World motorsport boss Max Mosley has won a legal action against a Sunday newspaper over claims an orgy he took part in had Nazi overtones [...]

Mr Justice Eady said he could expect privacy for consensual “sexual activities (albeit unconventional)”.

BBC News

Then, on Radio 5 Live (my very favourite radio station), I heard some people attempt to justify the investigation into his private live, on the grounds that it was sleazy and tawdry. No, no and no.

[The remainder of this discussion may cover topics of an explicit sexual nature. Please do not read on, or at least remember you were warned, if you are liable to be offended]

Firstly, Max Mosley’s father was the fascist Oswald Mosley. Get that? It was his father. It wasn’t him. So while I find Oswald Mosley’s ideals and politics abhorrent to me, I cannot and will not hold his son responsible for them and judge against them on that basis.

Secondly, he’s some sort of motorsport bigwig. Except that he’s such a big wig that I’d never actually heard of him prior to the News of the World thingy suddenly being picked up by the rest of the press.

So the suggestion from the tabloids that the story was ‘in the public interest’ is fatally flawed. It might interest members of the public, but ‘in the public interest’ means ‘for the greater good of the public’ and it serves no useful purpose for the public to know about what Max gets up to in his spare time.

Where I would agree that a story was in the public interest was if a politician or similar public figure publicly espoused one particular thing (e.g. a politician demanding that the country should live up to a high moral standard, or that everyone should uphold the law) and then finding that they don’t necessarily feel that applies to them (e.g. Cameron’s red-light gaffe — although to give him credit, he’s quite happy to acknowledge he was wrong and made a mistake).

Whatever sexual activities consenting adults want to get up to in private is surely up to them. If people get their jollies from being tied up, dominated, spanked or whatever, or from tying someone else up and dominating them, and both parties consent to that activity, then how is that hurting anyone else? Why do people feel the need to consider it ‘deviant’?

As far as I can see, all Max did wrong was to be unfaithful to his wife. And that is still a wrong, as far as I am concerned, but it’s a private wrong, and should not be made public in such a way. And it may even not have been a wrong if he was going off and getting his jollies that way with his wife’s consent… and in any case, what has it got to do with the rest of us?

Do you think it’s right to ‘out’ gays because it’s in the public interest to know? Is it right to out adulterers? Is it right to out alcoholics? What about anyone who has ever been to a prostitute? What about anyone who has ever used drugs? What about … (ah, you make up your own list)

Again: no, no, no and no.

It is only ‘in the public interest’ if they have a public persona and that public persona is a lie because they behave differently in private. I’d like to see if the lives of our tabloid journalists and newspapers would survive such scrutiny as they place on others they deem ‘fair game’. Surely we have a right to know about those telling us the news — controlling the flows of information we receive — at least as much as other public figures, if not more? Or are journalists above their own law?

And really, it’s time we all grew up about sex. It’s not dirty. We don’t need to be ashamed about it. That doesn’t mean we need to suddenly all discuss our sexual proclivities either, because that’s no-one else’s business, but we’d better remember that before we start labelling people as ‘deviant’, that it’s not that small a minority of people we’re talking about, if we’re looking at what reports tells us:

one US study suggests 11% of women and 14% of men have engaged in BDSM – an abbreviation for bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism and masochism [...] If those figures are translated to the UK, it could mean around four million people have tried BDSM.BBC News [2]

More than one in ten. Consenting. Adults. In Private. What’s the fucking problem here? Why do we have such a big hang-up about it? Why can’t we just let people be themselves instead of trying to push them along some kind of societal railroad that insists everyone must behave in a particular way?

Maybe, if asked, I would be one of those sorts of people who might want to insist that society does exactly what I tell it, or I will need to punish it rather severely. Ahem. Or maybe not. But what does it matter?