This story is worth a smile, and a moment of Steynian (Steynoid?) reflection.
Spain’s fertility stats are in the tank (ranked 206 out of 222 here), so the government has swung into action—or what passes for action with governments—by bringing in a scheme to reward women who have babies. That’s the kind of thing that no cartoonist can resist. However, one cartoonist and his editor went too far for the Spanish authorities:
Their offence was to have published a cartoon last July making ribald fun of the heir to the Spanish throne, and of the government’s scheme to encourage women to have more babies by giving mothers a special payment for each new birth.
It was a caricature of Prince Filipe having sex with his wife, Princess Letizia, and telling her: “Do you realise that if you get pregnant, it will be the closest thing to work I’ve done in my life?”
My advice to Sean Delonas would be to stay away from Spain.
And incidentally, when did “having sex” become the standard colloquial expression for coitus? Does anyone else dislike it as much as I do? It makes it sound like an operation—like having a haircut or having root canal. English really isn’t very good in this zone. We used to have “intercourse,” but that was a bit ambiguous, as it clashed with not-much-older usages of the word. (Like the famous remark about poet Sir Francis Doyle in the Dictionary of National Biography that at Oxford University “his intercourse with Gladstone became very intimate.”) Then there was “making love,” but that too overlapped with more innocent earlier usages. I think “having sex” is less satisfactory than either of those, though. I wonder how we got stuck with it.