You Couldn't Make it Up...

"Chester Crown Court heard the victim was tricked by Newland and only realised what had happened when she ripped off her blindfold and saw Newland wearing a prosthetic penis."

You just can't make this stuff up, can you?  As the trial of a woman who posed as a man to have sex with another woman she met on the internet, (and persuaded the victim to wear a blindfold during their meetings so as to keep up the deception), closes with her being jailed for eight years, I can't help but ponder what the British sexploitation film industry of the seventies would have done with such material.  A film about gender role swapping suburban swingers might well have been the next logical step for Derek Ford after tackling wife swapping and groupies.  That said, strap on dildos and blindfolds sound like the sort of thing that might have turned up in Sex Clinic.  Indeed, with their penchant for producing sex movies with scenarios 'ripped from the headlines', (the Sunday tabloid headlines, that is), I can imagine Hazel Adair and Kent Walton rushing a sensational piece of low budget smut into production if this story had happened in 1976.  The idea of a predatory lesbian with a fake penis exploiting innocent young girls would have fitted in well with the homophobic undercurrent which seems to be present in Adair and Walton's sex films.

But, without wishing to trivialise the trauma suffered by the victim in the real life case, there can surely be little doubt that the stuff which came out during this trial would have provided excellent material for a British sex comedy.  The opportunities for his trademark reaction shots that discovering a fake penis beneath a dress would have provided Robin Askwith don't bear thinking about.  That said, devising a scenario in which Askwith might actually encounter a strap on dildo wearing male impersonator might have been problematic - but I have faith in the abilities of seventies sex film writers to come up with something convincing.  Maybe there could be a twist in the plot by which Askwith's character pretends to be a woman to infiltrate a nurses' home, or something, then, whilst still impersonating a woman, is forced to pretend to be a man, wearing a fake penis so as not to give his original deception away.   Or something like that.  The comedic possibilities are endless.

If nothing else, this trial has reinforced the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.  As I said at the outset, you just can't make this sort of thing up.  Actually, you could, but it would be dismissed as being ridiculous. But when all's said and done, ignoring the dramatic and comic possibilities of the trial's bizarre revelations, the reality is that we've seen a tragedy played out - not just for the victim, but for the perpetrator as well, who, I can't help but feel, needs help much more than an eight year jail sentence.