Simple, eh?
Yes, ban it. The simple, reliable answer to every little problem.
Parents be warned: If you spot your seven-year-old daughter sneaking off to school sporting innocent-looking "cheap coloured plastic bracelets", it means she's actually inviting the opposite sex to snap her "shag bands" in return for sexual favours - part of a "terrifying wave of promiscuous behaviour" which threatens to …
At our school we played 'tig' and that was the closest I came to touching a girl for the first 15 years of my life. Seems 'tig' has gone XXX.
Paris because you don't need a band with her, just a crapload of cash (not that I'm suggesting she's an expensive prostitute or anything).
Firstly, I remember these things being around when I was back at school in the late 90s, has it really taken this long for the sensationalists to notice?
Secondly, has anyone considered that these children are just lying about what they're doing? How many teenagers claim to have had sex when they're just trying to sound big in front of their friends?
I saw something about this in my local paper too - these wristbands have actually be branded as "evil". How can plastic be evil (unless it's Chucky)?
If only this craze would catch on amongst certain adult females I regularly see on my journey to and from work... Picture it, a crowded tube train, an attractive blonde, a snapped black band.....
AC, in case the girlfriend happens across this page, and questions me on my morality....
Whatever would happen to one's dear sainted mother collecting the kids from school wearing a full pair of Marigold rubber gloves, fresh from a hard afternoon's washing up...??!!
It's enough to have my dear grandad (God rest his soul) turning in his grave, and the locals at the Stuka and Spitfire spitting feathers into their Spitting Feathers (it's a brewery for those not 'in the know'...)
Gawd help us...
Bugger I wish I had thought this up.
The company has a warehouse full of useless rubber bands which are not selling. They setup a website or two claiming to be children using these bands in some sort of sexual way.
They then phone the press to "anonymously" tip them off about the new trend.
Hay presto millions of pounds of free advertising. Brilliant. Within a month nobody will care and the people with the warehouse will have a warehouse full of cash. Brilliant.
Technically nobody has done anything illegal. Brilliant.
1 = find a behaviour that has supposed to have existed for years
2 = suggest it's a new craze
3 = moral outrage
4 = profit from more paper sales.
Seriously, I remember when the bands round my arms were called shag bands and that was loooong ago. I actually had a wristfull of black ones. Unfortunatly, I ended up snapping a few of them by fidgiting and playing with them. t'was nothing to do but entertain myself :-)
This is another example of moral-outrage eating itself.
My 7-year old daughter has an arm full of them. Bought them from the local shop. As have all her friends. They just like them because they are "colourful fashion bracelets".
Then along come some website, The Sun, and MPs, and tell kids "no! they are not fashion! they are sex-toys. Here, if you go to www.whatever.com, you can read the rules and find out how to do it! Which, of course, you shouldn't! Outrageous!"
If everyone had kept schum, then they would continue to be... harmless colourful bracelets. It's the GROWNUPS (so-called) that are turning them into something more.
You don't need "shag bands" to talk about sex, nor to have kids daring one another. Youngsters are sexually curious, with or without shag bands.
What you need, is decent sex education, not "biological" education. If youngsters were taught about smegma, that men lie, cheat and bully, and sex with an underage teen can have you labelled a paedophile or slag, I think most kids would think twice.
So , either the Sun doesnt read anything across the pond , where the "Moral Majority" had a little media frenzy of their own about this back when wearing livestrong bands became popular, or this was a really , really slow news day, and the reporter tried to make something interesting out of a niece of nephew coming to visit and telling him how things were going at school.
The ultimate non-story. Queue outrage ,and a Daily Mail campaign.
This colour-coded jewellery for sexual favours thing is nonsense. It comes up about once every two years when some newspaper has nothing better to say.
They've been touting this nonsense on and off about these plastic arm-bands for almost a decade now. Before that it was "friendship bracelets" which I'm sure anyone of my generation (born late 70s) will remember the girls making from bits of coloured string and giving out.
There was never anything to it then (more's the pity IMHO...) and there's nothing to it now. The fact that an MP has fallen for it speaks volumes.
Why is the reg reporting this ridiculous old hype?
Nice to see the combined headless chickens of the tabloid press and politicians off on a new threat to the kiddies that has only ever been heard about from some anonymous sources on the internet that, because they are on the 'tubes, simply *have* to be true.
If they want some more ideas then Cracked (http://www.cracked.com/article_17040_6-most-insane-moral-panics-in-american-history.html) has a few more they can borrow (Rainbow Parties come in at #5 on that list and I believe #1 has already been dealt with in depth).
If so it must be sweeping at roughly the same rate as continental drift. Girls had shag bands when I was in year 8 at school, no less than 13 years ago - and I dare say some while before that.
My girlfriend who was in the year below me at school in another part of the country confirms that they had them too. I find this kind of hysteria all very chortlesome.
