LETTER OF THE DAY - Doesn't Lisa Hanna know being sexy is a crime?
THE EDITOR, Sir:The social-media vagabonds are now clamouring to put a stop to Minister of Youth and Culture Lisa Hanna and the happy-go-lucky life she sometimes illustrates on Instagram.
A subset of the intellectual minority is champing at the bit to remind her of the numbers on her age paper. Apparently, they also believe she should tour the coastal parts of her constituency in a business suit and heels.
In the past, I have chided Ms Hanna and a few of her contemporaries for what I found to be unfortunate missteps in social-media exposure. Thankfully, they seem to have now got a better understanding of how to navigate this new and treacherous landscape without making too much noise.
The moment the youth minister shared a photograph of her best impersonation of Sintra Arunte-Bronte in that iconic 1970s Jamaica Tourist Board advertisement, she set off a firestorm of controversy among the faux modest and the sexually repressed.
Need I remind the few among them actually registered to vote that this is what happens when you elect women to leadership? Sometimes the species takes its alternative form and images like the ones Ms Hanna loves to share become prolific.
This could be remedied if we simply made burqas mandatory outerwear for females in public places. This might seem drastic, but it is perhaps the only way to stop hips and thighs from invading our imaginations. Women, give them an inch and they take it all off.
Some members of the Twitterati, notably those from the Belmont Road area, wish that Ms Hanna would pack her Gucci bags and go, taking her toned abdominals, gorgeous face, perfectly coiffed tresses, and stunning smile with her!
ULTIMATE SIN
For she has committed the ultimate sin: outdressing most women and being alluring to most men.
Would that the social-media vagabonds go back to the simpler days of fixating on Internet pornography instead of trying to influence the carriage and trappings of persons seeking to grow in leadership. Thankfully, the former type of online mischief will only make a mess of their own immediate surroundings and not spread to the general society.
I wish to live in an alternative universe where I can avoid engaging with vapid newspaper headlines asking if it's appropriate for the minister of youth to wear a bathing suit to the beach and share a picture of the outfit on social media, much like young people all over the world already do daily.
That universe should rightfully be the present reality, but apparently many of us are stuck in a time warp from a bygone era.
BRIAN-PAUL WELSH