Lizzy Vaid, a pretty young girl who works for UKIP, was publicly ridiculed last week when it emerged that a slime-ball ex-boyfriend was trying to flog sexually explicit pictures of her to the tabloids.
OK, look. Let’s agree on one thing. It is bone-headed to allow someone to film or photograph you in any state of undress, let alone in the middle of a sexual act. (I should say, I don’t know if that’s the precise case here. I haven’t interest enough in the sex life of Ms Vaid to ring around and find out.)
It is particularly injudicious if you have political aspirations. I hate to say it, but in this age of data breaches, over-sharing and digital vindictiveness it’s tough to argue that anyone, man or woman, has what the courts refer to as a reasonable expectation of privacy.
So you can’t blame the Sun for reporting the existence of these photographs. You might, however, applaud them for having the decency not to reproduce or describe them.
But that’s not what irks me about this sadistic spectacle. No, it’s the deafening silence from feminist campaigners and Left-wing columnists of all stripes to this young woman’s cruel ritual humiliation, and the total lack of interest from the liberal media in this country.
When a woman on the Right gets herself into trouble, there’s a sense that—how do I put this delicately?—the bitch had it coming. If you’re a woman, having the temerity to vote Tory—or, shock horror, the unconscionable UKIP—strikes the commentariat as so all-consumingly mystifying that you lose all moral agency and right to protection from the sisterhood.
Of course, the Left has never really known what to do with strong women on the Right. Margaret Thatcher is the most obvious but by no means the only example. Where the Left is not outright spiteful it tends to simply ignore what it cannot work out—such as why on earth someone with a vagina might believe in a smaller state and lower taxes.
On the other side of the divide, gobby, rent-a-quote campaigners like Caroline Criado-Perez have every disobliging remark made about them on social media broadcast by childish MPs like Stella Creasy and the professionally furious hordes and chewed over endlessly by the BBC and Left-wing newspapers, regardless of the newsworthiness of the offence.
Heaven help skinny blondes who vote in the wrong direction, such as Ann Coulter or Louise Mensch. I don’t recall the BBC devoting ten minutes of prime-time coverage to the odious moron who said he wanted to kick the former MP “in the c**t”. And one can only wonder what delicate flowers such as Ms Criado-Perez would do on the receiving end of a fraction of the comments thrown at Coulter.
You do also have to wonder if there’s a bit of an agenda here. As James Delingpole of this parish rightly notes, the Liberal Democrats are sweating and gasping their way through a paedophile sex scandal that has left no member of the party hierarchy unscathed. It’s intellectually really quite taxing to argue that coverage is better spent on this poor girl from UKIP.
But to get back to the issue at hand: personally, I’ve nothing against people learning hard lessons. What really sticks in my craw is the stinking hypocrisy of such selectively applied outrage.
I can’t help but wonder whether the Guardian would remain similarly silent were it a young Labour staffer’s baps being broadcast across the internet. Would they maintain a dignified distance from the prurience of the popular press, or would this ritual public humiliation have prompted gargantuan exegeses in the pages of Comment is Free?
Well. I think we all know the answer to that one.
Milo Yiannopoulos is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Kernel Magazine and author of the forthcoming book The Sociopaths of Silicon Valley. He tweets at @Nero
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