It's getting to be a bit sharp outside
I started rereading Philip Pullman’s trilogy “His Dark Materials” again this week, starting with Northern Lights, which was filmed as The Golden Compass. The story is set in a parallel world where a person’s soul exists outside their body as a shape-shifting animal companion called a dæmon. The story follows Lyra Belacqua, a young, rebellious orphan living among scholars at Jordan College, Oxford. Her life changes when she overhears her uncle, Lord Asriel, airing his views on a mysterious elementary particle called Dust. The all-powerful Magisterium, a quasi-religious organisation, considers his views heresy.
It was a well-made film, but it bombed because the studio ran scared of the story, rewrote much of the original script, weakened the storylines, removed the book's central religious themes, and altered the ending, alienating the book’s fans and critics alike.
As I picked up my copy again, Jess Phillips, who oversees Women's Safeguarding in the UK, announced a new “Violence against Women and Girls Strategy”. The words used in the announcement were terrifyingly similar to any of several oriental “Re-education programmes”. She promises that “the full power of the state” will be brought to bear at both national and local government levels, “to prevent boys and men from ever becoming abusers in the first place”, and to “bear down on perpetrators so that those who have offended do not do so again”.
Teachers are to be trained to spot and tackle misogyny in boys, to select “high-risk” boys for “behaviour change programmes” and to challenge “deep-rooted misogynist influences” in a programme that will be piloted in secondary schools (boys as young as 11 years) this year, to be extended to all secondary schools by 2029, and extended to primaries (boys as young as five) after 2029.
And here is where I suddenly feared that Life was imitating Art, in an entirely unbenevolent way. At the core of Philip Pullman’s trilogy lies the omnipotent Magisterium. It is a powerful, oppressive theocracy that views itself as the protector of humanity’s spiritual purity. To the Magisterium,
