A young woman is driven to run like a maddened deer back and forth across the Autobahn until she gets hit by a car. The men who stand on both sides of the road, screaming she is not welcome and driving her back out, all believe they are preserving their family honour.

Propriety.

A schizophrenic, homeless man is hounded off the curb by local police. Ending up at a downscale construction site, he falls asleep in a dumpster and gets crushed to death when a worker drops thirty solid kilos of waste concrete from three floors up, down onto the tabloid-covered body.

Propriety.

In a conservative, upper-class home, a teenager is found lying lifeless in a pool of vomit. On the night-stand, spilled five-star cognac has half-dissolved a scattering of pills and rendered the ink on a furiously scribbled note illegible, forever erasing the unbearable shame and self-revulsion of repressed homosexuality.

Propriety.

After being impregnated during a rape, a woman has an abortion in a back-alley clinic to hide the fact from her husband and her family. Two weeks later, having endured extreme pain, she dies from sepsis due to her uterus being infected.

Propriety.

I will guarantee you, within a year from now, all these events or events analogous to them will have come to pass at least once.

The pursuit of propriety is to blame for genital mutilation, the hiding of murder, child abuse, even the spread of disease by hiding infection; the worst personal atrocities imaginable, all done in the name of this disgusting idea - that some things just aren’t proper, not “right” or supposedly “natural” - not fit for a human being. The irony would be funny if it wasn’t so utterly covered in blood, gore and agony.

This is not to invoke pity. It’s not to gloat over the brutality of human relations.

This is to make one single fact abundantly clear.

Propriety kills.