Series: Video of the Week

This should probably be the bit where I make clear that the Video of the Week series isn't always necessarily going to be promoting a video that I wish to celebrate. Last week it was; this week it is not. This week's video is, nevertheless, still important.

The video below is taken from Russell Howard's hit TV show Good News. Throughout the week, Russell scours newspapers and the internet for interesting - and moreso funny - news stories. In this particular episode, he presents us with a story in the Canadian press about men with ginger hair being turned down for sperm donation. That is, they're being told that their sperm is no good because no one wants a ginger baby. And if the news story wasn't bad enough, then the moment when the studio audience's audible collective gasp is followed by a round of applause is, quite frankly, disgusting. They know it's bad and discriminatory, and yet they still applaud it.

This video is wrong on so many levels that I find it hard to know where to begin, but I may as well start with the actual news report itself.

The second we start to label certain characteristics as "unattractive" or "undesirable", we run the risk of discrimination. Sperm donation already discriminates against disabled people and those with other health problems, and of course I understand why it does, but it is incredibly presumptious to say that what is "undesirable" for one person should be "undesirable" for everyone else. The second you start to pick-and-choose who is allowed to spread their seed and who isn't, is the second you fall into very dangerous territory. Where sperm donation is used by women who can't find or don't want a partner, or by women whose partner is infertile, or for whatever reason they may have, what you are ultimately doing is attempting to weedle out one type of gene. The decision for whose sperm winds up in her body should belong entirely to the woman, and not an institution which "doesn't like" people with ginger hair.

What shocked me more than anything about this video is the audience's response to it. I thought that we British prided ourselves on our liberal attitudes, for our social inclusiveness (or most of us do, anyway) - so how can an entire audience of Russell Howard fans sit in a room and cheer for discrimination against ginger-haired people? And more than anything, how can there be no backlash, besides Russell saying, "Don't applaud!" before making a gag about ginger-haired people being pale-skinned? I'm a big Russell Howard fan and I even went to one of his shows last year, but I really don't know what he was doing here.

Ultimately, people need to stop looking at having ginger hair as a being negative thing - and that includes people with ginger hair. Nothing says "I'm ashamed of my roots!" (excuse the cheesy pun) more than someone with jet black hair, orange skin and ginger eyebrows. Take Nicola Roberts (former member of Girls Aloud), for example: here's someone who dyed their hair all kinds of shades of WTF and coated their skin in gallons of fake tan before finally deciding to embrace their ginger gene - and doesn't she look all the more better for it! But while that responsibility lies with them, the biggest responsibility falls on the shoulders of the rest of us: stop making ginger jokes, and stop pretending that it's acceptable. Because it's just not.