Rest well, Caroline

As ever, whenever a celebrity dies, especially when they die young, suddenly and tragically, the internet comes alive with the inevitable public grief, hand-wringing, assumptions from people who claim they knew exactly what happened in that unfortunate person's final sad weeks, days and hours, and there is a rush to apportion blame. 

But with the news only breaking last night about the suicide of Caroline Flack, we only have certain facts available. We know she took her own life, we know she was due to face trial for the assault of her boyfriend, Lewis Burton, we know the CPS alleges that she hit him with a lamp while he was asleep, we know he didn't want to press charges, we know that she pleaded not guilty, we know that a condition of her bail was that she was not to contact her boyfriend. 

And there is plenty we do not know. 

We do not yet know what the post-mortem or inquest will reveal. And there are things we will never know, such as whether this story may have had a happier outcome if she was allowed to see her boyfriend before the trial, or indeed what the outcome of the trial would have been. We won't know of a not-guilty verdict or find out how she could rebuild her life after an acquittal - or what would follow for her and Burton in the event of a guilty verdict. 

The only thing we can be sure of is that if she was found guilty, she'd become the anti-poster-child for the "See? Women can be abusers too!" brigade. That brigade had already come out of the woodwork, shitting on the whole concept of presumption of innocence. Nobody is saying that women cannot be the perpetrators of domestic violence - of course they can - but everyone accused of this dreadful crime has the right to a fair trial. 

This brigade of (mostly) angry men was emboldened by pictures published by The Sun of a bloodstained bed at Flack's flat, pictures which, horrifically, were still on the newspaper's website at the time of writing. The publication of the bloodied bed was, at best, in poor taste and, at worst, not in the public interest, particularly before her trial had taken place.

There is a rush to blanket-blame "the media" for Flack's death - and she has long been an object of tabloid obsession, particularly after she dated a 17-year-old Harry Styles when she was 31. No age of consent laws were broken, but eyebrows were raised when Styles was photographed leaving her flat. It didn't take long for her to be pigeonholed as a "cougar", a sexually aggressive and adventurous seducer of younger men, a woman who is seen as a threat to the ideal of a demure, compliant woman. 

She became an easy target for hate and it wasn't restricted to the usual tabloid suspects. Everyone with a Twitter account and a misguided sense of moral righteousness could pile in. 

And the public lapped it up. If there wasn't a market for these sort of salacious stories, they wouldn't be written or broadcast in the first place. We feed the beast when we click on the links. Entertainment journalists are often quick to defend their profession, to point out that it's not an easy job (it's not) and they are obliged to constantly seek out the stories that will get the clicks and the sales (also true). But it is unfortunate that in the quest to keep eyeballs on screens and papers, fingers furtively scrolling or turning pages, that not only does accuracy often fall by the wayside, but public interest tests fall short and there is little time to pause and contemplate if a story is kind or even necessary.

Advocating the end of entertainment journalism or holding "the mainstream media" solely responsible for Flack's death is reductive and simplistic, ignoring the role of social media in this complicated story, especially as that was the only way Burton was able to communicate with Flack since December. However, it shouldn't preclude entertainment journalists from pausing to think about how they cover stories, especially those involving celebrities who may be vulnerable, may have mental health issues, may be struggling with addiction, or may simply be going through a tough time, as can happen to any one of us. 

The guidelines for reporting on suicide, issued by the Samaritans, are an excellent resource - it is not a restriction on press freedom to report responsibly.

Ultimately, gossip is part of human nature. That's never going to change. We devour gossip about our friends as readily as we devour celebrity gossip. Hell, I have an episode of The Bachelor burbling mindlessly away in the background as I write this and I just rolled my eyes as a doe-eyed blonde used her one-on-one time with the prized Colton, the hot, virgin bachelor, to call her mother for the first time since her release from prison. I'm not going to pretend I'm immune to taking a pervy interest in the lives of beautiful people I'll never meet. Of course, with every celebrity death, there's always one sneering blowhard who feels the need to comment "Who?" under a tweet or Facebook post, as if not knowing about a figure in popular culture is some form of moral superiority. 

But the truth is that none of us are superior. We're all flawed and farty and prone to awkwardness, even those who, on the surface, appear to have everything under control. And any one of us could end up in as dark a place as Flack found herself in her lonely final hours. May we all pause to be kind to each other and to ourselves.

Photography by Alex Borland.

