Justin TimberlakeIt has taken no time for the racy film clip for Justin Timberlake's new single Tunnel Vision to be banned from YouTube after its release earlier today, with the popular video streaming service undoubtedly taking issue with the frequent and prominent nudity portrayed in the video.
While this may have once dredged up the discussion of censorship online, there are plenty of precious examples of similar videos meeting the same fate. YouTube won't stand for nudity, and a clip that portrays it so prominently is on borrowed time.
Interestingly, the video is unavailable on Timberlake's MySpace page, despite him owning part of the company.
Talk will now perhaps take a turn to dissect a different question: did Timberlake and his people really expect to get away with this?
The current number one single in Australia, Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, was accompanied by a video that featured a similar amount of female nudity and was taken down from YouTube shortly after its release. But not without creating an enormous stir, which has probably not hurt Thicke's record sales around the world.
So, is full frontal female nudity being used as a ploy to shift units? It certainly wouldn't be the first time. But are the women in these circumstances being used purely for controversy? If so, is that even worse than the overt sexualisation that has been par for the course in video clips for as long as many of us have been alive?
Are these men really admiring these women and their form, or just using them to drum up buzz? Are their songs that terrible that they need to resort to tactics like that? (No, they're not. Both songs are pretty great).
In the interests of making an informed opinion (or if you're on the internet and struggling to find videos of naked women) you can watch the Robin Thicke video here and the Justin Timberlake one here.
