If Brooks Newmark didn’t want these photos leaked, why did he email them?

So it now seems pretty clear to me that we can no longer send women photographs of our genitals without worrying that we might be the subject of some horrible sting operation and consequently suffer public humiliation and possibly lose our jobs. One by one, the harmless little pleasures in life are being withdrawn from us. It is even being said that we would be wise not to photograph our own genitals at all, let alone send the snaps to anyone, because a third party might somehow acquire them and cause us mischief. If this is true, I am not sure how I am going to pass the long winter evenings ahead, when we become enveloped in darkness. Read a book, I suppose. But that is hardly the same sort of thrill, even if the book is by Will Hutton. The whole problem has been caused by a woman who does not exist. The Conservative MP Brooks Newmark is today in the news for a second offence similar to his first: sent a photograph of his penis to a wraith, a phantom, a figment of a strange person’s imagination. The supposed woman, ‘Sophie Wittams’, a ‘twenty-something Tory PR girl’, was actually a male freelance journalist working for the Sunday Mirror. This Sophie was created, visually, by a composite of various women, none of whom had given their permission. The face was that of a Swedish model called Malin Sahlen. The bikini-clad torso belonged to a woman from Lincolnshire called Charlene Tyler. Charlene is angry at the newspaper — perhaps for very good moral reasons, or possibly, at the back of her mind, there is pique at having been used only for the torso shot and she fears that the Sunday Mirror journalist considers her a ‘Bobfoc’. That’s a term from Viz magazine meaning ‘Body offBaywatch, face off Crimewatch.’