Privacy and Max Mosley

When is your private life not private? When it can shift newspapers, of course.

As Max Mosley has found to his cost.

Regardless of what you think about Mosley’s activities, try a spot of empathy for a moment. Imagine it is you, having a sexual encounter that could be construed as embarrassing, paraded across the headlines. Imagine how it must feel to have your intimate moments splashed across the tabloids. Let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be grand for anyone, would it?

And that is exactly what has happened to Mosley. There is no real public value to this story; Mosley’s sex life is his issue and his issue alone. It doesn’t matter whether he likes kinky sex and it doesn’t matter whether or not he likes to dress up as a Nazi. It wouldn’t matter if he liked to dress up as Bobby Davro whilst having a carrot shoved where the sun don’t shine at the same time as furtively jerking off – it should be private to him. As unpleasant as you might perceive someone else’s idea of getting their rocks off might be, as long as it is between consenting adults, it should not matter.

What does intrigue me is the way this story is being reported. Take this article from The Daily Hate. It works quite hard to sound neutral – and no wonder, because if they criticise Mosley directly no doubt they will end up in court as well – but the detail the article goes into is quite striking. I mean, the article is so long that it is broken into sub-headings. There is a level of detail that you just wouldn’t see with a far more important story – like the latest abortion of a policy from Gordon Brown, for example. There is even a picture that details exactly what Mosley has been getting up to. That is quite startling – a daily tabloid publishing a photo of an act that would be described by some as depraved.

There is only one reason why there is so much detail in the article. It is because the readers of the paper want that level of detail. The article is titillation, pure and simple. It is a lurid little story for the readers; a chance to marvel at what other people get up to – and then the opportunity to judge those people. The message is simple from this story – and from other famous people who have had their private lives splashed across the tabloids. You have a right to a private life, just so long as you are not a (even very slight) celebrity or person of interest who has a slightly unconventional sex life. If you are such a person, then your sex life is going to be splashed across the headlines – like it or not.

I don’t know whether this prurient interest in the sex lives of others is curiously British thing or not – although I rather suspect it is. What I do know is that private lives should be private, not fair game for any tabloids trying to shift extra copies of their rags through a sordid little article.