In defence of Miley Cyrus

If I was Miley Cyrus' mother, I'd be proud of how my daughter turned out. Of course, this would also mean that I had sex with Billy Ray Cyrus in 1992, which my 16-year-old self would find hilarious, but I digress.

Miley has turned out well.

The criticism levelled at her is usually sexist or prudish or both. As far as her detractors are concerned, she commits the heinous crimes of dancing in possession of an arse and having the temerity to wear clothes that are too short or too tight or too midriff-baring. Her Christmas appearance on The Tonight Show, in which she sang a feminist re-working of Santa Baby, predictably outraged anyone who thinks women are taking over all the men's things for the purposes of establishing an evil gynaecocracy - or anyone who is permanently outraged about even the slightest display of female flesh.

Good on Miley for speaking up for all women with a smart song that deservedly went viral - equal pay for equal work, not being sexually harassed at work, not having to put up with men sending unsolicited dick pics, being financially able to take care of yourself without relying on a man - these are issues that resonate with women everywhere.

Of course, her path to becoming an intelligent 26-year-old woman with a grown-up career was not a seamless transition from her child star days. When she was twerking at Robin Thicke to the frankly repulsive, if annoyingly catchy, song Blurred Lines at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards,  it was not a career highlight. But it was nearly six years ago and since then, she has spoken out about how she felt conflicted by it all - on one hand, she wanted to make a statement about female sexual freedom but on the other hand, she says that overtly sexualised dance moves were expected of her and it seems that she was not entirely comfortable with it at the time.

Twerking in front of a creepy man in a crap suit and a global audience of millions is a specific situation that not every 20-year-old experiences, but it is hardly rare for a 20-year-old woman to do something sexual that she later looks back on with regret or makes her wish she exercised more agency at the time. It's just that when most of us are being ridiculous 20-year-olds, our collective ridiculousness does not end up on front pages or become a subject for national debate.

I am glad that when I was 20, I had the freedom to figure out who the hell I was and the worst consequence was risking becoming the topic of small-town gossip in rural Australia - although the damage that can be done to people's lives when someone becomes the subject of gossip cannot be underestimated. That is not something unique to this online era but the risk of going viral certainly magnifies things.

Miley Cyrus has moved on, grown up and ultimately made a good transition from child star to adulthood. She shot to fame as Hannah Montana in the eponymous TV show in which she played a girl with a double life - high school student by day and pop star by night - it was fun, it was cute and Hannah's character was funny, smart and, even with the pop career, still relatable. Having the excellent Dolly Parton as a godmother can't have hurt her development either - indeed, Miley's cover of her godmother's hit, "Jolene" is absolutely gorgeous. She has a great set of pipes and real talent should always be encouraged in this world of mediocrity.

The fact that Miley Cyrus has come out the other end of the child star sausage factory sane, stable, alive and not plagued by any number of awful problems that have either killed former child stars prematurely or led them into a lost adulthood, particularly if the cuteness is replaced by ordinariness post-puberty, should be celebrated.

I would much rather those who slag off Miley Cyrus, especially those who claim to be feminists, reserved their ire for genuine oppressors of women. In 2019, there are still plenty of things to be angry about and none of them involve cutting down a talented young woman.






Photography by Ted Eytan/Flickr

Kim Kardashian bound and robbed at gunpoint. The hilarity.

It is one thing to be nonplussed by the story this week that reality TV star Kim Kardashian was bound and robbed at gunpoint in Paris. But it is quite another to be openly gleeful about this turn of events and to publicly express one's joy at a wife and mother of two young children becoming the victim of violent crime.

"But she was asking for it, tweeting all those photos of her jewellery, flashing her wealth around like that..."

People who wouldn't dream of blaming rape victims for their own rape have blamed Kim Kardashian for her own robbery. But the most she is guilty of is bad taste and ostentation when she tweets another fabulous gemstone. You may find this obscene when there are people starving, but it's not justification for violent crime. Hell, people who wouldn't know one end of Twitter from the other get robbed of their valuables. Quiet people get robbed. Discreet people get robbed. Anyone who an opportunistic thief might suspect as having stuff they want can get robbed.

Jodi Foster, for example, would probably sooner drive a clown car to Mars than tweet a picture of her jewellery but it is well-known that she is a wealthy woman. Yet if she was bound and robbed at gunpoint, she would probably elicit more sympathy than a Kardashian.

