ALL THE OLD DUDES.

There was a horrorshow on, a few weeks back, in the wee, small hours;  I Married The Waiter, it was called, about older British women going to the Med or the Aegean, falling in love with young natives, 

marrying them and it all going horribly wrong, just like you'd expect; it was grotesque, bizarre and revolting, one seventy-six-year old drooling and cackling about the great sex she had with young Stavros or Dimitri, 



whom she had briefly and disastrously married, when he was twenty-two. 


 It wasn't the aesthetic of it which troubled me, grannysex, or great-granny sex with a kid,  and I even tried to congratulate both parties for their, what, their enthusiasm, I suppose, but all the time one knew that this was all doomed to end in heartache and embarrassment,  all the time one knew that this was aberrant and symptomatic of  Ruin, of a Me generation, once new and stupid, now grown old and stupid, an octogenarian humping a boy barely our of his teens  can, I guess, be seen as an act of liberation from gender stereotyping; just not by me, it made me cringe and squirm.  

And anyway, all but one of these old biddies deeply regretted their actions, some even seeing them for what they were, exploitative sex tourism, with old women playing the role more usually associated with old men, visiting Bangkok, spending their pensions on child abuse.

I suspect, though, that my view is anachronistic and that, among many who should know better,  Do what thou wilt is now the whole of the law.  I say this because  of the most recent such outrageous behaviour.  A seventy-year old Brit, Ray Cole, 

 found instant love online with a twenty-two year old Moroccan boy, Jamal, and flew from Britain to be with him and plan their life together. 

Unfortunatley for Ray,  Morocco is not what it was, a degenerate's playground,   and when the local Filth spotted Jamal and Ray in their hotel, they pounced.  At first they didn't want to nick Ray but he screeched and hissed so much that eventually they did, threw him in the slammer and left him to stew for a while.  It was A Nightmare, he fumes, MyHellOnEarth.  They didn't beat him or torture him or anything, just left him locked-up with lots of unpleasant guards and unpleasant prisoners, could have been in Winson Green or   Wakefield, come to think about it, but for Ray it was just the horriblest thing. 

 They even scrutinised his i-thing, which contained what he calls a sex-picture of himself although his lovely, darling Jamal was not in the shot. You might wonder, as do I,

 

 just what exactly the fuck a seventy-year old man is doing, carrying a sex picture of himself around the world; you might think that what with the Wars on Terror and Drugs, with the dawning of a realisation that there is no such thing as Privacy that this intolerably stupid old fuck was begging for trouble, embarrassment,  incarceration and self-publicity.  

Well, he got what he wanted, an almost full-page spread in the unspeakable Guardian, screeching his silly old head off,  about his treatment, about his love for Jamal, how he wants to get him political asylum in the UK  and a degree course in economics and  for them to just live happily ever after; y'know, just have a normal life together.

The Guardianista commenters were outraged on his behalf, the govament must do something, this is an outrage, dreadful, poor man, discriminated against like this. And when one person finally just mentioned that maybe sex tourism was not altogether a thing we should support there came an avalanche of heterosexist abuse - how dare you, they spluttered, one after another, how dare you, you....you....homophobes, how very dare you?

There was a time when the Guardian would have reported old Ray's dodgy conduct with a little more realism.  Old gay crosses world to meet vulnerable young man, that sort of thing, because it was and is that sort of thing;  as with the old women,  it is the commodification of  poor peoples' youth and genitalia.  I wish the Moroccans had kept him a bit longer, Ray, given him a chance to prove the depth of his love for the boy he had known for oh,  all of a few days, and had hoped to purchase outright.