Don’t blame men

I CAN’T believe the outrage over past and present male behaviour.

When I was at London University in the Sixties, I had a summer holiday job as a Playboy bunny girl — it paid more than working in Woolworths. I was well looked after and took it for granted that men would look at me because of the way I was dressed.

As a beauty contest winner, I went out with my model agency boss, who was 15 years older than me. I can’t say I was exploited.

I am a feminist and think we should move on from blaming men for behaviour that can be annoying.

Rape, sexual assault, sexting by young children, paedophilia — are these not the things we should be worrying about?

SUSAN NIMMY, La Greze, France.

SARAH VINE rightly calls for a sense of proportion and for distinctions to be drawn between being propositioned and genuine cases of sexual abuse, which, of course, no one would condone.

She also deplores indulging in ‘two of the greatest vices of our social media age: virtue signalling and lookat-me-ism’. To these I would add humbug and cant — hypocritical and sanctimonious talk.

Ms Vine says most of us ‘will at some point have been the subject of unwanted sexual attention’.

How is a person to tell if their attention is wanted or not? Only by a process of trial and error, I would submit.

Equally, how is a person to receive attention they do want if they are not prepared to risk a little of the unwanted kind? It is always possible to say ‘No’.

If a charge of sexual abuse is the only alternative to giving consent, men face too great a moral hazard.

For women to assume an air of outraged injury every time they are approached when they do not want to be is sanctimonious.

Or are we to reverse the social convention so women are the only ones to be allowed to proposition someone? LORD LOW of Dalston,

London E8. WHEN I was 18, I worked at the Royal School of Church Music. I can remember on several occasions being escorted into chapel by young men training to be vicars who put an arm round my waist.

If only I could remember their names, I reckon I could have several clergy and even bishops defrocked!

SHIRLEY HARRIES, Angmering, W. Sussex.