What strikes me amid all this fuss about the unlovable Jonathan Ross and the puerile Russell Brand is that it is ultimately about a male claim of sexual achievement: ‘You fucked his granddaughter,’ Ross said to Brand. There was a time when gentlemen were not supposed to brag about their amorous activities – let alone those of their friends. It may be that Ross and Brand do not consider themselves, and are not considered by their friends, to be gentlemen but even so the question of privacy will – fortunately I am pleased to say – not go away.
I had not heard of Georgina Baillie before all this started, and a lot of people’s lives would have been all the better if that state of affairs and been maintained. She is a young woman with a rather extravagant style of presenting herself and a taste for black underwear; curiously, a Google search for pictures of her leads exclusively to the Daily Mail, for ones of her in mild S&M gear. She also, it seems, enjoys the kind of varied and experimental sex life that is by no means unknown to many young people of that age. But her private life is her business and no-one else’s.
What I find quite disgusting is the way in which her style of life has been presented. We read in the Independent about
witless references to the ravishing of [Andrew Sachs’s] granddaughter by Mr Brand. … As for Georgina Baillie, it has become trickier to empathise with the shock to which she lays claim since learning that she’s an erstwhile “glamour model” who thrice enjoyed coitus with Mr Brand … Georgina will make a great deal of money from this, and so she should. For playing even an unwitting part in the provision of such mirth …
and in a letter in the same paper the same day:
It would be disgraceful to censor [Brand & Ross] indefinitely because of an unfunny routine left on Sachs's answer-phone about his 23-year-old granddaughter who, being in a band called The Satanic Sluts and describing her marital status as a "swinger", seems not to be lacking a sense of humour.
So there we are. A woman who says that she loves her grandfather – and why shouldn’t she? – is written off in a way that my Victorian great-aunts would have been proud of. I can hear them now: a woman like that … she can’t have any human feelings … no better than she ought to be … she can’t expect people to respect her … she’s forfeited all right to respect … women who display themselves in public … A suggestion that her right to privacy should be respected is branded as censorship.
British Puritanism and its associated hypocrisy – in the sense of allowing bullies to be rude about other people’s intimate affairs while keeping their own lives private – is every bit as alive and well as it ever was.
I recommend a reading of The Scarlet Letter.





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