After #MagalufGirl went viral, people have developed a taste for photos of young people going at it in public. And it’s got to stop.
The furore around #MagalufGirl (when a girl was filmed in a club in Magaluf carrying out sex acts on 24 guys in three minutes) probably explains why more videos of young people having sex in public have suddenly emerged and been published on both social media and in the papers, accompanied by some faux-horrified commentary about Broken Britain. The first videos were of other revellers on the Magaluf strip, but now, as the Daily Star put it: ‘Magaluf comes to Britain,’ as a photo emerged overnight of four clubbers appearing to have sex outside a club in Belfast.
Showing a slightly pixellated photo of two boys on their backs with a girl on top of each of them, it’s been damned as a ‘shameless foursome’ by the paper. It’s now been picked up by the international press, with one Australian news site landing the blame squarely with the girls, saying that the ‘picture of two girls having sex outside nightclub in Belfast moves conversation about standards on from Magaluf’.
Now, despite it being spun as a story of two girls in a passionate lesbian embrace instead of two girls sitting on a couple of lads’ laps, it hasn’t quite gone as viral as #MagalufGirl, so we wonder what papers’ excuse for publishing it – with a tiny bit of pixellation to preserve the identities of the four involved – might be.
The thing is, we all know this goes on, and it gets recorded – this sort of public sex is such prominent feature on free porn sites that it has its own category on homepages. Within this, there are uploads of sex acts taking place in clubs around the world dating back years. So why are papers only taking interest now? Because people are talking about it on Twitter and Facebook – and when stuff gets trending there, it makes headlines.
But making the stories even more public doesn’t do any good. Beyond spurring politicians into clamping down on nights where people are encouraged to carry out public sex acts in return for booze (which allegedly happened at Carnage Magalluf in the case of #MagalufGirl), all it tends to do is send the women involved to the stocks to be pointed at and judged. No mention of the men they were carrying the sex acts out with. Which, in turn, justifies all those initial mean tweets.
When the papers end up covering the stories with the same attitudes as commenters on Twitter (placing the blame soley at the door of the women, making no mention of the men involved), is there any point in it making it to print all? All we’re getting is an echo-chamber of vitriol and pretend shock along with an excuse to print lascivious photos and make women feel shit about their choices. The shaming of #MagalufGirl may have started online, but became tenfold worse as a 'state of the nation' news story when it was committed to print.
Showing these photos on a wider scale doesn’t stop women from being shamed, but it certainly adds to the suffering of those people who once did something a bit silly when they were drunk.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Picture: Anna Jay
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.