Polish Playground Bans Pooh Because 'It Doesn't Wear Underpants!'

Winnie the Pooh may seem like a lovable fictional bear, but a Polish town has sen through his headful of bees and innocent love for honey and labeled him as what he really is: A hermaphrodite that sends the wrong message because he doesn’t wear pants.

Before we get into the actual statement, I want to point out that by wearing a shirt, Winnie the Pooh is already doing more than most animals. Outside of a put-upon household pet (I bought my guinea pigs princess costumes) or an abused circus attraction, most animals wander about in the wild in nothing but their fur, their genitals splayed out for the world to see. Bears, especially, are not only known not to wear clothes, but are also rumored to shit in the woods. Winnie is pretty much a goddamn saint for covering up whatever he has under there.

Not so, say members of the council of a polish town. Winnie the Pooh, you see, is a sexual deviant!

From The Telegraph:

“The problem with that bear is it doesn’t have a complete wardrobe,” said Ryszard Cichy during the discussion.

“It is half naked which is wholly inappropriate for children. [Poland’s fictional bear] is dressed from head to toe, unlike Pooh who is only dressed from the waist up.”

One unnamed councillor can be heard discussing Pooh’s sexuality, arguing that “it doesn’t wear underpants because it doesn’t have a sex” before another, Hanna Jachimska starts criticising Winnie the Pooh author AA Milne.

But wait, there’s more:

“This is very disturbing but can you imagine! The author was over 60 and cut [Pooh’s] testicles off with a razor blade because he had a problem with his identity,” she said.

Wait, so would it be okay if Pooh had genitals? I mean, this is a story about a bear and his animal friends and their one human friend and a dysthymic donkey. At no point in the Pooh stories that I’ve read have Pooh’s genitals, lack thereof or how they were removed been a point of discussion. I do not remember asking my grandmother about them, and had I seen a picture of Pooh at the playground I would have cared very little that he was wearing a shirt and no pants (which, by the way, is my favorite outfit as an adult.)

The council is looking for another character for the playground. I would suggest Paddington Bear, but who knows what he’s hiding underneath that coat? (I wish I knew where in Poland this was, but The Telegraph has declined to state and The Croatian Times did not elaborate.)