THE media has been pretending that the burkini ban on France’s beaches is about the war on terror. It isn’t, and it isn’t about Muslim women either, or women in general. Men are just as much the victims in a campaign that is obviously about sand. The last time I visited France, I was forced to wear a Speedo. In a room at a swimming pool on the Loire River I was forced to take off my boardshorts and choose from a range of abandoned Speedos and shorts. Since I have never had a six pack and was close to 60 years old, I opted for a pair of shorts, which did not have string to tie the waist. A friendly pool employee removed the string from his own shorts and spent 10 minutes threading them through my borrowed pair. I had been looking forward to wearing my boardshorts, which I had bought at a village market along with tripe sausages, Cathedral tomatoes and quail eggs. They had flowery Matisse-like patterns, and brought out my inner hippie, suppressed since the 1970s. But the French had lo...
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