<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Of the recent spate of celeb naked photo leaks, only one has caused someone to lose their current job. Yes, Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Kardashian, Anna Kendrick, Selena Gomez and Cara Delevingne have all had to get their heads around the grubby idea that some sad souls have invested time and effort in wheedling their naked photos out of a cloud and plonking them on the world&amp;#039;s internet dining table for all to pick over. But only Brooks Newmark \u2013 ex-Minister for Civil Society \u2013 has had to quit over the outing of his naked pictures. I&amp;#039;m not a fan of Newmark (anyone who thinks charities should be &amp;quot;sticking to their knitting&amp;quot; and stay out of politics when austerity has left charities scrambling to deliver vital services that would otherwise simply disappear needs a head test, not the ministerial portfolio for charities, durrr) and I do think whacking pictures of your veg on social media displays vanity, poor judgement and a plain old rude disregard for your wife. However, the fact a married Tory MP was happy to snap his bits and DM them to a woman on Twitter should be a wake-up call. This is \u2013 like it or not \u2013 part of how humans with the horn now interact. No, it&amp;#039;s not as poetic as a love letter, but we&amp;#039;re just going to have get over it. A poll by our sister title US Cosmo found that 89% of young women have taken naked selfies and of those, 82% would happily do so again. It&amp;#039;s mainstream, normcore behaviour that even Tory MPs are getting in on. The trouble is that to most people born before 1985, it seems unnecessary, embarrassing, vain and dim-witted. And the problem is that the vast majority of influencers who operate in politics and the media were born before 1985. They&amp;#039;re old. They don&amp;#039;t get it. Hence Newmark not even bothering to defend his behaviour. Can you imagine the frothing, redfaced outrage from the Daily Mail had he not gone? It just wasn&amp;#039;t worth the aggro. But it leaves us with a big problem. All the political parties agree that they could do with more normal people among their ranks. People who previously had a job that wasn&amp;#039;t being a wonk or a SpAd or a speech writer. People who might be women. People who might be not be white. People who might never in a million years have even considered politics as a job for them because it all just seems so fusty and suity and shouty and horrible. People who might have bandied about naked selfies. People who might have Facebook pages littered with pictures of them drunk, doing stupid things. People who might have spouted opinions they no longer hold. People who might have taken drugs, or knocked about with the &amp;#039;wrong&amp;#039; crowd. People who might have ditched school or been unemployed for a while. In other words, just people who might have lived their lives blissfully unaware that one day, they would decide to stand up for what they believe in, and \u2013 buoyed by the agreement of some others \u2013 have a crack at getting in on this suity, shouty, horrible game called politics. If taking explicit photographs is incompatible with a political career then we&amp;#039;re about to run out of potential MPs. We&amp;#039;re effectively ruling out 90% of young people from ever taking part in politics. Which is nuts. It&amp;#039;s hypocritical of the media to widely dismiss politicians as &amp;#039;fake,&amp;#039; &amp;#039;robotic&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;boring&amp;#039; if we then react with abject HORROR AND OUTRAGE when we discover they may have made some dodgy decisions in their personal life. Of course, we should expect our elected MPs to act with decency and respect once in office but wouldn&amp;#039;t you rather be ruled over by MPs who were people before they were politicians? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/reports/news/a30089/why-naked-selfies-could-sort-out-politics-a-bit/>