Obscene costumed volunteers handing out summer reading at Redbridge library

[WombOfOnesOwn]

A library had a man in a rainbow monkey costume, with a dildo penis and a fake exposed butt, handing out summer reading books.

Look at this obscene sex clown mocking and terrorising local Muslim women:

twitter.com/HasAhmed_/status/1413931013340807172/photo/2

The library is, of course, apologizing about it now:

twitter.com/RedbridgeLibs/status/1413975910433366020

But during the event, they thought it was pretty funny:

twitter.com/turtillachip/status/1414255270038016009

What is happening? Why should parents going to the library's summer reading program worry that THIS is what they'll see? The website for this troupe of "performers" clearly shows this monkey performer with his fake penises inch from children's faces. There has been no vetting. No safeguarding.

And there'll just be an apology, another "isolated incident." Of course, the local Muslim women and girls know exactly what this library thinks of them now, and what may happen to them if they choose to even walk nearby. Do we think they're going to want to go in?

Okay, it looks like "Monkey business" is separate from the core activities of Mandinga - it has its own page on their website and is booked as a separate act:
www.mandingaarts.co.uk/monkey-business.html

Monkey Business is a medium scale outdoor theatre piece that stems from Mandinga’s carnival roots, but encompasses storytelling, circus, magic, and humour. This debut touring work represents a segway in Mandinga’s artistic development, supports the inclusion of a carnival arts company into outdoor theatre festivals, and showcases the talents of Latin American artists living in the UK.

Archived here:
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210711225948/www.mandingaarts.co.uk/monkey-business.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20210711225948/www.mandingaarts.co.uk/monkey-business.html

I think it's important to watch the preview video of the Monkey business performance - lots of deliberate sexual innuendo:

Also note the evolution of the monkeys during the performance. At the beginning, they have bums. By the end, some of them are flashing boobs.

I think it's important to watch the preview video of the Monkey business performance - lots of deliberate sexual innuendo

And yet no penises. I wonder why they decided to fit dildos to the costumes?

@Peoniesandpeaches Also funnily enough most LGBT people want to claim furries about as much as straight people. I’m sure there are LGBT furries but statistics would say straight people have more of a claim to them.

Yes everyone here gets that. We get that statistically all kinds of kink like furries, bdsm, sitting on cakes, whatever, is going to be practiced by straight people. But we can also see that all of these kink promoting groups are attaching themselves to the LGBT community as a way of pushing their kinks onto the public. Something which takes their kinks as something that's absolutely fine, because it was between consenting adults and pushing them onto people who didn't consent to that. And worse, some small but certainly pushy, groups are pushing their kinks on children.

Nobody here thinks that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or the vast, vast majority of people who are trans have anything to do with this. But there is a genuine concern about how this deliberate attempt to use the public acceptance of homosexual relationships to test boundaries, especially with regard to children.

No penises, but lots of suggestive bananas and boob flashing. I guess the dildos were the next logical step.

Clearly not appropriate for a children's reading event though!

InvisibleDragon:
Okay, it looks like "Monkey business" is separate from the core activities of Mandinga - it has its own page on their website and is booked as a separate act:
www.mandingaarts.co.uk/monkey-business.html*

It was on the main page though and has been rapidly removed. Archive here archive.li/qbyk8

And from the Facebook "behind the scenes" promotional video - "kids will love it ... Families will love it"
fb.watch/v/A696ddHch/

I'm really upset about this. It seems to me that Mandinga Arts do a lot of wonderful, creative Carnival and street performances. So much of it is great ...

And then, there they are promoting overtly sexualised monkeys, potentially with surprise dildos, as family entertainment.

I actually take great offence at the idea that this is more offensive to Muslims or other religious groups than to atheists like me. Monkey costumes with plastic penises should be unacceptable in front of children throughout the country.

Absolutely. There should not be any conflation with wanting appropriate material for children and safeguarding with conservative religious views. Everyone should think it’s wrong.

