This is, of course, the news that Max Mosley is a fiend and a cad.
Dylan Moran put it best (at about 5:30) when he said “Ohh, the shame of it! How could he!? How absolutely dreadful! I’d never do that! I’ve never had the chance, but I would never ever do that!”
I’ll come back to the Nazi connotations in a moment, but first let’s just assume that he really was doing something absolutely dreadful. So what?
Whatever took place in this hotel room happened between a group of consenting adults. Who cares what they got up to? I really don’t think that public interest is a decent defence here, because when are anyone’s consensual sexual habits in the public interest? A man might enjoy being stood on, being shat on, weeing in people’s faces – it’s nobody’s business but his own and the person he’s doing it to. If the News of the World win this case, it’s going to be a sad, sad day for British privacy law.
Secondly, Nazism. I think there’s a lot of mileage in Nazism as a fetish. The Nazis stood for industry, martial power, overwhelming force, skilled engineering and expert piloting. A finer set of sexual metaphors would be hard to find. Rule 34 dictates that there’s a fetish for everything else, so why not Nazism? I can think of worse things to fetishise – it’s not like the Nazis are a hot issue some sixty years after the end of the war. Why is having a fetish for being a prisoner (from which it’s not much of a stretch to prisoner of war, and who’s the first military that’d spring to the mind of someone of his generation?) so abhorrent that not only is it in the public interest (which I’ll touch on in a bit) but that organisations the world over felt the need to force him to resign?
Which is another thing that annoys my tits off. Something bad happens, some high-powered person has to resign. How the arseface does that work? The killing of Jean Charles De Menezes is a good example – I recall how there was tabloid speculation that Ian Blair, of all people, was going to resign! Ridiculous given that he had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting, regardless of the outcome. Or when Angus Deayton was sacked after an incident similar to Mosley’s. The only thing he was presenting at the time was Have I Got News For You. I could understand if he was a kids’ TV presenter, because that’s a bad message for children – but HIGNfY is a very adult show, hosted by adults and watched by adults. Sacking him for something he did in the privacy of a hotel room is just idiotic. It’s just like Dylan says; people are so quick to jump on the abuse train to get as far away from the wrongdoer as they can.
And finally, even if we accept that Mosley did have a Nazi-fetishist romp and even if we also accept that that’s a very bad thing and that he should lose his job over it: where exactly do you draw the line? There’s nothing actually illegal about having sex with Nazi intonations, so that can’t be it. So which fetishes are allowed and which aren’t? Is there a list you’re given when you become a public figure? Scat is allowed, but only if you’re the one doing the shitting? Bondage is allowed, but only when the ropes are tied to your hands and the implements are improvised, rather than purpose-bought? Clearly, this way lies madness.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it says more bad things about the timbre of the critics’ sex lives than it ever could about Max Mosley.
I’ve just written six hundred words, when really what I should be saying is this:
Shut the fuck up about people in the public eye doing things they shouldn’t. They can do what they like as long as it’s private, consensual and legal.
