Lara Bingle's nudie blues

Lara Bingle nude.

I really dislike the approach the Sydney Morning Herald is taking with its story on Lara Bingle, who, the SMH reports, is proceeding with her lawsuit against cheap'n'grotty men's mag Zoo Weekly "even though she appeared nude in Germany's GQ magazine".

Oh dear god- I just googled 'Lara Bingle GQ' and reached the Daily Telecrap article on the matter. The Tele have done the typical tabloid finger-wagging, before linking to the nudie-pictures for all their undoubtedly morally outraged readers. They're quite good pictures, by the way, although it appears that most of the photos aren't even of Bingle. You can enjoy the nudie pictures here without having to wade through the Telecrap warning links.

The angle that the SMH and Daily Telecrap are taking on this seems to me to be in a similar vein to the approach that defense lawyers in rape cases use, where if the victim is not a virgin, or (god forbid) has had sex recently, they may as well be spreading their legs for the entire country; in this case, you pose nude once and suddenly it's a free-for-all: you have no right to complain about the pervert with the mobile phone taking photos of you in the shopping centre toilet cubicles because you posed nude, let alone complain about a lowbrow men's mag.

On the other hand, Bingle and her lawyers really aren't doing anything to disabuse us of the notion that posing nude is for skanks, given their claim in the lawsuit that the publication of Bingle's photo shoot in Zoo sent the message that she was "prepared to demean herself for money by being photographed scantily clad for a smutty men's magazine". That pretty much implies that every girl who chooses to pose in one of those magazines is demeaning herself, and that's quite an offensive claim.

Speaking generally, as I have never read a Zoo Weekly magazine, the lowbrow mens mags (FHM, Ralph and Zoo) habitually accompany their photographs of women with crude commentary and innuendo. Playboy, GQ and other so-called 'high-end' magazines, do not. That's not to say there is anything wrong with a photograph of a scantily-clad woman being accompanied by smutty commentary so long as she is fine with it. Clearly, in Lara Bingle's case, she's not.

As soon as she gained some notoriety for her appearance in the tourism board's "Where the bloody hell are you?" campaign, the photographer who owned the shots shopped them to Zoo. I'm aware that the photographer owns the copyright to his images, and quite likely the right to shop them around without Lara Bingle's consent. That would probably depend on the kind of release she signed. It doesn't seem quite right, whatever the legalities are, that photographs of her should appear in a magazine such as Zoo with a tagline implying that she posed specifically for the magazine. The magazine, of course, should have the right to buy whatever pictures are on the market, but that doesn't mean it should be a free-for-all on smutty commentary about the model.

Unless Zoo readers are really so dumb that they haven't got the imagination to manufacture their own smutty commentary.

Not Lara Bingle but hey, it's a nice photo.