Rihanna has a sex tape? No, we don't wanna see it, either

Photo by Erik Hess

​Such is the power, the glory, and the intensity of the culture-industrial complex that it's capable of transforming just about anybody into a sex symbol, regardless of attractiveness, as long as there's a modicum of talent or allure attached. Don't get Gimme Noise wrong; we'll rep for "Umbrella" or "Hard" or maybe like one or two other Rihanna-related hits, and we scowled some when Chris Brown went all Ike Turner upside her head.

But beyond that, we're a trifle confused by the fact that at this point she's considered some sort of uber-fappable ideal of femininity or something, and we're resolutely non-plussed -- nay, grossed-out -- by the news that there's supposedly a Rihanna sex tape making the rounds out there.
The public's fascination with these reproducible invasions of celebrity privacy - Ray J. & Kim Kardashian, Tommy Lee & Pamela Anderson, many others - has always mystified me. I mean, when you've watched someone you admire and kind of worship stuck in the rutting throes of passion, you've sort of breached the last barrier of propriety; there's nothing left to reveal, nothing left to learn, unless you're planning to rob that person's heavily-guarded penthouse apartment somehow. Also, watching a nubile, stacked millionnairess riding some dude in real-time on a seventeenth-generation overdub probably can't even begin to measure up to whatever you'd imagine during a frenzied fit of onanism.

Also, well, I've suffered through so many televised performances and videos involving Rihanna that I feel like I've had tons of bad, over-accessorized sex with her that I didn't really wanna have. Smoke machines! Leather! Gallons of hair dye! S&M costumes! Slash throttling a guitar! Auto-eroticism! Mostly, I just felt assailed by a psycho-sexual onslaught lacking any sort of logic or artistry; mostly I just felt icky, violated, assaulted. (Maybe I'm getting old.)

And no-one really talks about the fact that Rihanna has this sort of pointy, angular face and bony frame overall, this sort of unctuous, velociraptor-like presentation, as if the woman isn't quite human. So it isn't hard to imagine that a Rihanna sex tape would spiral into something out of Species or Alien or something: slime, glistening fangs, talons the size of daggers.

Ew.