Imogen Thomas: vixen, victim or symptom of the disease?

Shining star, or burnt out?

Over the past few weeks there have been two main themes in the tabloids: the right royal wedding (aka Pippa Middleton's bum) and the right royal scandal of the Ryan Giggs-Imogen Thomas affair. Both stories suggest peculiarly British traits of media consumption - like our soap operas suggest, we are obsessed with other people's dirty laundry and, as if we have never grown beyond our collective Carry On film phase, we are obsessed with boobs and bums and all things so mundanely and so Britishly bawdy.

Ryan Giggs cheated on his wife with a glamour model. This tit-bit of intrigue is now public property, and it seemingly takes precedent over his twenty year career at the absolute peak of English football. Our future monarch has a new wife - we have a new potential queen - but what matters is that her sister is well fit.

As Pippa Middleton has done nothing to attract such attention (other than happening to have a sister who married a prince and happening to have a rather nice bottom), let's leave her out of this debate. Let's focus instead on Miss Thomas. To the anonymous death-threateners from cyberspace, she is an abhorrent slut. A home-wrecker. A fame-hungry whore. That, of course, is only one side of the argument. The other extremity is that she is the victim. Used by Giggs. Persecuted by the society that created her, and all those other wannabes like her. The truth, as ever, probably lies somewhere in the middle.



Charlotte Jackson

 Yes, her moral code appears to be somewhere roughly around the gutter - but is that her fault? Allow me to preempt various possible feminist readings of this story here: Imogen Thomas is symptomatic of British culture. She is a victim of a male-driven media's lust for flesh. Only women who sexualise themselves can 'get anywhere' in the pop-culture. These points are valid. In a previous post, I commented on how Sky Sports'  presenters include an overly high proportion of attractive young women (such as Charlotte Jackson, who was at the centre of the Andy Gray sacking furore). Miriam O'Reilly, at that time, won a landmark case for feminism and age equality. Since then she has been rehired by the BBC to film a documentary about herself and, it seems, very little else. She is not sexy enough for Prime Time TV - Jackson and co. are the future.

But it is not enough to write off Thomas, in broad, structuralist terms, as a victim of society. She is an individual. She makes her own decisions. She has at least some input in to the path she treads. She chose to appear on Big Brother - which brought her in to the public eye - and chose to pose in Lads Mags and to date sports stars: Ryan Giggs was not the first. The reason for these choices lies in the previous paragraph - she felt she had to do this if she wanted to 'get anywhere' in show-business. This is indeed symptomatic of a culture in which 'stars' are born without any discernible talent and hyped up to the supernova of fame, before burning out, breaking down and, ultimately, disappearing.



Sex sells

This is a societal disease, that much is true. The afore-mentioned blog featuring Charlotte Jackson included a picture sourced from Bing Images, of Miss Jackson in a rather revealing bikini. That image has generated more traffic to this site than any other article, picture, link or tag. Some five months after it was posted, there are still more weekly visitors to that picture than there are to the rest of the site combined. The Bing Images pictures in this post will probably do the same - of course, I would probably rather have people actually reading the blog but, hey, that's life! In modern media, it seems, sex sell more than ever.

Nevertheless, Thomas could have chosen another path. She could have become a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer or anything else she wanted, or, if access to the requisite education was not available to her, she could have gone to work in a bar or an office or a factory. The problem is simple: everyone wants to be famous. Great artists and honest professional alike hone their skills, not for the pursuit of the fame but for the love of their endeavour. Thomas does not even have any skills to hone, only her mortal body, which will age and wither and ultimately die. She has already had a boob-job to improve its longevity. But how long can she deny the tide of age? She is young and beautiful now, and lives on that. What will she do when she is Miriam O'Reilly's age?

Unlike Charlotte Jackson, Thomas doesn't have a craft. While Jackson's looks may have propelled her career, she is also good at her job. She is a trained professional. As such, her star may yet shine brightly beyond the glamour of her youth. Thomas is not even talented enough, or hard-working enough, for that - she simply makes her money through column inches and professional self-exposure.




Stony-faced

It must be horrible to be hated by strangers - even more so because, on a purely human level, married-man Giggs is far more at fault than she is. But this is the life Imogen Thomas chose - fame, wealth and the adulation and derision that constitutes modern-day celebrity. This is the path she chose. That is why it is hard to feel sorry for her when she sobs her way through morning television shows, or looks stony-faced outside the court-room. She didn't have it coming. She doesn't deserve it. But she did go out and get it.



Crocodile tears, or genuine remorse?

Even if the tears are genuine (about which I am, at best, dubious), perhaps she weeps because she realises that she has made her own bed, with some very famous notches on the post, and now she has to lie in it. Perhaps she realises that her amoral, materially-driven life is not the ticket to happiness she once thought. Perhaps she wishes she was just a bar-maid in a Welsh local, with a nice, normal boyfriend, wedding plans and a future based on more old-fashioned notions of contentedness: family and friends, a stable home-life and just enough money to get by on.

******************************************************************************

Oh, and for those of you who have accidentally stumbled across this site whilst looking for pics of lovely Imogen, and can't really be bothered with distractions like words and thoughts and general opinion-making, here's some more tits. And Pippa Middleton's bum. Enjoy!