When it comes to Lauren Goodger, the ex-Towie star who used to date Mark Wright, our interest level is at default set to about zero. She doesn’t move us. We’re just not that into her. So when news broke that she was complaining about a sex tape that had been leaked of her, and no-one can seem to find it, we weren’t initially sympathetic.
A celebrity of dubious talents complains to a tabloid that a six-second video of her performing a sex act on an ex-boyfriend has been leaked. Though she says it’s been shared by loads of people, not even the most avaricious of Googlers can find said video. All the same, the celebrity probably gets a bit of money from the paper for whingeing about her 'ordeal'. So what?
But hold though we’d be silly to assume that Lauren didn’t get a bit of money for talking about her sex tape shame before it went viral, she does - in fact - make some rather sensible and surprisingly relatable points about sex tapes and revenge porn.
Lauren told The Sun on Sunday that the leak of film, which was made by ex Jake McClean, in the Essex home they shared until their split eight months ago, has left her incredibly upset. Showing her giving him a blowjob (that’s our translation of the paper’s ‘performing an intimate act’), she said: ‘It is mortifying and humiliating. I’ve got no control over the situation I am in. I feel powerless. My private life has been invaded in the most horrible way. I can even see how some girls would feel suicidal and not be able to cope in this situation.’
Though she is unsure whether Jake leaked the images (‘He swears it wasn’t him putting it about. I suppose I have to believe him. He probably didn’t mean anything nasty at the time by recording it’), the 28-year-old has called for those circulating revenge porn to be criminalised: ‘Anyone caught sending private, intimate stuff like this about should be arrested. I would definitely advise girls and young fans not to send any pictures or anything because it can come back to bite you.’
Just in case you didn’t know about this sickening trend, revenge porn is where a jilted or generally pissed off ex-lover (or their creepy mate) uploads naked or pornographic videos or photos of their ex to dedicated websites in a bid to get back at them. As well as exposing people in their most intimate moments to the world, the videos and photos are then commented on and rated and masturbated over by complete strangers in every continent and time zone. It’s gross, and it’s unfortunately widespread enough for MPs to have taken notice.
The then-Justice Minister Chris Grayling recently told Parliament: 'It's clearly becoming a bigger problem in our society. The Government is very open to having a serious discussion about this with a view to taking appropriate action in the autumn if we can identify the best way of doing so.'
Maria Miller may no longer be Culture and Women’s Minister after she was forced to leave the cabinet, but she’s still sticking up for women’s rights as she began to lobby the government for a crackdown on revenge porn. As she put it last month: 'This is a form of sexual violence against women. What I want to do is run faster than the internet and make sure we have the right legal protection in place for these women.'
Let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and suppose Lauren is crying wolf, latching onto a hot topic to make money. Well, if revenge porn is anything like other forms of sexual violence, mostly committed by men, mostly against women, then we’re sadly wont to blame the women disproportionately. It’s all too easy to blame women for being participants in sexts, nudies and homemade porn videos when we're living in a culture that so often blames women for being raped. If we blame women for the sex attacks that happen to them without their consent, how awful will we be to women who willingly participate in sex acts and their subsequent filming? With revenge porn, the victim might not even be aware of the filming, and even if they are, they’re not doing so with a mind for anyone but the intended recipient to see the images of footage. It’s not the act of taking the fotoage where the bad deed is done, but the act of then relaying it to people whose eyes they were never intended for.
Maybe the video of Lauren and Jake hasn’t gone viral, maybe we haven’t all been able to mock Lauren’s sexual techniques via social media, maybe it’s not on the front page of every paper today, but that doesn’t mean that this sort of thing should be allowed to happen. So long as the video’s shown to someone it’s not intended for, there’s a breach of the consent that Lauren gave for it to be filmed. And if she wasn’t aware it was being filmed, well that’s making pornographic images without her consent.
A recent ruling in a German court set an interesting precedent in an area of law that is still to be defined in Britain. A man hadn’t even uploaded photos of his ex girlfriend online, but she had enough tangible fear that he would for the high court to rule that he delete every photo of her that he had on his hard drive. It wasn’t that he had done anything criminal, but the woman has, under the German constitution, a right to be protected to privacy within an ‘intimate sphere’, so it was almost like the court was asking him, ahead of firing a gun, to remove the bullets. Hopefully this sort of attitude will be employed in British courts, too.
It’s not only actual revenge porn, but the fear of it being done and the effects that can have that gives someone in Lauren’s situation the right to complain about it. Enough of us have grown up with mobile cameraphones to know there are images of us out there belonging to exes who may or may not hate us. Enough of us have that fear. Revenge porn is a gross symptom of 21st Century technology advancing way beyond our morals and the basic reason why a lot of dickheads don’t deserve girlfriends or mobile phones. The sooner there’s something in place to stop this sort of behaviour, the better.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.