Sunday, January 22, 2006

Bald, obscure LibDem in man-on-man rudeness shock horror

Mark Oaten, sometime contender for the LibDem leadership, has been caught out playing away from the fragrant Belinda and two kids. Fair cop to the News Of The World, to an extent; he had, after all, used images of himself as a loving hubby in election material distributed to the electors of Winchester.

But there's one sentence in the redtop account that just doesn't do it for me:

"The naked MP then got the rent boys to humiliate him with a bizarre sex act too revolting to describe."

No. I've no idea what the bizarre sex act was, but I'm sure it's pretty easy to describe. What the NotW means is that it can't be described with nudging the paper's Neanderthal readers over the blurry line between prurient schadenfreude and outright revulsion. Three-in-a-bed with rent boys in football kit is OK. But "bizarre sex acts" (chickens? shitting? hot drill bits in the perineum?) aren't suitable for a family newspaper, apparently.

It's not the primness I object to, or the hypocrisy. It's just the lousy, lazy journalism.

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