Kicking the Porn-ets' Nest...

 Like courduroy pillows, Jennifer Lawrence's tits continue to make headlines.

 After the initial scandal of leaked nude photos, the debate has meandered on and on (and on) and, just when you thought it was safe to go back on the internet, Ms. Lawrence does an interview with Vanity Fair and the whole issue ignites again to be used as an ideological football by all and sundry like a big, burning, kickable mixed metaphor of tits.

...

 For the record, I think everything has been somewhat blown out of proportion - and not just by my Xerox machine! HIYOOO!

 ...Sorry. Look, stealing someone's stuff and spreading it all over the internet is a shitty thing to do. It's illegal. Rightly so. Someone, somewhere is guilty of a crime and should be punished. There should probably be an extra layer of punishment added for the sexual nature of the crime. Anything that happened after the initial hacking, however, has apparently descended into a witch hunt. We're all guilty of being the worst kinds of people if we even consider having a look at leaked pictures of celebrities. The deepest pits of hell are reserved for those of us who thought "hmm, cool, attractive naked women that I wouldn't normally get to see," because of course nobody thought that - the only possible motivation for wanting to see arousing pictures of attractive young ladies is that we're all hateful, misogynist scum who wish nothing but ill for the entire female race, especially those of them we had a fiver on to win an Oscar last year.

 The reality from where I sit is that a lot of people just wanted to see someone attractive without any clothes on, which is pretty normal. Not necessarily squeaky clean, morally speaking, but there was certainly never any malice in it on my part, and I'm guessing the same is true for a lot of people.

 I like Jennifer Lawrence. I think she's very, very talented. And very pretty. I also think she's over-reacting quite badly to the whole thing, if the Vanity Fair interview is anything to go by. This might be easy for me to say, as thousands of strangers have never looked at intimate pictures of me, but they theoretically could. I've taken naked pictures of myself in the past to send to various people - girlfriends, hook-ups, Grammy winning country musicians...

Weirdly, that was her exact response...

 ...and if those pictures were leaked and spread all over the place I'd be embarrassed, sure. Angry, too, probably. But I think I'd have to ultimately just shrug and say "Yeah, that's me with my cock out." It's worth bearing in mind that I say this as a non-celebrity. I'm guessing someone who picks a career being stared at by strangers probably has a lot more of the "look at me!" gene than I do, and as such would be even less flustered.

How dare we look at her naked?! Unless she's painted blue and on a 20ft screen...

 Naked pictures and videos are a fairly normal part of modern sexuality, and (again) it's totally wrong to steal those pictures and videos from people. Unfortunately, the pendulum of outrage has now swung far enough that we're being told that looking at naked strangers is always wrong.

 First there are Ms. Lawrence's comments in Vanity Fair (and let's all just take a moment to appreciate the irony of someone talking about their own naked photos and privacy in a publication whose title means "Beautiful Self Love"), in which she says that she took the photos to send to her boyfriend at the time, because he was "either going to look at porn, or look at [me.]"

 I hate to break it to you, Jen, but he did both. I abso-fucking-lutely stone cold guarantee he did. Why? Because people (male, female, young, old, gay, straight) like looking at porn. It's hard-wired into us. The idea that if you're in a relationship you should never look at porn is as silly as the idea that if I have fruit in the house I'll never need to eat donuts. I'm fully aware of which one is healthier and more wholesome, but sometimes you just want a donut. Sometimes you don't want to light incense, drink wine and seduce your partner. Sometimes you just need to jerk off and then get on with your day. I'm sure a lot of women do exactly the same thing, whether they'd admit it or not.

 Sadly, the Vanity Fair interview was seized on by a group called Fight The New Drug, an anti-porn group who believe that all forms of pornography are damaging to society and evil and probably giving you hairy palms. In an open letter to Ms. Lawrence that has, in the words of Lisa Simpson "a creepy, Pat Boone-ish quality to it," they try to argue that all porn is exactly as morally wrong as stealing someone's private images; you can tell they're down with the kids because they're super keen on using words like "super" a lot.

 The truth is that people like watching other people fuck. We always have. Porn is largely just an extension of sexual fantasy - we just have the technology to put our imagined sexual scenarios on film these days. Saying that all porn is evil and degrading is like saying the early work of the Lumiere brothers was degrading and exploitative to trains.

 Are there types of pornography that are degrading and dangerous? Yes. In news that should shock nobody except the Puritans at Fight The New Drug, however, most people don't like porn that is violent or harmful.

