Posts Tagged ‘sex’

I’ve been travelling around California for the last 10 days, taking in the sights and sounds and meeting people on a research trip for a book on the ways that sexuality has been used to create fame. Hollywood is a spawning ground for media whores, after all. I thought I’d be taking time out of blogging, but there are three celebrity stories subsuming the news in the USA at the moment and I could not let them pass as, even by my own standards of morbid interest, the American news coverage of Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson and Rachel Uchitel’s latest shenanigans is overkill.

Mel Gibson’s everywhere, in stories relating to the tapes that are allegedly of him violently, angrily haranguing the mother of his youngest child, Oksana Grigorieva, in racist, sexist and vulgar terms. It smacks of a put-up job to me, but it’s a story that will run and run.

Lindsay Lohan, in case you missed it, is also in trouble, serving ninety days in jail for drink-driving offences. If you were judging by the amount of comment and analysis the story’s getting, you’d expect her to have been found guilty of triggering an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Falkland Islands or something similar. Not that Lohan will serve her time – the latest reports suggest that she could serve as little as nine days “because of overcrowding”. Read the rest of this entry »

The collapse of Lord Triesman – and potentially the British 2018 World Cup bid he was in charge of – after a fit of sexual hubris and some seriously careless talk about bribery, brought on by the less-than-sincere attentions of a younger woman, is a sorry story, but a familiar one.

This is a story that highlights the lack of investment in PR at the highest level. There’s an awful lot of bollocks talked about stories that are ‘so important’ that you can do trades with the papers on them, with shadowy publicists portrayed as Fagin types hand-rubbing and smirking in the background. This is mostly absurd – an exercise in scapegoat making.

A good publicist is counsellor and conscience – a Hollywood hybrid of shrink and media hound – and should protect their client. They have always been looking to the long game rather than the easy buck; the reinvention of the client to keep them in the limelight for years rather than to just take a cut from one hefty payment and then move on. Read the rest of this entry »

What a depressing week for lovers of football. What a sorry, sad, insane mess played out by fools and halfwits. Ordinarily, the focus would have been on the big game, Arsenal v. Chelsea. Instead, this weekend, our interest in the game will be for all the wrong reasons. So, instead, I have decided to focus on the American version of football, which reaches its colossal climax on Sunday. I hanker after the hype, showmanship and ballyhoo of the Super Bowl.

US and UK sport have always been different – from the amount of body armour the Americans wear to play what amounts to rugby to the way the world views the different sports on each side of the Atlantic. Whatever your view of American sport, however, there is no doubt they are well ahead of the game when it comes to using social media in cahoots with big sports events. Read the rest of this entry »

Is there any need to reinvent the dating agency? It seems that there is in America, where a company have audaciously taken the process to its extreme, as a press release announcing the launch of Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com, “The World’s First Dating Service for the Terminally Ill” proves.

Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com claims to be “designed to cut through the superficiality and embrace issues we think are most meaningful – the desire and need for understanding, compassion, empathy and comfort between human beings” but it also offers to help terminally ill people to find others like them, who don’t mind they’re dying, to have sex with.

Are they trying to court controversy? Certainly, if the puns throughout the press release are anything to go by. The press release urges terminally ill people to “join us… if you are truly dying to connect” and promises to help them “to go out with a ‘bang’”.

The press release is spectacularly brazen, offering “the possibility for individuals to connect with other open, accepting minds who might better understand their unusual circumstances” and to help potential clients to find “a singing partner for your swan song”, as well as selling their ability to hook people up with sexual partners as desperate as themselves.

I’m astonished by the audacity of this release and the project itself. It is bound to cause a storm of controversy – all of which will no doubt make it a huge hit when it is launched on St. Valentine’s Day.

They’re quite extraordinary, these Americans.