Small is beautiful?

Why exactly does Apple think that 12-year-olds need  a gay hook-up app?

When Distinc.tt was launched, CNET headlined with 'Apple approves "only gay social app for ages 12 and up"'.

Apple themselves, indeed, are hardly coy about what they're trying to do, describing it right up front on Distinc.tt's website as 'The first LGBT+ social network for people of all ages.'

And this, in case you were in any doubt, is against a lurid, multicoloured background of flashing under-age kiddie pics.

At the time, it must be said, this just seemed like a really, really bad publicity stunt. In practice though, it's gone largely un-remarked, and in future it will, presumably, be seen as quite normal for "gay" 12-year-olds who have been outed by their adoring parents to load up the app and get on with... whatever it is that Apple imagines gay 12-year-olds want to get up to.

In fact there had been consternation, amusement, alarm and resignation (seemingly on all sides) just three years earlier when a Swiss condom manufacturer announced that in future 12-year-old boys would be able to have their own brand of condoms. The Ceylor Hotshot apparently is a type of condom manufactured and marketed in Switzerland and specifically designed to fit the penis of a prepubescent child. Because, so the logic went, you can't get them started too young! If the little lads were doing it, they might as well be able to do it cleanly and without making themselves and/or their partners sick.

The big difference between Switzerland and England of course is that here it's still illegal for children under the age of sixteen to make love. In Switzerland it isn't, provided there isn't more than three years' difference between them.

But then what's the law got to do with it?

We've been told repeatedly that there is no "gay agenda". But it's genuinely difficult to see in what way shifting the social boundaries of what under-age sexual activities are or are not acceptable - and of course at the same time opening the good old Overton Window ever wider - can really be anything other than the gay lobby's much-vaunted "queering" of society.

It's already happening, and the vast majority of people neither know nor care.