 Personally, I watch porn. Not because I'm a single man who works six nights a week and therefore has a presence on the dating scene about on a par with the Pope; just because I'm normal and ALL NORMAL PEOPLE WATCH PORN. I don't want to see women getting mistreated. I don't even find it sexy when it's a barbie-looking woman with ill-fitting concrete tits and a borderline eating disorder staring dead-eyed into a camera and grunting too much, which seems to be the image most anti-porn lobbyists have in their heads. What I tend to look for is clips where the woman actually looks like she's enjoying herself, because that's also what I aim for in real-life sex.*

 So, Jennifer Lawrence is wrong to think that there's anything to worry about if her boyfriend watches porn. There's nothing wrong with watching it, everyone does it, everyone masturbates (including several of the more intelligent animal species) and she needs to chill out about that. That being said, she's a fantastic actress and doesn't deserve to be robbed and have her pictures strewn around cyberspace.

 Whoever hacked Jennifer Lawrence's pictures is the real bad guy here. It was a shitty thing to do, it should be punished, they shouldn't have anything to feel good about. Anyone who looked at the pictures doesn't have much of a moral high ground, but it's human nature and I totally get why people looked.

 The people at Fight The New Drug are the sort of creepy, narrow-minded, sexually repressed types that love to proselytize to the rest of us about how we should think, feel and fuck each other. I'm not legally allowed to say that I think they're all into some weird shit, bedroom-wise, but I'll just mention that anyone who takes up a moral crusade about what other people do with their genitals usually gets caught six months later in a public toilet doing something untoward. 

 All of this furore has ultimately been created over pictures of tits and asses - apparatus owned by 51 and 100% of the population, respectively. Can we please move on now?






*Results may vary.

Icelandic Saga

 When I’m not working in a bar, I maintain a steady sideline as an investigative journalist. Or at least that’s what I tell women at parties.

 Mostly, I just make stuff up. This is one of those times.

 I had a tip that there was an entertainment industry whistle-blower with a huge story that was looking to talk to someone trustworthy. Luckily, everyone trustworthy was too slow, so I went to meet with him instead. In a darkened back room of a shady pub, I met my contact.

 He was a grey-haired, doughy man who could have been anywhere between thirty five and fifty – whatever weighed on his mind had taken its toll on his body, and he had the fleshy, jowly look of a man gone to seed. In spite of his bulk, his eyes were furtive; the kind of eyes I’d seen most often in skinny, strung out guys. He looked like a thin, nervous man, the weight of whose secrets had been made flesh and trapped him physically as well as psychologically. He lit another cigarette as I switched on my tape recorder.

 “You promise me you won’t use my name?” he asked, quietly.

 “I’ll keep your identity an absolute secret, Dr. Williams,” I said, making a mental note to edit that part out before I publish this. I had a feeling I’d probably forget.

 “What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked.

 He took a breath, looked down at the table, the eyes still darting as he tried to find a way to begin. “…I know what’s happening to Peter Andre,” he said, finally.

 This wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting. “Go on…” I prodded. He jumped a little, because I actually prodded him. I’m not very good with metaphor.

 “What you need to understand is that this information is sensitive,” he said. “I worked for three years as head of shipping for Iceland. I was one of them.”

 “One of them as in a supermarket employee?” I asked.

 He shook his head, dismissively. “No. No. See, Iceland isn’t really a supermarket. That’s the first part of all this. Sure, they maintain the odd store for appearances sake, but they’re actually much bigger. Much more powerful.”

 “So what are they really?”

 “Iceland is the world’s first anti-fame bureau. They specialise in making peoples’ careers in showbusiness disappear.

 See, to the common man, being famous looks great. You get money and adulation and groupies, but in actual fact, it’s a business like anything else. You know those earnest, creative types you meet who say they just do what they love and aren’t interested in material gain? That’s why they’re never famous. Maybe thirty years ago it worked that way, but now, Big Fame hold all the strings. If you want to be well known, you have to do it through them. Iceland is a subsidiary department.

 See, some celebrities get tired of it. They get over-worked, they burn out. There’s only so many times you can fall out of a limo with your clunge on display before it gets tiring.”

 “Was 'clunge' really the word you wanted to use there?” I said.

“It DID seem out of character for me, I agree, but then I’m not very well drawn-out to begin with,” he said. “Anyway, Big Fame expects a lot from its employees. You’re required to put in an insane number of hours, marry a lot of awful people in succession, and constantly make up outlandish stories to sell to supermarket tabloids. It’s exhausting. A lot of people want out. Some try to do it gracefully, by just slipping quietly away, never working again, but that doesn’t stick. They still can’t walk down the street without being noticed. That’s why the Iceland Protocols were developed.”

