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We envy - and, simultaneously, despise - celebrities partly out of sexual frustration. We assume that, while we ourselves are forced to endure the monotony of licit marital relations, Hollywood money, fame, and power can buy even Botoxed has-beens and obese B-Listers enough sex to satisfy their presumably insatiable appetites. And yet the lengths to which stars are forced to go in order to commit meaningless indiscretions - opportunities that, with a little ingenuity, we ourselves are free to enjoy - paint a different picture altogether. David Beckham resorted to the ludicrous ruse of disguising his lover as a pizza delivery boy in order to sneak her past lurking paparazzi, while Jude Law had to settle for the girl nearest at hand, his au pair, who was summarily dismissed when one of her young charges reportedly caught the couple in flagrante delicto. Hugh Grant had nowhere to go but a seedy side street off of Sunset Boulevard where the LAPD spotted him through the fogged up windows of his BMW engaging in what Time facetiously called "felonious fellacious activity" with a prostitute named Divine (a canny businesswoman, as it turns out, who to this day thanks Grant for the shockingly modest fee he paid her, some $60 which, since her arrest in 1995, she has parlayed into several mülion, gamering a fortune through ads for perfume, lipstick, and lingerie). The most scandalous thing about celebrity sex scandals is not how promiscuous the rich and famous are but how limited their opportunities for sex seem to be and how false our impression that they are surrounded by seraglios of lecherous groupies and nymphomaniac chorines swinging from the chandeliers of their bachelor pads, desperate for a part in their next film. Sex scandals create an image of sexual scarcity and cautiousness quite different from our torrid image of Hollywood excess and hedonism.
Celebrity sex scandals play upon ancient stereotypes of the rapist aristocrat preying on vulnerable serfs: Lovelaces kidnapping Clarissas, D'Urbervilles seducing Tesses, Michael Jacksons plying pubescent boys with "Jesus Juice," Roman Polanskis raping Lolitas after sedating them with booze and Qualudes, Gary Glitters molesting Vietnamese girls he claims he slept with because he was teaching them English and, besides, they were afraid of ghosts. Reports of...