Reeva Steenkamp's corpse was in the morgue, her body was on the Sun's front page [View all]

[Blue_Tires]

Years ago I worked at the Sun, and I rem ember a man from the circulation department giving a presentation to editorial staff on how to maximise sales. The chastening upshot, for a paper whose employees preferred to think its market dominance was built solely on great stories, thrillingly told, was that birds mean business. Of course, you'd get a big sales spike with some sensational splash about the royal family or a footballer or whatever, but those were effectively few and far between, and if you wanted to ensure the regular, bread-and-butter circulation boosts on which the paper relied, a female celebrity in a bikini was what was needed, under whatever sub-newsy pretext you could devise. A list of names and numbers was passed round. And there it was in black and white. If you put a picture of Caprice on page 1 – and any old stock one was fine as long as she had very little on – you could guarantee a 30,000 uplift in sales. Nell McAndrew would get you 20,000. Geri Halliwell would do 10,000. They had maths for it and everything.

I wonder if that same circulation department were rubbing their hands, or their trousers, or whatever it is they rub, when they saw that the paper would be splashing on Friday with a huge picture of Reeva Steenkamp pulling down the zip of a bikini top, even as her corpse was lying in a Pretoria morgue awaiting a postmortem. Steenkamp was shot several times on Thursday, allegedly by her boyfriend Oscar Pistorius, with the incident swiftly and widely declared a tragedy for South Africa, for sport, and for disability rights. And – presumably to a lesser extent, because it was scarcely suggested in the scramble to get hold of bikini shots – for her family and friends.

The killing has yet to be described as a tragedy for women, probably because in the continual clustertragedy that constitutes female representation in the media, Steenkamp is just another casualty, who obligingly happened to be hot. That the story leading the news for the entire day of the One Billion Rising global action opposing violence against women concerned a woman being allegedly murdered by her partner was unfortunate. That the death was covered in the way it has been begins to look like something else. But nothing new, obviously.

His attention drawn to articles which appear to eroticise violence against women, Lord Justice Leveson concluded in his report that they "may" infringe the Press Complaints Commission code. Mmm. Perhaps we can stop hearing that women's liberation has Gone Too Far The Other Way when encouraging people to get their rocks off over dead or maimed ladies only "may" be a wrong thing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/reeva-steenkamp-body-on-front-page
http://www.theweek.co.uk/media/oscar-pistorius/51532/prescott-hits-sun%E2%80%99s-titillating-reeva-steenkamp-cover