Woman gets tits out: Seen by some! This should be the headline for the latest boring Australian ‘scandal’. A photo of a topless woman wearing a Richmond football club premiership medal was circulated among some members of the team. Circulating a photo of someone else undressed without their permission is of course wrong, but is it really a scandal worthy of a weeks worth of opinion pieces in the national newspapers? Are we so desperate for something to be outraged over these days? Or is it just the failing media companies looking to justify their existence with endless chatter chatter chatter?
The Australian media is committed to being as vapid as possible. Our ‘scandals’ come in only four varieties:
- Radio host says something vaguely offensive on air
- Shock elimination from The Bachelor/Bachelorette
- Australian arrested overseas for doing something stupid/drugs
- Football player does something stupid/drugs
(Occasionally a beloved children’s entertainer will be found guilty of a decades-long systematic campaign of child rape, but I’ll leave that as it really just throws off the curve graph.)
Britain gets things like three footballers filmed getting their arseholes eaten out in a Thai brothel (real scandal by the way – the video is kind of hot). The US has pick anything Trump says/does. We have the winner of the 1999 series of Popstars picking a ‘husband’ from a line-up of probably-steroided, definitely-gay models.
It is somewhat unfortunate, for the sake of tabloid journalism, that this ‘scandal’ occurred at the same time as the news of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct broke. With the treatment of women in the media under the spotlight, the newspapers were forced to bring out the feminist red-bob-brigade to critically analyse women’s rights, rather than trawl through the woman’s life and breathlessly report every sordid detail they could find. Like they did with Cocaine Cassie, the Australian arrested in Colombia for drug trafficking. The Richmond woman remains anonymous, her photo censored, unlike Cassie, who had that photo of her boobs taken from her Craiglist ad and splashed across every front page in the country (I kept count) and every person connected to her chased by journalists. Who could forget the riveting interview with the man who owned the fish and chip shop next to the brothel she once worked at! It was awful, but entertaining.
There’s a Damned Whores/Gods Police feminist essay in there in regards to the different treatment of the two women, but I’ll let the Fairfax columnists have that one to fill up their word count. I don’t care anyway. Call me when a rugby gangbang video leaks that shows at least three shafts.