Megan Stammers: Our Unquenchable Thirst for Melodrama
Poor Megan Stammers was on the front page of my newspaper this morning. With her gloppy mascara and her teenaged colour rinse.
Were we running low on child murders or pedophiles this week? Because how a 15-year old’s “hot for teacher” crush and a 30-year old’s total lapse of good judgement has become front page news astounds me.
Remember that no one is alleging that anything terrible has happened to her. She’s off on a madcap trip to France with her stupid math teacher for a little hankie pankie. I suspect she might have easily been any one of us: gullible, romantic, drawn to the forbidden star-crossed lovers story.
What the hell has happened to us? How did we sink so low as to consider this even entertainment, much less national news? Has all this consumption of Twilight novels and too much Fifty Shades of Grey turned us into irrational imbeciles?
THIS IS REAL LIFE – not a fucking soap opera!
What began as a desperate flee to love on the part of two quite stupid people has now become everyone’s titillating breakfast reading, thanks to parents who obviously craved the media spotlight and a press that seems to have no ability to exercise any level of journalistic integrity anymore.
Now, of course, one can imagine there are some very frightening and paranoid discussions being had between a 30-year old married teacher and a 15-year old with little experience in romantic entanglements and less in PR damage control.
Between the parents and the press, they’ve escalated what would have ended in mutual disinterest into a psychological nightmare.
All to feed our unquenchable thirst for melodrama. Something has gone terribly wrong with us.
” Something has gone terribly wrong with us. ”
Hasn’t it always been like this? People have the chance to pontificate, to be pious and holier-than-thou; to be titillated, to bring out the same tired old morality; to be utterly smug.
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Really? Did the the journalistic world report every elopement to Gretna Green as frontpage news? Since when?
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Perhaps, maybe, I don’t know. But isn’t there a reference to eloping to Gretna Green in Pride and Prejudice — though Mr Wickham and Lydia were caught by Mr Darcy before they could. But surely if the concept of eloping to Gretna was sufficiently well known a couple of hundred years ago for Jane to have felt able to include it in her novel, there must have been publicity or public knowledge about it. I just think that attitudes haven’t changed much since then.
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Yes, but that was supposed to be dramatic narrative, not news.
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True, but it wouldn’t have had any impact if the readers didn’t know what it referred to. P&P only came out 70 years or so after Lord Thingy’s marriage act, and her readers would have been well aware how to avoid it by eloping. And they would have been made aware, I guess, through the yellow press. In other words, the press then thought that elopements etc then were newsworthy (titillation, gossip etc). I’m really saying that things haven’t changed in 200 years, that “scandal” and so forth sells papers. Plus ça change.
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Oh hurray! At last! Someone else with a bit of common sense on this. I completely agree that there has been an overreaction to this story. Poor Anne Diamond said something similar on Sky News last night – that it was a romantic jaunt and we should leave them to it – and she has been hugely criticised for it.
But really… I think he is a bit daft, but not bad. And they will either come back having fallen even further in love (in which case good luck to them), or the reality of a week in close confinement breathing each other’s morning breath and farts will have killed off all the romance of the thing and it’ll be over.
The only sad bit for me is that fifty years ago they could have done exactly the same and Megan would then have had the choice about whether to tell the story of ‘the time she ran away’ to her grandchildren or not. The Internet and press coverage mean that choice has been taken away from her and the story will likely follow her around for a long time whether she likes it or not.
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