I don’t buy the “it’s cultural” argument. The Danes had that cartoon about the man with the very long penis he can’t control. We are supposed to think “oh look at those quirky Danes, isn’t it great how liberal their attitudes are to men with penises bothering children” when we should be thinking the world has lost its mind.

the library staff who run these events will probably not have been involved in organising it. Managers and development librarians do that. Library staff were probably put on the spot, and had no idea of the content until that fucking monkey started waving his prosthetic dick around. The ones on the ground, actually on the library floor are presented with these events as a fair accompli.

This screenshot was posted earlier in the thread. Someone from the library thought the monkey costume was funny.

@OldCrone I did see that. Disgraceful. I can't speak for Redbridge library, but our social media accounts are run by development librarians, who are not usually on the ground with customers. It sounds like whoever ran this was so proud of their little scheme that they were there to witness it, and, unbelievably, saw nothing wrong with it!

What I find so vile is that the summer reading challenge launch is a big event for all libraries nationwide. Whoever organised this did it with the knowledge that if it went to plan, this would be the one day of the year when the library would be packed with children. Anyone who works in libraries knows this, we prepare for it as we know that we will need extra staff to deal with the sheer numbers. It's absolutely unforgivable.

@Datun

BlueberryCheezecake

Ffs, Go after the people doing this, Instead of berating the women on here for commenting on it. I am told constantly that drag is an expression of male homosexuality, and you have drag queen story time Across the land in libraries, with men calling themselves bustin Cherry, and flow job.

If people are making connections, go figure.

Because it would appear that the local council is making the exact same connections. Otherwise why would they hire men with their plastic cocks hanging out?

This.

I can't believe not one member of staff at the library said anything. What were they thinking?!

I know this is wrong but I don't want to be called a bigot and I don't want doxing and surely someone else will report.

@Datun

It's almost like a completely different company was involved.

That's always a possibility. Especially if the two separate parts are so different from one another.

I think that, as with Drag Queen Story Time, an adult entertainment has been taken and adapted for children, badly.

Really I think children's entertainment should be left to professional children's entertainers, who presumably will be well versed in safeguarding and what is and isn't suitable for children.

ScreamingMeMe
Really I think children's entertainment should be left to professional children's entertainers, who presumably will be well versed in safeguarding and what is and isn't suitable for children.

Agree

I just want to add my agreement with pp here. I first saw this on another mn thread.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4294337-A-library-thought-it-appropriate-to-book-this-entertainment-for-children-and-I-feel-sick?msgid=109001790

I feel absolutely sick that this paedophilia type of grooming was permitted in the first place, deemed funny by the library staff, trivialised by some people.

This is a safeguarding issue. It’s not an artistic expression of telling a story to children. It is a sneaky and sly way of introducing sexual abuse. It is grooming.

Paedophiles are predators.

Following is a copy and paste from an educational website. I highlighted sexual material in bold because a dildo is sexual material and directly pertains to the actions of the person who wore it and jiggled it about and from some accounts encouraged children to touch it.

Examples of grooming behaviour may include:

openly or pretending to accidentally expose the victim to nudity, sexual material* and sexual acts (this in itself is classified as child sexual abuse but can also be a precursor to physical sexual assault)

How grooming happens
There are many different ways in which grooming can occur and it may even be parents, carers or other adults who supervise young people, who are targeted by this behaviour.
While the below information describes some of the ways in which grooming can happen, grooming will not always look like this. Offenders are deceptive and manipulative in the way they work, so it is important to draw on a range of information, such as the warning signs of sexual exploitation, if you have concerns.

www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/health/childprotection/Pages/expolitationgrooming.aspx

Yes. Children were being abused in a public library and the people in charge (a) commissioned it and (b) laughed
Now they think they can get away with "whoopsie, what a mistake". And they're probably right.

