A few years ago I returned from my annual January holidays disgusted by the willingness of young women to despoil the female form by baring their pudding bellies, and last year, you may recall, I returned to tell you about the explosion in tattooed low life in Taree, Kempsey and Coffs Harbour. This year on my return I report to you a new low, the sporting by male amputees of metal legs that make absolutely no attempt to present themselves as a proper leg. It is very likely that you too have been confronted by one of the contraptions of stainless steel rods, springs and levers. Most don't even have a shoe on the end, using instead what appears to be a mini ski.
It wouldn't matter, of course, if they wore jeans or trousers, because once it's out of sight an amputee's choice of prosthesis is none of our business. But putting that choice in sight makes it our business, given its impact on those in the immediate vicinity. Clearly the manufacturers of this pushrod leg, as I describe it in my column today, never intended it to be worn with shorts.
Women amputees, thank goodness, are persisting with the painstakingly shaped and coloured plastic legs that give the illusion of a properly complete body, obviously a concession to the critical importance of legs to the female form.
You know, occasionally we're caught off guard by one leg of shorts or a pinned-up trouser leg flapping eerily empty as a fellow leaps along on crutches, but to present a metal contraption growing out of a human body is brutal. At best it is inconsideration.
Bring back the expertly shaped and coloured plastic leg!
This brutality or inconsideration is becoming a central theme in a great many people's social statement - think tattoos, piercings, female pudding bellies, foul language. Where will it end? What next? And should amputees be required to wear body-mimicking prostheses?
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