So Amanda, why did you watch that vile tape?
The treatment of Tulisa over the 'sex tape' was cruel and unthinking
By Barbara Ellen,
Guardian It feels strange to be angry and disappointed in Amanda Holden. It feels like being let down by the little girl chalking on the blackboard on the old-fashioned test card. It feels like being angry at a sub-par bowl of Instant Whip. Amanda Holden sits on the panel of a television talent show. She's rather pretty and has always seemed quite sweet. Why on earth would anyone be angry or disappointed with her?
Except that on Alan Carr: Chatty Man last week, Holden giggled about how she'd watched the Tulisa Contostavlos "sex tape". The sex tape that is not a sex tape – the one where Tulisa is a teenage girl and her then boyfriend films her with him and later it goes public. If this private stolen moment is a "sex tape!", then you or I humming along to the radio is a Vegas dance routine.
Contostavlos was clearly still distressed about the tape on the same Alan Carr show the week before. But never mind that. After her sofa-mate David Walliams said he'd like to watch the tape, Holden smirked that she already had and that their Britain's Got Talent colleague Alesha Dixon had sent her the link: "It's a terrible thing to confess, but everyone wants to see it. It was her." The atmosphere was suddenly very sub-Dick Emery, along the lines of: "Ooh, aren't we awful?" Actually, Amanda, as women, you and Alesha truly are.
Let's be clear: the filming of Ms Contostavlos was not a sex tape. The sheen of showbiz does not alter the fact that the video of her performing a sex act was effectively trafficked. In this way, anyone viewing it is directly supporting the abuser and the abusive situation. Despite all this (the degradation of a young woman who's not only in their own profession but appears on another Simon Cowell show), the tape apparently became something for Holden and Dixon to girlie-bond over. It was as if the only acceptable response was to have a peek; that it would somehow be prudish not to watch grainy footage of a young girl unwittingly being set up.
Don't tell me that this is inconsequential. If porn terms make it clearer, what Holden and Dixon did was a high-profile act of girl-on-girl treachery, full-frontal female betrayal. What else could explain such shallow bitchery at another female's expense?
What hypocrites they both are. Holden received lots of female empathy when she had a horrible time with her pregnancies. Does she think that it was men feeling her pain? Similarly, many, including myself, felt that it was unfair to denounce Dixon as the villain of ageism, after she replaced Arlene Phillips on Strictly Come Dancing. Both women have been recipients of female support and goodwill on a national scale. How sad and ugly that this did not translate into ordinary human compassion for Tulisa.
When will high-profile women learn that if they don't stick up for each other, then no one else will? How difficult is it to refuse to engage with misogynistic bullying? To refuse to view such an artefact and explain that you know the difference between a "must-see" YouTube footage of, say, a puppy being silly and the public humiliation of a young woman?
Oddly, Holden made some reference to females supporting each other on the same chat show, moments before smirking about the sex tape. Clearly, she doesn't realise that feminism, at its purest, is women simply trying to look out for each other, something she and Dixon could have done, instead of what they did do. Maybe it was this – the offhand cruelty – that made this female-on-female betrayal such an unedifying spectacle. Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. To borrow from Britain's Got Talent, where female solidarity is concerned, I'm buzzing Holden and Dixon off.