@NotBadConsidering

I actually take great offence at the idea that this is more offensive to Muslims or other religious groups than to atheists like me. Monkey costumes with plastic penises should be unacceptable in front of children throughout the country.

Absolutely. There should not be any conflation with wanting appropriate material for children and safeguarding with conservative religious views. Everyone should think it’s wrong.

I don’t buy the “it’s cultural” argument. The Danes had that cartoon about the man with the very long penis he can’t control. We are supposed to think “oh look at those quirky Danes, isn’t it great how liberal their attitudes are to men with penises bothering children” when we should be thinking the world has lost its mind.

I agree too, but as the person who mentioned the high percentage of Muslim residents in Redbridge, I was actually thinking about how very little effort had been made in commissioning this event to consider the potential audience of council taxpayers and their children and how likely an event of this nature was to succeed in drawing them into the library and coming back again and again over the summer.

Of course the sexually explicit costumes and performance were offensive to any sane person, and of course the children of atheists need safeguarding just like the children of religious people. But what I was thinking about here was more the fact that the Equality Act identifies nine protected characteristics and in equality and diversity training up and down the land most of them appear to be ignored, and the possible tensions between several protected characteristics are very rarely explored.

I don't think this was a Pride event (given it's no longer Pride month and it was explicitly designed to launch a summer reading challenge). But there's plenty of evidence here that these costumes have been used at Pride in the past, and the fact that they're rainbow-coloured suggests an LGBT link. It's not a naturalistic costume, after all, is it?

This will have done absolutely nothing to convince many socially conservative, deeply religious people that they and their children have nothing to fear from living in a secular, tolerant society with equal rights for LGB people. As others have said above and on many previous threads, it took decades of patient work for gay rights activists to break down the unthinking prejudice many people had that gay men had predatory intentions towards little boys and young teenagers (and some had similar fears about lesbians and girls).

Judging by some of the responses from the citizens of Redbridge and further afield to this furore, that link is still there in the minds of many. This sort of thing will lead directly to open homophobia and make the lives of LGB people that much harder. What a disaster.

I hope your thread stays in AIBU @Oceanbliss. Every parent needs to be aware of this, regardless of their opinions on feminism or gender identity.

As usual except for RT, the Sun and oddly enough a French news site no other press outlet has mentioned this. Why is the sexualisation of children being ignored?

Janice Turner took to Twitter to talk about this, so I live in hope that The Times won't ignore it.

@334bu

As usual except for RT, the Sun and oddly enough a French news site no other press outlet has mentioned this. Why is the sexualisation of children being ignored?

Football.

Good days to bury any news.

I've woken up thinking that we need to thank Mandinga Arts. Thanks to them, I anticipate a great wave of public indignation with Sun readers and the Daily Mail at the forefront, culminating in the end of drag queen story time and all these other totally unsuitable children's entertainers.

I notice that both here and on the other thread some people have commented about volunteers running libraries. While this is true in some cases, most volunteers are coordinated by library managers.
However, I was horrified to discover that volunteers in the library service I work in are not DBS checked. Also, they tend to take just anyone who applies. There have already been instances of volunteers sexually harassing staff and members of the public, and one case of theft. In my opinion this situation is a child safeguarding disaster waiting to happen.

@BlueberryCheezecake

Honestly, it's pretty clear at least some of you do just blame anything you don't like or disapprove of on the LGBT community, which honestly you want to take a good long hard look at yourselves and your prejudices

And the people who are actually transphobic and homophobic are going to do a lot worse than just a bit of blame. Pride, for years, have welcomed groups like this, Stonewall have stuck everyone under their umbrella, it is incredibly naive to think that the backlash won't be against the LGB community.

What the actual f##k am I seeing here? Someone thought this was appropriate for children?

Unfortunately they do associate themselves with the LGBT+ community and Pride, AfternoonToffee AWombofonesown has posted info.

I've been worried for some time, as I'm sure many others have, of the damage that kinksters and queer theorists will do to LGBT people. This is like a nightmare coming true