Eight things you hadn't realised other people find offensive and upsetting

From Page 3 to Jeremy Clarkson, Victoria’s Secret to sausages, it seems everything offends somebody these days.

These easily-upset liberals now even have a name: offendotrons. You can bet that, right now, on a university campus somewhere, there’s a change.org petition being hatched about practically anything you can think of.

Here are eight of the most ludicrous yet trivial things that people have been getting upset about recently.

1. Clapping your hands

This week, Britain’s booming university mollycoddle culture soared to new and absurd heights when the NUS Women’s Conference asked delegates to stop clapping as it “triggered anxiety”. Bizarrely, top brass asked the audience to instead switch to “jazz hands”. As we processed the idea of future equalities ministers doing their best Al Jolson impersonations in a silent yet anxiety-free auditorium, social media asked the pertinent question: how will these people ever function in the real world?

2. The Athena tennis girl poster

The iconic erotic image that launched a generation of healthy fantasies has racked up 20 million sales since its 1979 release. Now the Everyday Sexism Project has, of course, declared it “sexist”. It all kicked off last week when the All England Tennis Club tweeted that "Tennis Girl" was to feature in a Powerful Posters display. Critics wanted it “eradicated from history” but Wimbledon refused, no doubt gloriously adding to ticket sales, proving that protest is the best marketing device going.

Minecraft: violent (Photo:

^Alamy)

3. Minecraft

Proving if nothing else that PC madness isn’t unique to our shores, earlier this month the Turkish Family and Social Policies Ministry tabled a banning order on kids’ computer game Minecraft claiming it was “based on violence”. Ignoring the fact that it probably stops millions of teens watching online porn, the Turks added that the multiplayer mode of the best-selling PC game of all time, sold to Microsoft for $1.5 billion last year, could lead to online bullying. Creators Mojang said: “The world of Minecraft can be a dangerous place: it's inhabited by scary, genderless monsters that come out at night.” Clearly, this needs to be outlawed, then.

4. Using the word 'old'

In February, Ros Altmann, the Government’s Older Worker’s Champion, declared war on “ageist stereotypes” including the words and phrases "old", "elderly", "frail", "past it", "over the hill" and "decrepit". “Even words such as mature, senior or pensioner are terms that diminish the perceived value of older adults,” she said, adding, “these ageist terms should be as unacceptable as racist or sexis ones.” Her inoffensive alternative, “older adults,” is thought to have caught on in approximately one British household – Ms Altmann’s.

Dippy: climate-change

^denier

5. Dippy the Dinosaur

When it was announced in January that Dippy, a model of a 66-million-year-old diplodocus, was finally to be retired from the Natural History Museum, the dearly-beloved dinosaur sparked a #savedippy protest that became strangely malicious. Dippy’s replacement - a blue whale - was chosen as a “reminder of our immense environmental responsibility,” yet when some people pointed out they just preferred dinosaurs, they were labelled “climate-change deniers”. That gave us the tortuous, modern logic that if you prefer dinosaurs to whales, you’re basically responsible for global warming – even though an Ice Age killed Dippy and her brethren stone dead.

6. Smiling at women

Earlier this month a study by Northeastern University, Boston, appeared to conclude that men who smile at women and behave in a warm, friendly, chivalrous manner are guilty of “benevolent sexism” that was, in its own weird way, as harmful as shouting abuse at a woman. After watching 54 students play a trivia game, they concluded that benevolent sexism is "one of the driving forces behind gender inequality in our society" even though it is “harder to spot” than, say, a sozzled male student mooning at a female-only gym session.

7. Using the word 'girl'

From ‘coloured’ to ‘terrorist’, the spoken word is a minefield these days. But the BBC surpassed itself in May last year after cutting the word ‘girl’ from a documentary about the Commonwealth Games, fearing it might cause offence. Broadcaster Mark Beaumont, 31, quipped after being thrown by female judo champion Cynthia Rahming: “I am not sure I can live that down – being beaten by a 19-year-old girl.” The “sexist” word was pulled even though Ms Rahming said: “I wasn’t offended – I didn’t find it sexist”.

8. Breakfast cereals

You’d probably answer “no” to an incredulous 2013 Jezebel article “Ever Noticed There Aren’t Any Female Breakfast Cereal Mascots?” In it, male writer Doug Barry trills against the “patriarchal injustice” of cereals and their “conspicuous exclusion” of females, apart from on Kellogg’s Disney Princesses. Proving no male oppressor is safe, Barry lambasts “the homoerotic trio of rice-puffing elves, Snap, Crackle and Pop”. Seriously, this actually exists.