This past week the Girl Guides published the results of a survey of their members that asked what new skills they wanted to learn.
Unsurprisingly the media at home and internationally focused on one item alone – that guides chose ‘practice safe sex’ as an additional skill.
Here’s a couple of typical responses at Free Republic (sorry, won’t dignify them with a linlk)
“This is such a repugnant move on the part of the Girl Guides that it should make decent people want to puke.
In their monthly magazine mailed out to the membership I wouldn’t be surprised if it featured advertisements for sex toys. No rucksack should be without one!”
“I nearly did puke when I heard about this. I actually threw up in my mouth.”
I can guess the reason the Freepers feel nauseous: it’s the conflicted guilt they feel for envisioning young trainee sluts in hot uniforms doing unspeakable things the moment they read ‘girl guides’ and ‘sex’.
How very revealing indeed that the first commenter’s immediate mental connection with girl guides was ‘sex toys’. But then that’s the right wing all over -they say they’re all about protecting girls and women but really it’s about keeping them ignorant and thus easier to mould to mens’ sexual and domestic desires.
I’d also point out that it’s older guides, aged 16-25, who chose the subject – above the age of consent, here and in the US (well above in the case of Idaho, where it’s 14) . But reality’s no barrier to the wingnuts’ fevered imaginations.
Anyway, the list of wanted skills is actually quite interesting and is broken up by age group:
SKILLS WISH-LIST – AGE SEVEN TO 10
Surf the web
Name 10 European countries
Ride a bike
Care for a pet
Which are actually rather sweet. Don’t forget these are additional to the skill badges the guides already do but if anything need be added, I’d say road safety. Or what to do in a flood.
AGE 10 TO 15
Prepare a healthy meal
Change a light-bulb
Say hello in foreign languages
Stand up to boys
I’d add basic bike mechanics for that bike they learned to ride earlier, or how to build your own pc. Girls should learn how things work and how to fix them; competence gives confidence, and might actually help a bit with ‘how to stand up to boys’.
It might also, in the light of recent severe weather events be useful to expand the survival badge to include what to include in an emergency pack, how to cope without power in 6 feet of water, how to make sandbags, purify drinking water and recognise the syptoms of cholera and typhoid…
AGE 16 TO 25
Practise safe sex
Write a CV
Hold on to a job
Plan a holiday
What struck me about that last list is the sharp difference in aspiration between it and the 10-15 list: the latter are all outward looking practical skills, the former totally self-focused – to me it reads like the wish-list of someone working in a dead-end call-center job and going out at the weekends. You can almost see the horizons narrowing.
What should be added to that list is self-defence: what to do if someone pulls a knife, or someone gets shot or if one of your friends is tasered by overzealous cops on an injuncted National Trust or Friends of the Earth protest – also a badge for how to clean up contaminated river sludge from household appliances and disinfect carpets. Or how get a fire going from sodden charcoal and make a cup of tea.
The guides unsurprisingly focus on girls but lest I be accused of misandry I think that everyone needs to learn how to survive in a crisis and every single skillset mentioned here applies equally well to boys.
Especially ‘how to stand up to boys’.
But last weeks floods and the continuibg recovery issues show very clearly that it’s not just modern society today’s young women need to survive in but an an increasingly unstable physical world too.
I know I sound like a stereotypical stuffy great aunt but I’m dismayed at the lack of practical physical survival skills that young people today are taught: parents are just too busy surviving financially or weren’t taught themselves, Ray Mears’ enduring popularity notwithstanding. Sometimes it seems as though teaching children these practical skills in schools is seen as away of empowering children to defy authority. Better to keep the youth pliant and quiet, it’s thought, but if childrens’ urges to take risks leads them has no oulet they’ll confront danger in other ways many of them illegal and/or lethal.
We have a massive resourrce of survival knowledge to draw on from what our grandparents learned from their harsh wartime experiences in times of terrible danger, privation and crisis That knowledge is in danger of being lost as the last wartime generation gradually dies off, but there has to be a way to draw on it to the benefit of today’s youth: they too are threatened, as their grandparents were, by world instability, creeping fascism and men with guns – so they should have quite a lot in common.
Snark aside, whatever you feel about the jingoist and imperialistic origins and the structure and ethos of the scouts and guiding movements and their largely ( at least in the UK) middle-class membership and aspirations, nevertheless it has to be a good thing to teach the young how to survive in a modern society, for as long as that modern society lasts.
