Something's not quite right with the Meg White sex tape | Music

Publish date: 2022-04-10
Music blogMusic

Something's not quite right with the Meg White sex tape

Is it really her? And why is it always tapes of female celebrities that attract the most attention?


Icky hump? Was that Meg White in the sex tape? Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

From the little we've been able to glean about her, Meg White didn't seem the kind of rock star who would ever generate the headline "Meg White sex tape furore" - yet there it is on nme.com, which helpfully provides four stills from said tape. The "furore", which is in response to a grainy video of a woman who may or may not be the White Stripes drummer enjoying the company of a male friend, has divided viewers into two camps.

One refuses to believe it's actually White, while the other is convinced it is, and reacts with typical pubescent lairy behaviour. Within the latter group is a faction that thinks the leaking of the tape is the real reason the White Stripes cancelled upcoming US and UK tours, rather than the official explanation, which was that Meg was suffering "acute anxiety".

It makes you wonder. No, not about whether it's her on the tape (personally, I can't imagine the unnervingly introverted White cutting loose in quite this way), but about why the explanation would be questioned. Perhaps it's because conditions such as "exhaustion" often turn out to be euphemisms for something more scandalous (just as "I was researching a film role" has become the standard excuse for really off-the-wall behaviour).

But "anxiety" figures so rarely as a reason for cancelling a commitment that it rings true. Furthermore, the idea that Meg would duck out of touring because the public now know what she looks like without clothes doesn't wash. The woman is a rock drummer - she has more backbone than that. The doubters should just accept that, to misquote Freud, sometimes anxiety is just anxiety.

You have to ask, though, why it's always the sex tapes featuring female celebrities that go round the internet like wildfire. The most recent celeb to be so immortalised is Vanessa Hudgens of Disney's sickly High School Musical, who posed for "intimate" pictures that found their way online. The resultant uproar jeopardised her job, and she was forced to issue a grovelling apology.

The handful of male pop stars who've been filmed sexing - Tommy Lee and Dane Bowers are the only ones I can think of - don't attract anywhere near the amount of attention as Hudgens and her sisters-in-celluloid Paris Hilton, Lee's ex-wife Pamela Anderson and (possibly) White. (The exception is the notorious R Kelly tape, which apparently features an underage girl - but had she been an adult, it would have passed with little comment.) Why is that, I wonder?

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