I used to wear them when I was a teenager [16+ yrs]. The way the bands were used was that when a female kissed a boy she would give the guy a bracelet/band. The number of bands a guy wore indicated how much he scored. It meant that a male had to ask if he could have a band/snog and the girl could refuse. The Bands did not have any other meaning. Breaking the bands does not make sense as you would not have as many trophies to wear casually.
Expect Ed Balls to respond, his is the Normanton constituency, Normanton is geographically part of Wakefield. These two are neighbours in constituency terms, both coming from Wakefield.
I've had to give these two people IT support before, they really do think they're the moral guardians of society and are the last people you'd want to trust making decisions surrounding this sort of thing. It wont start and stop at a ban, it will without a doubt result in something stupid like all retail staff having to sign the sex offenders register if they dare try sell them to anyone under 18 or even simply forget to check their ID.
Hi ! leave Polanski alone. He is famous and a (apparently) talented film guy. So what he did or diden´t was ok. Its not like he is a commoner like you lot who would be sick disturbed individuals that needed to be shot, castrated and hug til it really really hurt.
(Joke alert because some are to stupid to tell whether it is or isen´t a joke)
Let's not ban them, simply vet the kids and require they have the right licence to wear each coloured ban. Revenue from vetting fees for the government, they get kids on the database and used to being on databases. It can be integrated with the school's lunchtime fingerprint database, so policy evidence of 'joined-up thinking'. The database information can be sold to the sex industry proper to raise an extra load of cash, and, indirectly, VAT. Good for government, good for business, good for everyone.
I don't really understand the moral outrage; if kids are opting-in to offer and receive 'sexual favours', they'll find some way to make that known. Banning the bracelets won't stop that. Arguably it's better to know who is 'up for it', and it wouldn't be such a bad idea in the adult world.
Mine's the one with a pocket full of wrist bands. Catch me if you can; I'll be the one standing still, whistling "One Night in Paris."
I live in Yorkshire, I've lived here for 14 years.
Yet I agree with you, entirely. The problem is people here are much lazier, generally more stupid, want things done for them.
This is evidenced by the fact that it is both the Labour and BNP heartlands. Really, there's a reason these two parties (which combined represent all that is lazy and ignorant) flourish here- it's a centre of ignorance, moral outrage and panic at the slightest things.
next to the newsagent's football sticker boxes as "Shag Bands" with instructions then YES, it's wrong to let kids buy them. Yes, kids'll fool about and come up with whatever games they can to make the guys seem less prickish ("Haha! I snapped your band. See you behind the bike sheds at lunchtime!") and the girls less slutty ("Oh, deary me- you snapped one of my several gold bands. Now I've GOT to do all that with you- it's schoolyard law.")- and that only comes about because of the prudish way we're brought up.
BUT exploiting underage sex for profit should definately not be encouraged. By all means stick them in the booze aisle or sell them at pubs/clubs/etc. for unimaginative adults to enjoy.
If they're just sold as bands and the kids are coming up with their own meanings then fair enough- it's an innocent product. It's not like it's a binding legal contract- if they didn't want to they (a) wouldn't do it and (b) wouldn't wear them.
Not Yorkshire. The people trying to make money from this are based in Croydon. Here are their profiles, each reader can make their own mind up about the "Team" who are running the company promoted on the site.
http://www.time-bomb.co.uk/store/go/about-us/
Any readers in Croydon who are not happy about this can of course go pay them a visit or even protest outside the shop. This will ensure even more publicity.
"What I think we have here is the commercialisation of childhood."
Yes, despite the "it's not for real" protests, which I'm sure are largely correct, what we have here is the exploitation of all ages: adults who buy The Sun because they think it's "news"; children who are seen as a consumer "resource" to whom stuff of all kinds must be sold, whether that stuff is appropriate or inappropriate, despite that group actually having negligible income of their own. Combine this with blatantly commercial media and what passes for entertainment amongst a corrupt clique of unscrupulous producers (and other denizens of Soho), and how surprising is it that the herd all moves in the same undesirable direction?
What the "instant politician" (a soundbite in a can!) fails to mention in the predictable outburst is that all this is fuelled by the contemptible education policies of the political mainstream, most of whom would rather see the whole education business outsourced to a bunch of toffs and/or theotards so that the state's only role is to fill in the propaganda blanks in whatever syllabus eventually gets delivered to a bunch of kids whose only role in life will be that of a compliant Sun-buying consumer who prefers Brand Jesus to other brands, thus making speculative foreign wars so much easier to legitimise with "popular support" as the gawping masses jeer for "satisfaction", more cheap shit to buy, and another juicy scandal to fill in the intellectual void around them and their mates/marriage/co-workers.
