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While I agree with this on some levels, I do think that the video can be framed in more than one way.
For someone who enjoys dressing up in womens' clothing and giving oral sex to other men, participating in this activity is not degrading, for fairly obvious reasons. However, as far as we know, Mr Tony is a heterosexual Christian who tends to wear traditional male clothing as a matter of course and choice. Moreover, he also portrays himself as a traditional male father/authority figure, both in his capacities as Prime Minister and in relation to his family in the media. Therefore, for _him_ to be seen to be compelled to engage in this activity can be seen as a degrading situation. Furthermore, the nature of the compulsion seems to be that of economic desperation leading to prostitution. Again (although this is a far less clear-cut area), I can conceive of a situation where someone exchanges sexual favours for money entirely by choice for their own reasons. However, again, the Blair-puppet seems to be compelled to behave in a (for the reasons above) degrading manner because he needs "money"/to maintain the "special relationship" can be seen as insulting to Blair himself without necessarily playing on the anti-prostitution*/transvestite/homosexual prejudices of people watching the video. I think the idea is that the video is meant to shock because in it, the Blair-puppet behaves privately, for his own gain, in a way that seems to be directly opposed to everything he stands for in public. Moreover, this is not the crude "oh look, Blair and Bush are up each other's ARSES. That's DISGUSTING and they are BAD"-type rhetoric of certain newspaper cartoons - the "ejaculation" at the end of the video is petrol, from a petrol pump, which shows that this is _not_ a human homosexual coupling: "Bush" is not motivated by a perfectly understandable human sexual desire, but some sort of perverse wish to, er, spray everything with (dirty, polluting) oil in order to demonstrate his masculinity. Finally, it's noteable that the Blair-figure is a _puppet_, and as such does not strictly have gender (although it does of course have _perceived_ gender), but the Bush-figure is a faceless human. Because neither figure in the video is motivated by sexual desire, and a sexual act is not, in fact, performed, it could easily be interpreted as an attack on these leaders because they privately betray the self-created expectations of their electorates, rather than because they engage in symbolic homosexual sex. Although of course it could be read that way, which is indeed worrying.
*Difficult to phrase this one, as I consider myself generally "against prostitution", in that I consider it tragic that someone is reduced to such an activity against their will, but consider the activity of exchanging sex for money (while not something I would engage in myself) to be morally neutral in and of itself. I think |
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