Cher, Woman's World and the Daily Fail

Cher's new video for her single "Woman's World" was launched exclusively on the Mail Online website, the electronic version of the Daily Mail.

I, along with many other gay men, have been a huge fan of Cher since the late 80s. Who can forget the infamous video (and leather outfit) from the video for "If I Could Turn Back Time", her Oscar-winning performance in "Moonstruck" or the phenomenon that was "Believe", her very successful foray into dance music?

All this time, Cher has been a great supporter for both gay rights and women's rights, as seen in this hilarious (and serious) advert for women's reproductive rights with Kathy Griffin.

This makes it all the more surprising her new video appeared on the Mail Online's website.

For an example of the Mail Online's attitude to gay people and their relationships, Jan Moir's article published after Stephen Gately's sudden death is a pretty shocking example.

A poor young man is barely cold, his partner (Andrew Cowles) and his family are in grief, and the knife goes in - heartless speculation about the cause of death, and the snide implication that he (or his gayness) were somehow at fault.

Later comes the baffling phrase "Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships". This seems to be saying that gay people can't be happy in relationships, and the existence of civil partnerships just pretends otherwise. Of course, sane people know that both straight and gay relationships can be happy or unhappy and quite a lot of them end because of the death of one of the parties involved (as did my own, but that's a blog post for later).

To use the death of a young man to tarnish the relationships of thousands of people is just vile. The British people certainly thought so, because this odious article generated 22,000 complaints in a single weekend to the Press Complaints Commission, more than they had received in the previous 5 years.

The Mail's record on sexism is no better. If you check out the pictures on the right hand side of each article (known to Brits as the "sidebar of shame") you'll quickly learn that while men are reported on for their achievements, women are only reported on for either losing or gaining a large amount of weight (sometimes the subject of such an article will be approvingly described as "celebrating her curves"), for being pregnant ("baby bump" is a favoured term on the site) or for going out in public after a breakup.

The Mail Online is also pretty well-known for its hypocrisy - it laments the sexualisation of young people yet it sees fit to describe children of celebrities with words such as "leggy".

While I was delighted to see Cher's new video, I sent her a tweet expressing concern that it had premiered on such a homophobic and anti-women website and I was very pleased to receive a response.

The purpose of this blog post isn't to bash Cher. It seemed from her response to my tweet she wasn't aware of the nature of the Mail Online website, and had she known more about it, she may have chosen to place her new video elsewhere. I hope that next time, that's what she does.

PS I'm of course loathe to link to the Mail Online, but felt it necessary here to provide an example.