Racy motor racing story
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A bit of news caught my eye earlier, sort of vaguely connected with the world of Formula One motor racing. Which is not something I'm interested in, at all. I've never seen the point of Formula One. I suppose the cars that they use might be seen as quite nifty, if you were a ten year old boy. You might think "Ooh, that car's wicked, man, n ting", and you might ask your mum to buy you a duvet with a picture of the car on it, or have posters of the car on your wall, and that would be fine - there'd be nothing wrong with that, because you'd be ten. But to a grown up, I really don't see the appeal of Formula One. To me, it looks very much like some men in expensive cars driving round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round a racetrack. And then, stopping. It's repetitive, it's noisy, it's repetitive, and if you like Formula One motor racing or are interested in it in any way, and you're not ten years old, I'd have to say that there's probably something wrong with you. But something mildly interesting that is vaguely connected to Formula One did actually happen this week. You may have seen the story. It doesn't involve cars, but it does involve a video of the multi-millionaire son of a wannabe fascist dictator indulging in paid-for spanky sex with women who were allegedly dressed as Nazis. Now I don't see anything particularly wrong with that; what people do in their private lives is their business, and people's sexual proclivities rarely have any bearing on their ability to do their jobs, so the details of what Mr Max Mosley was doing are totally irrelevant. But it's interesting because of the furore it has provoked in the otherwise crushingly tedious world of motor racing. The heads of several organisations involved with Formula One have been quick to criticise Mr Mosley, saying that ought to be ashamed of himself for bringing the industry into disrepute. It's quite funny to hear spokespeople for major car manufacturers claiming a moral high ground; the car is arguably the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet - after human beings, obviously - it's very hard to think of an invention that has had a bigger impact on the environment than the car. So, amusing to see a bunch of men who have grown rich from its glorification vilifying one of their colleagues over his lack of moral standards. It's also difficult to know exactly what the pious defenders of Formula One are complaining about. They surely can't be offended by the idea of hiring women to dress in a manner that's arousing to a male audience, because I just had a quick look at the ITV Formula One website just now, and there's quite an extensive collection of photographs of what they call their "Pit Babes", who are attractive young women in bikinis. So the marketing of women as a sexual commodity is obviously not what's offended them. If it's the sadomasochistic aspect of the affair, then I'd refer again to Formula One itself - because to actually watch an entire race, with all its noise and repetition and sheer Sisyphusian pointlessness, and derive any pleasure from it, you would have to be a masochist. And you'd need to be a sadist to put it on television. So again, pot, kettle, black. I wonder if the real reason that all these ultra-rich polluters and despoilers of nature are angry is that if one of them is caught being a bit naughty in an (allegedly) Nazi-themed brothel, it might make the public suspect that the rest of them are also turned on by that kind of thing. And while they sleep perfectly soundly with the knowledge that their business activities directly affect the delicate balance of life on earth, the idea that people might find out that they're perverts fills them with dread. I'm not saying that they are perverts, by the way. Just that they might be. |
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