Filth

If there’s one thing that will get the average British tabloid journalist excited it’s the smell of a sex scandal. Sex sells newspapers and magazines. It provides the fodder for documentaries in late night slots on channel 4 filled with lurid accounts about alleged transgressors from people who either vaguely knew them or have an axe to grind.

Sex, or to be more accurate any story about alleged sexual impropriety, is good for the media.

So why do they choose to pretend otherwise? There seems to be a cut-off point. You can be cheeky but not smutty, teasing but not explicit … unless it’s “in the public interest” to do so when reporting on the “sordid” “truth” about a particular news item.

Don’t worry this is just a general rant about the laziness inherent in any media channel which acts with indignation when anyone, particularly a public figure, is found to have sexual tastes outside the vanilla. It also applies to people who deliberately manipulate the media for its own commercial ends. However as always although I find it a bit sad and very annoying when the fish and the sharks get together for their own mutual advancement I know it wouldn’t happen if there wasn’t an audience out there for this kind of thing.

Imagine the scene. It’s Sunday and the scandal rags are out. The BBC’s newsreaders are discussing Sunday’s salacious stories earnestly and with some relish as this is the only day they can get away with dwelling on the sexual (these days you can’t even say “arse” on the BBC without the presenter quickly making a simpering apology).

The family is reading and watching the stories unfold, making the appropriate disapproving noises. Then at some point they go their separate ways and are alone with their thoughts, she goes off to cook Sunday lunch and dreams of the elicit affair with the hunky sports star just featured on the box as having a voracious sexual appetite. He sits, apparently reading the details of the disgraceful story while actually studying the lines of the “harlot’s” breasts through her almost transparent top and wondering what it would be like to cum all over them.

Let’s all be honest. The need to read about this sort of thing and the volume of righteous indignation is proportional to the unhappiness with your own sex life? OK so where a partner has been cheated on and a family has been split up there is some room for tutting and finger wagging but how often do these stories involve single people (celebs) just doing what they enjoy, more often than most of us do, with better looking people and at more expensive venues?

Hypocrisy, jealousy?