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`YOB', once a slang insult, is now a descriptive category used by tabloid and quality newspapers alike. Incorporating other breeds, like the lager louts, football hooligans and joyriders, yob is a species of young, white, working-class male which, if the British media is to be believed, is more common than ever before. The yob is foul-mouthed, irresponsible, probably unemployed and violent. The yob hangs around council estates where he terrorises the local inhabitants, possibly in the company of his pit-bull terrier. He fathers children rather than cares for them. He is often drunk, probably uses drugs and is likely to be involved in crime, including domestic violence. He is the ultimate expression of macho values: mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
The yob is the bogey of the Nineties, hated and feared with a startling intensity by the British middle class. Janet Daley, in her Times column, describes such men as `drunken Neanderthals', while Jeremy Kingston, also in the Times, reckons they are `crapulous louts'. Simon Heffer of the Telegraph claims, like Peter Lilley, that not even women of their own social class can tolerate such ghastly specimens: `Nobody wants to marry a yob because he is boorish, lazy and unemployable.' The language in which such young men are described - louts, scum, beasts - can be heard across the political spectrum. It appears in an extreme form in Sun editorials and in a modifed version in sombre discussions of youth crime, as well as in some feminist writings on contemporary masculinity. Individual men disappear in this language into a faceless mob, or appear only as thuggish stereotypes.
The scorn heaped on the heads of pit-bull owners at the height of the dangerous dog scare of 1991 is a case in point. Even quality papers carried sneering interviews with men who called their dogs Kosh or Tyson and `who are usually between 18 and 25, with short hair and tattoos, dressed in shell suits and trainers'. This insistent view of the `yob' as morally delinquent - idle, criminal, unemployable, and (a very Nineties inflexion, this) unmarriageable - would cause outcry if used to refer to race or women. But it has achieved such a consensus that it is now difficult to ask even such...