Australian musician Sia has apologised to anyone “triggered” by her video for Elastic Heart, featuring Shia LaBeouf and 12-year-old dance prodigy Maddie Ziegler, dancing together, in flesh-coloured outfits (Ziegler sporting a platinum Sia wig), in a cage. The video has caused uproar in some quarters. Fame-averse Sia (who generally performs with her face hidden) tweeted: “I anticipated some ‘paedophilia!!!’ cries for this video. All I can say is Maddie and Shia are two of the only actors I felt could play these two warring ‘Sia self states’”, adding that her intention was to “create some emotional content, not to upset anybody”.

The video is jarring. Famously troubled LaBeouf and Ziegler dance around, wrestling, attacking, playing. At one point, LaBeouf holds Ziegler aloft; at another, he tries to stroke her and she kicks and hisses to get away. Elsewhere, Ziegler wraps her tiny limbs around LaBeouf in a feral grip. Watching it, I realised that the intensity (Sia’s “emotional content”) was the reason it was jarring – the mere fact that the video wasn’t carefully benign, cheaply titillating or just plain boring, like so much else in the genre. In Elastic Heart, the grown man and the young girl are alive with feelings for each other, running the gamut from amusement and play through to fury to despair. What isn’t there is sexuality. In fact, it baffles me how anyone could look seriously at Elastic Heart and claim to see any sexual content whatsoever.

Can’t a grown man and a young girl produce art with edge and beauty of any kind without a squalid sexual subtext instantly being read into it? Sia seemed to apologise for potentially triggering memories of child sex abuse and grooming (as some accused her of doing, on behalf of abuse victims). Of course we all sympathise with abuse victims. However, one would imagine that such triggers would be everywhere – perhaps mainly focused on the most ordinary and domestic of situations. All of which couldn’t be further away from a highly choreographed performance of an arty cage dance.

If some abuse survivors were genuinely disturbed by Elastic Heart then fair enough, but what about those who referred to it as an excuse for their own unease? Are these people aware that Ziegler performed solo, dressed identically, dancing similarly, for Sia’s Chandelier video. Did this talented young dancer remind them of child sex abuse then? If not, is it because LaBeouf was in Elastic Heart – so presumably a woman performing the same dance with Ziegler would have been perfectly fine. Is this where we are now: society flinching from the sight of a man and a girl performing together in any way that hasn’t been entirely emotionally neutered?

Sia – Elastic Heart

Ultimately, this discomfort seems wrapped up in our own dirty, addled, increasingly paranoid 21st-century mindset, in which paedophilia, once so grotesquely secretive, is now seen everywhere and in the most kneejerk fashion. No one could complain about increased awareness of abuse, which means that children are finally protected and believed. Such instincts come from a good (better informed) place. However, the situation has surely become overcooked when paedophilia becomes one of the first things we presume and in the most ludicrous settings.

It becomes so that everything, even art, is expected to distil and accommodate all the retrospective guilt of bygone eras: the fact that so many perpetrators of the past weren’t caught, that we were lax, not observant or protective enough. In some ways, it’s good not to forget; in others, perhaps we need to get past it. The latter is true of Elastic Heart – a video found to be offensive because of sanctioned hysteria, rather than anything happening on screen – all the more disturbing when set against the wider background of any artist being scared into silence or self-censorship. Sia should not have been badgered into an apology. She had nothing to apologise for.

This article was amended on 31 March 2015 to correct Maddie Ziegler’s name.



Vladimir Putin: is he fit to ride the horse he’s so often perched upon? Photograph: Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters

Take Putin out of the driving seat



Russia has listed transsexual and transgender people as no longer being allowed to qualify for driving licences. They are to be classed as having “mental disorders”, which would also include exhibitionism, voyeurism and fetishism of any kind (others include compulsive gambling and stealing).

The official line is that this is because there are too many road accidents in Russia and tightening medical controls has become necessary. However, Russian psychiatrists and human rights lawyers have condemned the move, which appears to follow on from the infamous 2013 legislation that made the promotion of “non-traditional lifestyles” illegal.

Barring a person from driving for no good reason is a serious matter. It takes away not only a civilian right but also a prime symbol of adult autonomy; never mind the real logistical difficulties that being car-less might present in parts of Russia. It also means that people who might feel that they’d benefit from some degree of psychiatric counselling would feel less inclined to do so if they feared losing their cars.

What a farce. There are some of us who would like it proved that a certain Vladimir Putin is mentally fit to ride that horse he is often (and so sexily!) perched upon. There are shots I’ve seen where he looks quite thrillingly “barking”, bobbing about on his saddle, with no top on, brandishing a rifle like the big he-man he oh so obviously is.

More seriously, this reminds us that it’s still important to keep abreast of Russian moves such as these. Big and small, these laws represent blatant targeting of minorities and cynical affronts to international human rights. This latest one is yet another shift towards the blanket criminalisation of anything other than blessed, state-ordained heterosexuality. We must keep watching.

Strictly Come Dancing’s Ola Jordan, who injured her knee so badly on The Jump that it threatens her dancing career. Photograph: David Fisher/Rex

The Jump takes car-crash TV to its limits... nearly

I go pretty low with television, lower than is dignified. But even I have never watched The Jump, the Channel 4 reality show where low-rent celebrities compete in a variety of winter sports, with the slowest two each week being made to perform a ski jump to decide who will be eliminated.

There are always casualties during training. This time, Ola Jordan, of Strictly Come Dancing, injured her knee so badly that it threatens her dancing career. The Speaker’s wife, