Emily Ratajkowski's blurred lines

Emily Ratajkowski, who was one of the models roped in to Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines project, has been doing a bit of an "I don't see what the fuss about" interview.

She was talking while promoting the Zac Effron film We Are Your Friends at the time, so it's almost as if she's drawn to career-limiting moments.

On Blurred Lines, she called it the "bane of her existence":

"Now, it’s the bane of my existence. When anyone comes up to me about 'Blurred Lines', I'm like, are we seriously talking about a video from three years ago?"

Which is ironic, because whenever anyone spots him at his current job at the Chick-fil-a, Robin Thicke hopes someone will ask him about Blurred Lines.

Ratajkowski also spoken about the amount of nudity in the clip, saying, "It's weird to me that the reaction to a woman’s naked body is so controversial in our culture."

"My mum taught me to never apologise for my sexuality. My dad never made me feel embarrassed. I also don’t think I’ve ever had an awareness of my own body as being super-sexual. It was always just my body."

Obviously, yes, being naked isn't a bad thing and being ashamed of your body is terrible. But Emily's being a bit disingenuous here - it's hard to see how she could have been so surprised that the level of nudity was a problem when they had her film a completely separate version with her clothes on.

More importantly, it's the context of the nudity and the way that the women had no clothes on, and the men did. And the way the men interacted with the women. It's such a blatant piece of sexist crap that it could almost have been designed as a starting point for GCSE essays on the male gaze. So clunky and easy to grasp are the problems with Blurred Lines video that it could have been made by Fisher Price as My First Sexist Problems.

It's not that there was a problem with your body, Emily. It's the way it was used. And that's why you're probably going to find people asking you about it for years to come.

Amfar makes a curious choice

Amfar - the AIDS/HIV charity co-founded by Elizabeth Taylor - held a fundraiser in Hong Kong on Saturday.

Which is fine. Going where the money is. That makes sense.

But hang on... what was the entertainment?

HONG KONG – Robin Thicke serenaded a star-studded audience at the amfAR gala in Hong Kong on Saturday night with “Blurred Lines,” just four days after a jury in Los Angeles ordered the singer and Pharrell Williams to pay about $7.4 million to the family of Marvin Gaye, concluding that the pair’s 2013 hit song copied parts of Mr. Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up.”

Really, Amfar? You're raising money to fight against the spread of HIV by getting someone to sing a song about how it's so tricky not raping people? Do we not worry about judgement once we're out and about?

Blurred credit lines

I suppose that's going to have wiped the Happy off Pharrell Williams' face, as a US court rule he and Robin Thicke ripped off Marvin Gaye.

A jury decided that the music in rohyp-hop hit Blurred Lines was lifted from Gaye, and ordered a payment of nearly five million quid in damages to go to Gaye's estate.

Presumably, Gaye's family will spend most of this money on legal fees trying to get his name taken off the credits again.

Because that's not much of a victory, is it? Sure, you've got the proof that you were plagiarised, but now that crappy song is going to carry a credit that Marvin Gaye helped write it.

It's like you've broken into your the office your boss uses, and done a massive anonymous poo in the middle of their desk. But then discover that Molly from accounts is saying that she did it. You'd feel obligated to put everyone right, no matter how much you don't really want to be associated with the still-steaming turd. It might be an unpleasant pile of stinky old cack, but you'd be damned if someone else is going to pass it off as their work.

There's the potential for more problems for Thicke and Williams, as now the question of who wrote the music has been settled, they're at risk of being sued by the Friends Of Roman Polanski for lifting the lyrics from them.

Robin Thicke out of it while Blurred Lines was created

Apparently Robin Thicke was on drugs while Blurred Lines was being made:

R&B singer Robin Thicke said he was high on painkillers and alcohol in 2013 when "Blurred Lines" became a hit, and he exaggerated his contribution to writing the song, according to court papers filed on Monday.

Thicke, 37, said in a deposition in April that he had been largely absent during the composition of "Blurred Lines," due to being under the influence of opioid painkiller Vicodin mixed with alcohol.

I can see why you might want to claim that you were too drunk to remember writing the rape song; what's questionable is just how off his face he must have been to think it was alright in the first place.

Related: Pharrell Williams, now being given more of the 'credit' for the song, doesn't have the excuse of being too drunk to know what he was doing.

VH1 has questions for Robin Thicke

Given that Robin Thicke is, at best, a howling misogynistic void, was VH1 being brave or satirical when it decided to invite Twitter to ask questions of him?

Have a burning question for @robinthicke? Submit your ?s for tomorrow's Twitter Q+A using #AskThicke! pic.twitter.com/LwWKWlBysg

— VH1 (@VH1) June 30, 2014

They must have known.

#AskThicke immurement or scaphism? Gonna give you a choice, which is more than you've done for any woman.

— Another Angry Woman (@stavvers) June 30, 2014

They must have known.

And when did you decide that the Creepy PE Teacher look was the style for you? #AskThicke

— Scriblit (@Scriblit) June 30, 2014

There's no way they couldn't have known what the outcome would have been.

How many times have you ignored and badgered women who said no? #AskThicke

— Amadi (@amaditalks) June 30, 2014

We've seen so many of these hashtag campaigns now, how would you not know?

On a scale of R. Kelly to Phil Spector, how do you intend to "Get Her Back?" #AskThicke

— Rachel McKibbens (@RachelMcKibbens) June 30, 2014

Which can only mean one thing.

#AskThicke So given how you still have a career, think folks will admit we live in an abuser culture?

