced across the stage, waving an umbrella, like Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain.
Who is to blame for all this nonsense? Those hatchet-faced, 17th-century English and Scottish puritans, that's who. They took their neuroses to the Americas, they overthrew the Stuarts and instituted a reign of Puritanical terror, inserting lasting taboos in the political classes of the English-speaking world. Even language was affected. Thus, Americans say "rooster" rather than the double-meaning "cock", and they refer to public toilets as "bathrooms", when the one item which is absent from such a convenience is a bath (deplorably, this verbal grey squirrel has now colonised cis-Atlantic English).
Gaelic Ireland wouldn't even have begun to understand the terror over the humble nipple. Why, it even has two words for that thimbly little source of food and pleasure - sine and dide - presumably one for the left, the other for the right. Good old Gaelic.
So now, alone from Achill to the Carpathians, we will not be allowed to see a baby choosing from which majestic font to nourish himself. In his tomb, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid is probably muttering that the public exposure of a woman's breasts in the media would be an occasion of mortal sin, whereas the Politically Correct would tut-tut that they are "inappropriate". Same grisly old puritanical prudishness, just different terminology, and utterly, utterly pathetic.