My husband has expressed concern for me when I wear my engagement ring on public transport. The ring is not necessarily worth much financially but sentimentally, it is priceless. It is my grandmother's ruby and it is not a subtle ring. If some lunatic cut my ruby-clad ring finger off or made me hand it over at gunpoint while I was minding my own business on the tube, people would probably have plenty of sympathy for me. I've tweeted pictures of this ring. I wear it in public most days. Would I too be asking for it?

"She is just another useless reality TV star. Who cares?"

Welcome to fame in the modern world. This is a world where high school students view "reality TV star" or "YouTube sensation" as valid career choices. We have fed the beast by watching the TV shows, clicking on the YouTube link, reading about these people in newspapers and magazines and online, talking about them as if we know them personally. We have created the public interest for this sort of thing.

"But people get robbed all the time and it isn't front page news!"

Do you even understand how the media works? Stories that are considered to be of interest to the readers, viewers and listeners will get airplay. See the above point for why Kim Kardashian's robbery is more newsworthy than the bloke down the pub who had his mower nicked from the garden shed.

There are limits to how many stories any given news outlet can cover and it is up to news editors worldwide to make judgement calls on what will be published or broadcast, what gets priority, what the balance of subjects will be on any given day. Naturally people get upset if their pet cause doesn't get the attention they think it deserves but these people don't work as news editors and have no idea what the job entails or the competing pressures that are involved.

And the onus is also on everyone else, the consumers, to choose what media outlets we go to for our information. Don't want to read about Kim Kardashian? There are plenty of places to go where you will never see a Kardashian story. And guess what? Thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can usually share stories you deem more worthwhile really easily.

Take some responsibility for your choices rather than passively whining about "the mainstream media".

And the Kim Kardashian robbery is newsworthy, especially if you live in Paris. If I lived in Paris, I might want to know that there is a gang of audaciously violent thieves out there.

Yes, there are people out there suffering more than Kim Kardashian probably ever will. But the outpouring of joy over an incident that could have ended in her death is gross. It has degenerated into people publicly wishing she was raped or murdered. Where the hell is our basic humanity?

Sometimes I wonder if we have evolved that much from the days of throwing Christians to the lions for entertainment.


Photography by George Hodan

The hypocrisy of the royal paparazzi outrage

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have done the very British equivalent of hanging their heads out the window and yelling at the top of their lungs: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!". They wrote a strongly worded letter.

Essentially, it was a plea to paparazzi photographers for the same sort of privacy non-royal parents enjoy. It was a call for control over what photographs of their kids are shared widely. Just as it is up to parents to decide what pictures of their little darlings end up on Facebook, on mantelpieces and on naff Christmas cards, William and Kate would only like official photographs and photographs taken at official photo calls to be published.

Of course, if they truly want to raise their kids in a normal environment, a republic would solve that problem. They could live as private citizens and get jobs and everything. Yes, I know Prince William works as a part-time air ambulance pilot and donates his salary to charity, but he can afford to have the luxury of such altruistic principles. He could always give up the tax-free money his dad gives him from the Duchy of Cornwall and pay tax like the rest of us.

But to suggest a British republic is still, for many, as absurd as suggesting we all wear shoes made of tofu and hats made of argon. So that leaves us with the letter from the here-to-stay-for-now Duke and Duchess, which was dutifully published in full across multiple newspapers, including the Daily Mail.

It was nice of the Mail to do this, accompanied by official pictures of Prince George and Princess Charlotte. No seedy pap pics taken from the boots of cars. But on the Mail's website, right alongside this reverential reprinting of the letter were paparazzi pics of Brooklyn Beckham, aged 16. And this was just days after the non-story of four-year-old Harper Beckham photographed sucking on a dummy was considered front page-worthy.

A quick click on the Mail's homepage as I write this reveals, along with the usual papped shots of grown-ass adult celebrities, the following kiddie-based crap in the sidebar of shame: the Beckham kids again (this time, Romeo, Cruz and Harper but no Brooklyn, who was clearly too cool to attend his baby's sister's recital), a video filmed from across the street of David Beckham and all four of his kids performing the fascinating act of getting into the car, Kylie Jenner's boyfriend's two-year-old son, 17-year-old Elle Fanning trying to eat a frozen yoghurt in peace, Reese Witherspoon and her sons, aged 12 and two, Kourtney Kardashian and her kids, aged five, three and 18 months, and Kim Kardashian and her two-year-old daughter, North West.

