Seksopolis: My Small Homeland in the Grip of a Porn Scandal

SUBJECT ONE

I live in a country of less than five million people (I recently discovered that even exotic Sicily has more inhabitants than Croatia) in which people tend to know most people, perhaps even people’s grandparents, by name, so you can imagine the kind of ripples even the inciest, winciest, tiniest personal porn scandal would create.

Even an issue like somebody’s cat giving birth to her kittens prematurely makes for a subject worthy of gossip here. How then to shut one—or even two—eyes to the fact that Croatia’s most popular pop singer Severina has had her private home porn video splashed over computer screens up and down the country?

Known for her pout, deep cleavage and the little cross around her neck (so that no one is left in any doubt about her immaculate Catholicism), Severina could try, like Britney once did, to claim she was still a virgin if it wasn’t for the fact that she’s the other side of thirty and therefore this might have a strange effect on her career.

In the past I’ve quoted the lyrics of her songs in this column, mainly folk ballads with conservative rhymes in which it’s quite clear where a man’s place is in the world, and where a woman’s is (note I mention women second).The porn tape was apparently filmed on the yacht of her former lover and stolen a good two years ago (!) but cropped up recently, and via a Croatian Internet site became the number one talking point in Croatia. When I say number one, I’m probably not being precise. Among Croats, there is now no longer any other subject apart from Severina’s video. Croats have devoted long column inches in dailies, weeklies and magazines to this eleven-minute porn tape with oral and anal sex followed by dowsing with champagne. The name “Severina” is now being circulated like some sort of a salacious currency. You could exchange it for a trip to the town’s nut-house, which, by the way, is in my part of town, if you were to dare to admit in public to not having heard of these tapes.

Or you could soon start getting some dubious looks even if only, like me, for some reasons of my own, you hadn’t watched it. That kind of excess will only be tolerated in very old, very frail and very poor Croats, and even then not forever. There is an official version of the porn film that has been seen by everybody, but there is also a version that’s only been rumored, and I think I have a right to doubt its authenticity. In one of the more explicit versions the excited Severina is asking her...