Law Society’s Gazette, February 1981

Counsel’s Opinion: In Defence of WomankindHow I wish all the painters, scrawlers, slogan writers and scribblers would stop it. One of the least attractive social phenomena of our time is the disfigurement by graffitists of the walls, floors – even ceilings – of public places.

It is not as though it were the pathetic outpouring of otherwise imprisoned and deprived talent. People of all classes are doing it – even the lavatories used by members of the Inns of Court are now scrawled over with puerile verse and epithet.

Sly encouragement is given by those who ought to know better – radio and television broadcasters and journalists quote and publicise what they are pleased to call the wittier specimens.

But I shall at least say I sympathise with one class of these offenders. It may be a breach of good taste and propriety to write on a poster, but when that poster is an affront to good manners, then the breach seems less grave.

I refer to those who write on pictures of posturing doxies ‘This degrades women’ and, sometimes, ‘Take your filthy hands off our bodies’. I sympathise with them because, right before our eyes, women are day-by-day and mile-by-mile being cheapened, degraded, dehumanised.

All the grace and charm of womanhood is reduced, for profit and in search for influence and power, to the parade of a whorehouse…

Why will feminists not unite to condemn the constantly growing treatment of womankind as objects, mere things and subjects for sexual gratification?

The time has come to shun women who allow lascivious photographs to be taken of them, who act in lewd performances and who enter beauty competitions and other such demeaning affairs.

Law Society’s Gazette, February 1991

Postbox: Job titlesI note Mr Ritchie ([1990] Gazette, 31 October, 15) wishes to be called a residential conveyancer, and not a ‘domestic conveyancer’ on the grounds that the latter term has ‘unfortunate downmarket connotations of domestic violence, domestic disputes and domestic courts’.

Speaking as one who practises in the area of residential violence, residential disputes and residential courts, I don’t quite follow his reasoning. We are both in the same profession, are we not?

J Wilson, Bradford