They were all paparazzi shots. None of them were pictures the celebrity parents volunteered to the world's media. They are dull pictures of famous people and their kids going about their business, doing the same boring things the rest of us do. How come in Daily Fail-Land, papped shots of underage celebrities and underage celebrity kids are OK but papped shots of royal kids are a crime against media ethics? Prince George and Princess Charlotte can't help who their parents are but neither can the kids of David and Victoria Beckham, assorted Kardashians or Reese Witherspoon.

Which leads us to the bigger question here: Why the hell does anyone care at all about photos of celebrity kids?

If you are so pleased William and Kate took a stand against those evil paps, but you read the Daily Mail, especially the website, you are part of the problem. If you blush a little, giggle coyly, and admit the sidebar of shame is your "guilty pleasure", you are part of the problem. Hell, if you buy any magazine that uses pap shots, you are part of the problem. The editors know people want to see pictures of celebrity kids, they know it makes them money through copy sales, ad revenue and clicks.

You are creating the market for pictures of celebrity kids. If you feel a bit creepy about this, that is a good thing.

You should be embarrassed if you regularly pore over photos of children you will never meet. It is not the same as looking at photos of your nieces and nephews or your friends' kids on Facebook. It's an invasion of privacy and those pictures online will live on forever for the kids of celebrities, usually with nasty comments at the end.

A free press is a wonderful thing and it should be defended. But when we feed the market for the journalist equivalent of sniffing bicycle seats, for bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping non-news, we end up with the media landscape we deserve.




Photography by Anna Langova

You guessed it! It's another world of stupid!

Here we go again with further idiocy that cannot go unnoticed. Last week, we saw idiocy involving kids in politics, horse meat, Megan Fox, horrific events at a US campus, a Maria Sharapova-sugar brouhaha, a Jimmy Savile puppet and a cycling goon.

1. OK, so President Obama has signed a load of executive orders in favour of gun control and he did so surrounded by children. The US right, unsurprisingly, has called him out on this. It is gimmicky because good policy should stand up without using kids as props. Regardless of the issue, using kids for political gain has always been a tad unseemly, whether it's kissing babies, posing with photogenic offspring to appeal show off one's family values or whatever. Ugh. But then the NRA also called out Obama for having armed guards protect his own children. Yes. That is because as the children of the most powerful man in the world, Sasha and Malia are obvious targets. For people who may be getting their hands on guns a little too easily.

2. The great British horse meat debacle has resulted in a festival of equestrian puns - and a festival of absurd hysteria. There was a nationwide gross-out when it was revealed that Tesco's pre-made beef burgers contained horse meat. People who are perfectly happy to eat cows, sheep, pigs and chickens panicked and declared it was disgusting. Never mind that the addition of some nice, lean horse meat might actually improve a burger, and cheval is a damn sight better than the crap in the average hot dog - these people were not going to eat Seabiscuit! Then there were the sanctimonious vegetarians who used this as another excuse to be sanctimonious vegetarians.

The horsey beef burgers brouhaha wasn't a failure of food hygiene. It was merely a failure of food labelling. If the label tells the consumer there is horse in their burger, they can make the choice as to whether they find that appalling or if they simply decide that a horse is like a delicious, long-necked, more agile cow.

3. Stephen Marche has written a profile piece on Megan Fox for the US edition of Esquire magazine that is so embarrassingly awful, the only viable excuse for it is that he lost a bet. Marche's words were beyond parody. There was a long riff about ancient Aztec sacrifice, he slags off the physical attributes of Lena Dunham, Adele and Amy Adams in his defence of Fox, he writes without any apparent irony that her skin is "the colour the moon possesses in the thin air of northern winters."

Fox joins the irony vacuum by saying how she doesn't want to be famous anymore while posing for a magazine in her underwear.

But my favourite bit is Marche's description of Fox's lips: "The lip on the left curves exactly the same way as the lip on the right." Either Marche is confused by facial anatomy or he isn't describing the lips on her face...

4. Manti Te'o, a US college football star who plays for Notre Dame (which seems be inexplicably pronounced in the US as "Noter Dame" - I'd love an explanation of this), fabricated a story about a dead girlfriend. For months, the US sports media believed that Te'o's beloved, one Lennay Kekua, was in a serious car crash and was then diagnosed with leukaemia. The story became even more tragic when Te'o revealed that Kekua passed away on September 11, aged 22, within hours of his real-life grandmother dying. Except Kekua never existed and Deadspin.com was able to reveal that Kekua never existedand Te'o's story contained enough holes to make a tonne of Swiss cheese.

