Is the Public Really So Interested in Sex Scandal?

The conventional wisdom has long held that "sex sells" and that the broad public has a profound fascination with "celebrity." Accordingly it seems entirely natural for the media to devote immense amounts of time to the coverage of "sex scandals."

However, as the turn of advertising in recent years demonstrated, the reality is more complicated than this rationale. It isn't "sex" that sells, but the "sex-y." And there is far more difference of opinion in the world about what is "sexy" than what is just "sex"--with this mattering because what people personally find to be sex but at the same time un-sexy is so repellent to them that they become outraged at the media showing it to them at all. And it is the case that a great deal of sex scandal is un-sexy in the extreme.

At the same time it seems that the fascination with celebrity just isn't what it used to be, with this going not just for many kinds of celebrity specifically (thus have we had the decline of the movie star and the supermodel and the sports star) but celebrity itself. The result would seem to be that, however much particular cases may confuse matters (pop singers admittedly do better than most, certainly to go by who the public Googles), the doings of celebrities are also a matter of declining interest for them.

Of course, one may respond to that by pointing out (as media critics have done since at least Thorstein Veblen, that the news media does not orient itself to the public at large, but rather a more limited portion of it--the portion that pays for subscriptions, the portion that advertisers most want to reach, a layer not too old or too young, comparatively affluent, and a good many other things going with all that besides. This is all the more the case given the importance of the Internet in the media world of today, and the subtler but still profound role of the "digital divide" in contemporary life--and that those who do spend lots and lots of time online differ in important ways from the rest of the public, in part because of what they bring to the web, but perhaps also because of how so much use of the web shapes their outlook. Still, it does at least go to show that the matter is more complicated than the truism might have it--and call into question just how much the attention to sex scandal is a matter of the media "Giving the people what they want" rather than the media "Giving the people what it wants to give them," in line with its ample motive to stress such fare.