 “And this is what’s happening to Peter Andre? He’s tired of being famous?”

 He took another drag on his cigarette. “Look, I haven’t been working for Iceland for a long time. Years, now. But I can see all the signs. What would typically happen is this: Peter Andre doesn’t want to be famous anymore, and he wants everyone to know that. So what does he do? He could release a video on YouTube saying he wants everyone to just ignore him, but that might not work. Shia LaBeouf tried announcing he wasn’t famous anymore and now he’s in the new Brad Pitt movie. It’s not enough. So Peter Andre goes to the people at Iceland and they say ‘Sure, Peter. We’ll put you in a string of adverts for our dummy supermarket that basically announce to everyone that your career is over. They’ll be painful and embarrassing, but it’s two days shooting, max, and then everyone who sees them plastered all over national TV will sit at home and think “Hmm, Peter Andre’s career must be over.” Problem solved.’”

 “That’s exactly what I thought when I saw them,” I nodded.

 “Right. And maybe Peter would have been happy with that. But showbusiness is a cut-throat industry, and Iceland wanted to be the best. They couldn’t have other businesses saying they’d make you even less famous than them. They had to stifle competition. That’s when they came up with the gulags.”

 “Gulags?”

“Yes. You see, famous people aren’t usually very bright. Dolph Lundgren has a masters degree in chemical engineering and tried to work out a way to de-famous himself, and it nearly worked, but then he slipped up in his calculations and ended up in three Expendables movies. And the average celebrity isn’t anywhere near as smart as him. In fact, most of them don’t even have the sense to read what they sign, which is what Iceland banks on. As soon as the shooting is finished on their cringeworthy, career-wrecking ads, they grab the celebrity and ship them to a prison camp in Iceland. It spawned its own phrase. When people asked what ever happened to certain actors or pop stars, they were told ‘Keep mum; he’s gone to Iceland.’ People in the fame game knew what this meant, but they even made a version of it into their corporate slogan as a coded warning to others.”

 “Are you telling me that right now Peter Andre is being transported to a prison camp in Iceland,” I asked. It was a little much to take in.

“He’s not being transported, no. He’s probably been there for months. As soon as they finished shooting the ads he’d have been tranquilised and packed into a crate.”

 “Jesus. Is there any way back?!”

 He sighed. “It’s possible, but difficult. You have to fight your way out and most people don’t make it. You remember mid-nineties TV actors and occasional pop duo Robson & Jerome? They managed to break out a few years ago, working as a team. Jerome improvised some melee weapons and fought his way past the guards, in the process learning the sword skills that would give him a comeback role on Game of Thrones. Once they were free of the camp, they had to hike two hundred miles to civilisation, sustained only by eating whatever fish Robson could catch in the local rivers. It’s why he still gets so excited whenever he catches a fish.”

“Now that you mention it, I did wonder where they’d been for twenty years or so,” I mused.

 He bit his lip. “Others aren’t so lucky. And the penalty for a failed escape attempt is severe. They don’t just punish you. They don’t even make you famous again. They make you infamous. A few years ago, Rolf Harris decided that he wanted out and clobbered a guard with his didgereedoo. He didn’t make it past the fence, and we all know what became of him after he was caught…”

“If all of this is true, why tell me?” I asked. “Why now?”

 He shrugged, sighed. “As you get older, you start to value life a lot more,” he said. “I thought I could live with all the people I shipped to the gulags, but the truth is that it’s not right. I don’t mind exploiting celebrities until they’re bitter, botoxed shells of human beings, all light gone from their eyes and their smiles surgically grafted on because they can no longer experience true joy – I mean, we all do that! But actually knocking them over the head and shipping them to a frozen wasteland? I figure I might finally sleep better if I can give a voice to the people who I deprived of the ability to speak for themselves.” He met my eyes for the first time as he said that, and I believed him.

 “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going to write this story up and give it every bit of exposure I’m capable of.”

 And I did. I put it on my Facebook AND my Twitter.

 In a lot of ways, I’m a real hero.

No Such Thing As Bad Publicity...

Like a lot of people, I've been following the Oscar Pistorius farce - er, trial - in a loose way. It's hard to avoid the coverage and it's certainly a diverting story, but I haven't read up on it enough to be familiar with all the details of the case.

 This is why I was surprised to learn today that, immediately after "accidentally" putting five bullets in his girlfriend while she was carelessly peeing in the style of a burglar, Pistorius rang a friend who owned a super-car dealership and lived forty miles away. According to the police timeline, his friend was on the scene in fifteen minutes.