A Notre Dame spokesperson said Te'o was fooled by an elaborate online and phone hoax. Er, right.

But here is a story from Notre Dame that is far more important and deserves far more airplay than the moronic Te'o.

5. Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova garnered 40,000 Twitter followers after her first tweet: "Your ultimate sugarmama has arrived. #myfirsttweet." I'm not sure what is more idiotic - the fact that such a banal tweet would be so popular or the fact that the tweet is promoting her new candy company, the awkwardly named Sugarpova. Actually, the biggest idiots are possibly the people who are now angry with her for starting a candy company when she is allegedly meant to be a role model promoting a healthy lifestyle. Or perhaps people could start taking responsibility for what they put in their mouths rather than looking to a shrieking tennis player for guidance.

6. The BBC accidentally repeated a Tweenies episode from 2001 featuring a spoof of Jimmy Savile as a puppet presenting Top of the Pops. It was a stupid blunder, someone should have checked et cetera, et cetera. But the outcry is simply today's excuse for the pearl-clutchers to get their knickers in a twist and slag off the BBC. Any kids who happened to catch the episode on Cbeebies yesterday morning wouldn't have a clue who he was and are blissfully unaware of the horrible news stories that keep erupting. Any offended parents who spotted it could simply turn the TV off and get on with their lives. Anyone whose kids were actually harmed by the puppet yesterday should call the police to have it arrested.

7. Lance Armstrong. That is all.


Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com

The idiocy that is celebrity role models

Every time a celebrity does something stupid, the inevitable cry from the gallery of pearl clutchers is: "But he/she is a role model for the children!".

Except they're not. They're human beings who happen to be very well paid for whatever it is that has made them famous. These people are usually physically attractive - indeed, this often helps make them more famous than actual talent - and they can be regularly seen on magazine covers, in newspapers, on TV and online.

Unless they actually publicly state that they would like to set a good example for kids everywhere, these people are under no obligation to meet any minimum behaviour standards as deemed appropriate by the gallery of pearl clutchers.

Premier League footballers, for example, are young, fit, healthy, wealthy men who are blessed with the ability to skilfully kick a ball. For this, they frequently earn more in a week than many of us earn in a year. Why is anyone remotely surprised when they sleep around or drive fast cars idiotically or behave like entitled brats? Obviously, not all of them behave like dickheads. Plenty are perfectly nice blokes. But when a footballer scandal breaks out, it's not about letting down their kiddie fans. It's about young rich men behaving in an entirely unsurprising manner. Cue the opening of the No Shit, Sherlock files.

Or when Rihanna again returns to the abusive and awful Chris Brown or tweets photos of herself in various states of inebriation, the instant reaction is an appalling mix of victim-blaming, slut-shaming and freaking out about the example she is setting teenage girls. Instead, the reaction should be to have proper discussions about domestic violence, about how being a celebrity isn't a guarantee that you'll be immune from douchebag boyfriends, about how it's perfectly fine to emulate Rihanna's style or enjoy her music, but that doesn't mean copying her life choices is compulsory.

When a celebrity does something stupid, it's an opportunity for parents to, oh, I dunno, actually have a conversation with the kids about it all. As soon as a kid can read a magazine and look up stuff online, that's when it's important to talk to them. It is easy to see how young people develop the idea that celebrities have an apparently easy and glamorous existence. This leads to the notion that footballer's wife, reality TV star or glamour model are all realistic career paths.

I know it all sounds way too hard but there is no reason why young people can't be taught to be critical consumers of media. Why not explain to the teenage girl who hates her spots and her thighs that the images in magazines are PhotoShopped to within an inch of their lives? Why not tell a boy whose favourite footballer has been caught in bed with three prostitutes and enough white powder to do the hotel's laundry that he can admire him for his on-field skills but that off-field behaviour is separate and nobody's damn business?

It is naive to try and shield kids from the world of celebrity. It is naive to think an earnest conversation over the breakfast table will mean a 14-year-old girl will stop wanting Kim Kardashian's hair and put up posters of Marie Curie instead. It is farcical to think a football-mad boy of the same age won't get excited at the thought of being a wealthy Premier League star with a Ferrari in the garage. But it is commonsense to respect their intelligence enough to talk about celebrities with them, challenge their notions of role models, and gently let them know that finishing their education is a wise idea, regardless of what path they might choose as adults.