Why can't the member for Wakefield - a whip as well, representing yet another idiocy of the Lord of the Manor era political system of the Britards - just resign and lead all the other career politicians out of the door in the process? After all, they have all presided over the "commercialisation of childhood" and a lot more besides without doing very much about it.
since this MP is a whip.. shouldn't they ban whips, after all they're always associated with deviancy. She could then exclude herself from being anywhere near any kids..
It truly beggers belief that instead of explaining to the parents in her constituancy that this is just a load of old rubbish she wastes parlimentary time by bothering with it..
this idea has been around for about 13 years (it was around when i was a child), like many things, its all talk, maybe a snog happened as a display of social dominance (having the balls to actually do it)
then again, it depends entirely on the intelligence level of the children.... they are all little shites and slags these days... maybe they actually take it seriously?
let your own paranoia guide you to your own truth with this one :)
There's this new craze sweeping the nation, it only started yesterday.
Smack bands, if someone manages to get one of those off you then you have to smoke crack and inject heroin...at the same time. You can't not do, it's the rules, you have to do it, and then eat poo.If you don't then you are saying you are gay.
When I were a lad, we used to smack the woman we were interested in over the head with a large stick then drag them back to our caves. Some of these folks grew up to be famous mass murderers and tyrants, but you never heard a bad word about any of them.
The parents of kids of today don't know they are born. Bring back national service is what I say. That'll teach them about proper sexual perversions in dingy bars in Germany and Burma. Once you've seen Maxi Ping Pong do her special trick, "shag bands" will be the last bloody thing on their minds.
Bah humbug!
Hand grenade, because that was part of Maxi Ping Pongs other trick.
They will get very confused when they have to swap the shag band color codes with the hanky color codes...
Those who will pick somebody with a yellow one - hint: it's not a hug - will certainly get an unwelcome surprise when they get down to it. And good luck to those who meet somebody sporting a teal blue one!
"..Kids at the local school here are far too busy sacrificing goats and selling their souls to satan..."
...and they are no damn good at it. When I was their age I'd materialised three major demons and sacrificed my cousin. All these kids do is mooch around in capes trying to look cool, standards have slipped.
For Heavens sake, it's a hoax.....A myth. Based on an old urban legend wideley debated on Snopes back in about 2003...Get a grip people, since when has the Sun been a newspaper or known at all for responsible research ?
Jebus..... IQ's are surely falling around here.
Thumbs down anyone on here that believes this drivel.
It appears that the MP for Wakefield instigated an investigation into cronyism by Lib Dems in Islington council, back in her days as a councillor in Latteland. That particular investigation, by the Standards Board of England, lasted over three and a half years and found no evidence of corruption by the accused Lib Dem councillors. I'm sure the one million pounds plus of public money which this costs was well spent. In an interesting 159 page ruling the tribunal described Ms. Creagh as an "insensitive witness, lacking in balanced judgment and one who was prepared to make assumptions about honesty and integrity of others without any proper basis".
The ruling also said "The tribunal considers that her evidence was heavily influenced by her political motives." Lacking in judgment, thinking the worst of others? Who'd have imagined it from this story...
Just to avoid Ms. Bee worrying about the libel lawyers getting in on this, then here is a link to the Guardian article from which I have extracted these quotes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/jan/05/localgovernment.politics1
they had these when I was in school in the 80's with a similar outrage back then too.
Back then, they only came in black (as they were just rubber seals). The black bands back then meant the same as today, but being that they only came in black and people not being very PC back then, they were called niger bands not shag bands. I'm guessing that the name shag bands came about in the 90s when people became more PC and the manufacturers started making them in a variety of colours.
The truth is no-one did anything with anyone they didn't want to, and it's a bit late to be banning them.
Thinking back, was there anyone else here who saw the title of this article and clicked on it expecting to find that it was something to do with the Rolling Stones (or more likely some modern bunch of wannabees)?
<straight face>
Not that I would ever dare to suggest that a great British institution such as they have ever been involved in excessive fornication, underage sex or anything else that might cause an outburst of fulminant rage in the tabloid press.
</straight face>
So some kids with low self esteem do naughty things ultimately because "their mates tell them to".
It's gone from "Have you met shaun? You should shag him cos he's fit and he fancies you"
to "Shaun snapped your band so now you've got to shag him." Errrr, same thing.
If there is even the most remote problem with this it's that kids are prepared to surrender their rights to a game.
Blue haired troll because EVERYONE knows what it means if you've got a blue haired troll.
I note, with disdain of course, the close correlation between this eroto-braceletian sensationalism, and the Sun's impromptu side-shuffle in political alliegances. Coincidence? I think not.
Moreover, it is in the public interests to know - would David Cameron hug a hoodie sporting a yellow band?
I thought the idea was tacky. Yes I was a late developer but damn i'm proud of it. back then only the sluts of the class who[r]e them and I doubt much the same has changed. this recent round was just to sell papers, and yet here I am reading about it online first.
paris because i'm sure she snapped a few.