Paper Monitor
12:48 UK time, Friday, 3 February 2012
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Paper Monitor enjoys a pint as much as the next person and enjoyed the brouhaha in this morning's papers over a guest ale that was removed from a parliamentary bar in the House of Commons.
The beer in question is called Top Totty and features a pump plate featuring a half-naked lady wearing bunny ears. Now brewers are famed for having a laugh when it comes to beer-naming - Big Horn Buttface Amber Ale comes to mind.
To many, it's a bit of puerile school-boy fun. The thought of this nation's MPs asking for Top Totty all evening might raise a snigger in some quarters. But for Shadow equalities minister Kate Green, it was too much. An hour-and-a-half after complaining, the beer was removed.
Some people think she's simply had a sense of humour failure - but others have supported her view that this was demeaning to women.
Jemima Lewis, writing in the Daily Telegraph .
This is seen in some quarters as an example of political correctness gone kerr-azy. But what ought to trouble us more, surely, is that a smallish, family-run Staffordshire brewery should think it reasonable to use such porn-lite branding. Images of naked women are now such a ubiquitous part of mainstream culture that we hardly question them anymore. It's only when they pop up somewhere unexpected, like a dusty parliamentary bar, that their casual vulgarity gets noticed.
The Daily Express , however, is in the political correctness gone mad camp. Under the headline, Let's Drink to Top Totty, a comment writer opines:
That a Labour MP should call for and achieve the banning of Top Totty blonde beer from a Commons bar shows how crazily far the cult of political corerctness has travelled. But Kate Green should not think she has disadvantaged the Stafford brewers of this ale in any way. For beer drinkers everywhere will have just one question in mind: I wonder what it tastes like?
Now Paper Monitor recalls a sojourn in Canada, and a brown ale called Moose Drool. Nope, no matter how many times it heard the name, it simply wasn't tempted.
The 
