Sophie Heawood: Boring! Capturing yourself in the act is too normal and too easy
Tulisa Contostavlos has broken the mould - she does not need to sell sex to get to the top
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Your support makes all the difference.Some friends of mine, a couple, once stayed at my flat for a few weeks while they waited for their wedding and their new house to be sorted out. One day the woman went out, leaving her laptop open on the kitchen table. Her screensaver was a slideshow of all her photos, and so, as I pottered around the flat, I kept glancing at her holiday snaps whizzing past. Along with a shot of her eyes boggling over her future husband's member, which was rammed in her mouth at the time.
That happy sight floated back into my mind this week when popstar and TV presenter Tulisa Contostavlos won a High Court verdict against her ex-boyfriend Justin Edwards, who had released a private video of them and sold it online. He denied releasing the sex tape, suggesting it came from Tulisa herself.
She was soon accused of trying to boost her career, not to mention being a slag. Into every celebrity's life, a little kiss 'n' tell must fall. But Tulisa wasn't taking this one lying down – well, not again.
Against the advice of her managers and publicists, she took to the internet to declare otherwise. She gave interviews to declare otherwise. And then, she went to the High Court to declare otherwise, and won. He confessed. She paid her lawyers and went on holiday to Ibiza to celebrating her victory and turning 24. It's nothing short of extraordinary.
As is evidenced by my friends, it's pretty normal nowadays to digitally capture yourselves in the act. In fact, it's too normal, and too easy, because it often ends badly for the woman, who doesn't seem to realise that if a bloke can pass this around his friends, he probably will, and it will royally mess things up for her in the end. It shouldn't, but it will.
Tulisa doesn't regret her relationship with that man, she doesn't regret making a sex tape, but she regrets trusting him. And so she's hammered her point home and made quite clear that, unlike Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, she worked for a decade on a career before this came out. She's never got her boobs out for men's mags, and there's a world of difference between her dressing up for a pop video and selling sex to get to the top.
Frankly, for a glamorous female celeb in her early twenties – who's a gossip mag staple – she's broken the mould. Selling sex is so boring. Well done.
Twitter: @heawood
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