Celebs, Filth, and legal history

Last year a civil servant from Westoe wrote a blog post. This month he is before the courts under the Obscene Publications Act, which aims to protect people from "being depraved and corrupted". If it says that why isn't The Economist in court every week you say? To which I reply - get real dude!

Septicisle has done his research and our civil servant clearly has some sort of torture-rape-fantasy thing going on having written a number of times on the same theme. The piece in question, which is still online, Girls (Scream) Aloud, is poorly written puerile tripe about the famous girl band members being kidnapped, raped and murdered. Please don't click the link if you are likely to be shocked by a potentially illegal and certainly obscene story involving torture.

Personally I didn't find it that shocking. I did keep tutting throughout, although this was due to the clunky overuse of the same terms over and again. Buy a thesaurus man! Either I'm hopelessly jaded or getting depraved and corrupted is a lot duller than I remember. I'd add to that if the extraordinarily sick SAW movie series aren't prosecuted then this blog post certainly has no business being at the sharp end of the law.

However, it is a disturbing case. Clearly the writer is fixated on pop clones, dazzled by celebrity culture in a most distasteful way. Not the stuff of fantasies at all I'd have thought. These incredibly unerotic eroticised commodities are hardly fit subjects for obsession, and it does a disservice to us all to pretend that they are.

It's almost as obnoxious as the golden statue of Kate Moss by Marc Quinn or that terrible statue of the sub-Tiffany wannabe Brittany Spears. I mean we know that artists can be as vacuous as everyone else, but why they would want to flaunt the fact is anybody's guess. Art's meant to deepen our sensibilities isn't it?

This anemic version of sexuality draws on a set of people that don't even look the way we think they look. We only see them after the make-up, dresses, lighting, posing, choosing of the correct image and then photoshopping has had its way. Not that I want to cut off anyone's legs or hang them up on hooks you understand - quite the reverse.

These women, in fact most women in the media, are presented in such a shallow way that there is nothing to say about them that isn't shallow itself. We're given nothing else but the images which tricks us into thinking that maybe that's all there is to them. Substanceless fancies. No wonder they make such poor subjects for sick erotic fiction.

I'd say that this whole identikit sexuality business is pretty unappealing. Surely there's a danger in allowing the consuming of images to become our key sexual focus because, as the saying goes, you are what you eat, and I'd prefer a rather more substantial meal.