Think of the children

… but please don’t make them into lamps after poking their eyes out with scissors. Especially on a children’s TV show in Sweden, unless you want to cause a storm in a teacup. Via Metafilter, a Norwegian site reports (do I detect a hint of anti-Swedish glee?) that “Swedish children’s TV channel is forced to remove clip of doll murder.“

Luckily (for them) Sweden is so utopian that some people have nothing better to worry about than dolls being mutilated on a TV show for children, Philofix, complaining vociferously that it was “perverse”, “macabre” and “crazy”, and that the presenter should be dismissed. Clearly these people have never met a real child or they’re a very long way from their own childhoods, because otherwise they’d know that many children adore this kind of business and need no encouragement or instruction whatsoever in play-sadism with any vaguely humanoid figure. Given half a chance they’ll fuck up a doll in ways that make presenter Rakel Wärmländer’s interventions with scissors seem very tame. This project definitely is perverse, macabre and crazy… but guess what? Children are perverse, macabre and crazy too. What’s wrong with being perverse, macabre and crazy anyway?

Not to mention that– old lefty that I am– I think it’s preferable for a child to know that the world is there for them to learn from, tinker with and enjoy in their own private and individual way instead of just passively accepting objects and products as they are given, and never doing anything without permission.

Watch Rakel get medieval on a doll’s ass below. UPDATE: What a shame, the miserable bastards have purged it from YouTube already.