 Some cynical types are suggesting that this is evidence that something was fishy, but it could just be coincidence. Maybe his friend was in the area. Or maybe, through sheer random chance, he became the best advert for his own business in the history of the world.

 I'm not saying anyone should ever exploit a tragedy, but if this guy doesn't start running the following ad in Pretorian TV then quite honestly he's missing a trick:

 "Hi, I'm Dave Van der Watt from Crazy Dave's Motor Emporium! Has your friend just shot his missus?! Do you need to be here in a mathematically impossible time frame?! You could be on the scene and lying in mere minutes with the new Bugatti Alibi!"

 I'm not even convinced that the fastest cars in the world could cover that distance, but I could be wrong. Maybe there needs to be some thorough testing of this by the relevant automotive experts...

"TONIGHT!! Richard Hammond shoots his wife..."

"Can I get there to lend a hand ahead of the boys in blue?!"

"Can James May hide all the evidence when the clock is ticking?!"

"...With the help of Dave from South Africa, we'll find out as we test drive the new Ferrari Perjury!"

Or, y'know. Maybe Pistorius is just full of shit.

Is This Sick Sport Proof Of A Sinister Conspiracy?

 Whilst going un-noticed by the general populace, a sick and immoral spectacle masquerading as a sport is being broadcast on British TVs.

 Cunningly hidden on the channel "Dave", after Top Gear but before Top Gear, Motocross X may at first come off as the latest in a long line of "x-treme" sports. In my unending quest to bring you the drunkest, most paranoid and libelous news, however, I can exclusively reveal that Motocross X is in fact a sham, and less a sport than a twisted eugenic conspiracy.

 On the surface, X-Cross is simple. Riders take turns performing stunts on motorbikes, riding over ramps and completing various feats of acrobatics. The horrifying truth, however, is that nothing that happens between the launchpad and the landing ramp is even remotely intentional on the part of the rider.

"FUUUUUUUUUCK!!"

 What's more, despite the implications of the commentators, none of the riders are volunteers or even professionals. 

 Whilst the nature of the participants varies from country to country - China tends to use Motocross X as a form of punishment for under-performing students at acrobatics schools, whilst the UK tends to send the more nimble looking chavs convicted of motorbike theft - all of them are unwilling participants, sealed into their bike helmets and launched down the tunnel on remote controlled bikes.

 Obviously, there is a huge death toll in the early rounds of competitions, and only the most quick thinking and athletic can survive until the televised stages. How do I know all of this to be true? Simple, logical deduction: There is nowhere in the world where people would be able to train for this sport. When was the last time you saw a public space filled with enormous dirt hillocks and ramps? 

 Clearly, the only people with the money to build such facilities are the shadowy cabals of people who control the sport, who have also hired actors to give the illusion of professional athletes. After competing a trick, one of these "athletes" will ride into a tunnel and then an identically-dressed actor will ride back out and remove his helmet to create continuity. 

 As time has worn on, these puppet-masters have grown bored and introduced more and more elaborate tricks to play on their bike-bound victims, from greasing the saddle and gluing the victim's hands to the handlebars:

 "YOU ASSHOLES!!"

 To running ten thousand volts through the bike mid-flight, forcing the competitor to only touch the plastic parts:

"Shitfuckshitshitfuckshitshit-!!"

 To simply telling an athlete before launch that there's a bomb in his shoe that can only be turned off by the magnet in his wrist:

"I don't deserve thiiiiiis!"

 As if this travesty of a sport wasn't inhumane enough - and make no mistake, we are all MONSTERS for watching - the truth of the competitions is even more shocking than one might first imagine.

 Even a casual viewer will note that the stunts performed are only visible in detail during the slow-motion replay - in real time, things happen far too fast for the human brain to process, unless you're one of the unlucky people who is nailed to a motorbike and so high on terror-adrenaline that you've essentially become Spider-Man.

 This would imply, logically, that the true architects and primary viewers of this so-called sport are beings with far faster visual reflexes than our own. I'm not saying this is proof that the world is in fact controlled by alien lizard-people, but I am saying exactly that in those words. These space lizards are forcing the nations of the earth to pit various teams of Motocross X riders against each other.

 Our reptile overlords will then use X-Treme sports as a eugenics program to breed a new form of supermen who will serve as their slaves. Eventually, these lightning-fast, impossibly athletic ubermensches will rise up in rebellion against their lizard masters like Spartacus of old, and the war between the two will spill out into the lives of the common, oblivious human.

 These "X-Treme Wars" between ninja motorcycle stuntment and reptile emperors from beyond the stars will almost certainly spell doom for our entire planet, but one thing is for certain: They'll be fucking AWESOME.