— 김재영 (@jazzagold) June 30, 2014

This is pretty much the result VH1 was expecting.

How's your own personal feminist movement based on trivializing consent & promoting rape apology going these days? @robinthicke #AskThicke

— Shelby Knox (@ShelbyKnox) June 30, 2014

Which means there's only one logical explanation.

#askthicke when you "wrote" Blurred Lines did you do a jump and say "wow! Men and those other objects are going to love this!"?

— Neil Webb (@trialsoflife) July 1, 2014

Someone at VH1 came up with a plan to focus all the world's disgust with Robin Thicke into one place. And then make him look at it.

Who knew that VH1 still had a vital role to play in 2014?

It turns out being drooled over by Robin Thickie is a career move

So, you thought being in Robin Thickie's Not Raping Can Be So Confusing video would be a dead end for Emily Ratajkowski. Well, how wrong you were.

As a direct result of her part in Blurred Lines, Emily can now move on from being perved over with a new job, erm, posing for Sports Illustrated annual swimwear edition. I suppose at least she gets to wear some clothes this time.

By the way, there's apparently some people who think that Thicke's video didn't promote appalling attitudes towards women. Here's the opening words from Pedestrian's article about Emily:

Living Venus Emily Ratajkowski, who is credited as the #1 Boner Catalyst of 2013 for her emphatic performance in Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" video...

It's not just that, rather than a person, she's been described as something that stirs an erection, but they've even got the science wrong. A catalyst doesn't make something happen, it just speeds up the rate of a reaction.

Mind you, if they think about people in that way, maybe the people over at Pedestrian do find their erections going off faster than they'd hope.

Simon LeBon is a super puffer

Simon LeBon's calling out of Robin Thicke for misogynystic bullshit is welcome:

“The problem with Robin Thicke’s video is it disempowered all the women in it,”[...]
“I think Robin made a bit of a mistake, because he’s not a bad guy, he’s not a misogynist, but he’s getting off on the chicks in the video and all that stuff. The theme of the song is, 'You say you don’t want it, but you do’, and that’s, actually, quite scary if you carry it through, so I felt that that was a mistake.”

Because, of course, Duran Duran would never have used naked women to pep up a pop video, would they? Why, LeBon might demand to know if we should be flinging this filth at our pop kids.

What's also notable is where The Daily Telegraph caught up with him:

Le Bon [spoke with] Mandrake at Boisdale Canary Wharf, where he was crowned The Spectator Cigar Smoker of the Year.

Simon LeBon is the what now? There are many things I think of when I think of Simon LeBon, but 'there's not just a cigar smoker, but probably the Wayne Rooney of cigar smokers' isn't one of them.

Robin Thicke gets people shouting at him in the street

I'm not surprised that people yell stuff at Robin Thicke in the street.

Oddly, though, he seems to think they're confusing him with someone else:

The 36-year-old singer - who is 18 years younger than the 'X Factor' boss - often gets heckled in the street by people shouting ''Simon'' at him because they think he is the music mogul due to their similar haircuts.

He said: ''I went through a hippy phase when I started out in music and said I would not cut my hair until I heard my song played on the radio. Now I do get called Simon Cowell because of my hair.''

(Lets be generous, and assume that quote was merely poorly edited rather than quite than incoherent.)

"I mean... it must be that people think I'm Simon Cowell, right? That's why they're calling out 'exploitative little wank biscuit' and 'soulless crumb-tray on the end of a life-sapping stick', right? They think I'm Cowell, yeah?"

X Factor: You're wasting your time

Interesting to note that the X Factor is getting Katy Perry and Robin Thicke in next week.

For a show that is supposedly suggesting that fame is down purely to talent, curious that the actual singers they turn to both owe their careers to famous parents.

After 10 years of identifying people with this X Factor, shouldn't there be a big pool of internal celebrity, more than large enough to fill every slot that calls for a big name?

Robin Thicke attempts to rig Amazon's 'other fans of this artist might like' recommendations

Robin Thicke has decided who he should best be compared to.

Surprisingly, it's not Paul Raymond and Peter Stringfellow:

''A lot of good white soul singers, like Hall & Oates and Michael McDonald, did soul music for a while then had their pop breakthrough. That's what's happening to me.
''But I think John Lennon is blue-eyed soul. Bob Dylan is blue-eyed soul, Bruce Springsteen is blue-eyed soul.''

This was in a piece in Vanity Fair. More like a sodding carnival of vanity.

Robin Thicke's dealer sees him coming

You know when the police seize drugs and claim they're worth squillions, and everyone stares at the story, and does the maths, and wonders where the cops think they'd find anyone paying that for drugs on the street?

It turns out Robin Thicke might be the pictured customer, as he's somehow managed to spend half a million dollars on cannabis.

To be fair, he doesn't say how long it took him to get through this cash, and if he was really doing half a million dollars' worth of dope, he probably lost track of days about three hours in.

I know, I'm taking the honking claim of an insecure young man desperate to impress way too seriously. I mean, he can't have been doing all those drucks because he was telling me he was totally driving his car at two hundred miles an hour up and down the A5 last night, right?

Robin Thicke: Thicke by name...

Robin Thicke is currently number one, mostly on the strength of a video with topless women in it.

But it's okay, because it's art, he tells Metro:

Is it acceptable to objectify women in pop videos? If it’s acceptable to ‘objectify’ women in the Louvre… People have been painting and sculpting naked women since the beginning of time. We didn’t objectify them, we just showed them in their most natural state.

That's right, women. Your natural state is with your tits out writhing next to a so-so singer.