In the past few days you’ve probably seen a couple headlines about how Margaret Thatcher didn’t want to run an AIDS awareness campaign in the 1980s and how she’s getting a lot of shit about it.

Like me, you probably didn’t bother clicking on it (because boring) but it turns out the reason that she was against running it was because she was scared of anal sex. Although she definitely looks like she would at least contemplate it in the picture above.

Basically, the AIDS epidemic was in full swing in 1986 and the health secretary Norman Fowler proposed taking out full page national newspaper ads to raise awareness about the dangers of it. One of the key components of this was a sentence stating that unprotected anal intercourse carried the highest chance of infection.

Margaret Thatcher was against this as she didn’t want to acknowledge the existence of anal sex because she felt that it would corrupt public morals. Oh come on pull the other one, people had already been doing it for centuries! She was also concerned it may breach the Advertising Code and the Obscenities Act.

Anyway, here’s what she had to say:

Featured Image VIA

Image VIA 

Do we have to have the section on risky sex? I should have thought it could do immense harm if young teenagers were to read it?

Adverts where every young person will read and learn of practices they never knew about will do harm.

Fowler replied stating the following:

Unless there is a reference to anal intercourse, which has been linked with 85 per cent of Aids cases so far, the advertisement would lose all its medical authority and credibility.

The two continued to butt heads (lol) over the issue, until Fowler eventually conceded to replacing a large section about anal sex into a single sentence. There was a widespread awareness campaign at the time that included television adverts, door to door pamphlets and a week of educational pamphlets, but still it can be argued that more was needed and including the information about anal sex in the newspapers probably would have helped as at the time everyone believed it to be true.

Just another reason why Thatcher fucked the kids. Remember when One Direction fans couldn’t even figure out who she was?