People, presumably, would not dream of climbing a drainpipe to gawp at the bedroom secrets of their neighbours
I would like to think that the Soho shops flogging DVDs of "Tulisa's sex tape" for £3.90 are finding their stock hard to move. Yet it's apparent that people see nothing at all wrong in grossly invading a person's privacy, as long as a third party has actually done the foul and nasty groundwork for them. Despite all the evidence after the phone-hacking scandal broke, that invading the privacy of other humans – even famous ones – causes great and needless distress, many people still seem to think that such activity is just a bit of fun, something that people have a "right" to enjoy, snigger about or discuss.
There can be no doubt at all that the person responsible for placing sexual material involving Tulisa Contostavlos, below, the former singer with rap group N-Dubz, more widely famous as an X-Factor judge, is doing this awful thing out of malice, and out of a wish to exploit Contostavlos's embarrassment and hurt for money. The poor woman has taken every legal move she can to stifle distribution of this short piece of camera-phone film. It's plain that she doesn't want people to look at it.
But people want to look anyway, and other people want to facilitate their want. People, presumably, who would not dream of climbing a drainpipe to gawp at the bedroom secrets of their neighbours, and would be incandescent with anger and humiliation if their neighbours targeted them in such a fashion, see nothing wrong in lapping up salacious private details, as long as somebody else is supplying the material.
Newspapers and magazines insist that they ply such dubious material because it's what the public wants. Amazingly, in some sections of the press, there is a real sense of grievance over phone-hacking, a genuine – if counter-intuitive – belief that it's all the public's fault for wanting to know gossip about the stars, and thereby forcing others to supply it to them. The consumer is king. The market decides.
In truth, it's sellers who create markets, not buyers. The person who is torturing Contostavlos in this way is an unspeakably vile and pathetic little individual. All those who are splashing the singer's name and photograph on the covers of their own publications are colluding in his cruelty, facilitating his merciless, destructive bullying. They are disgusting.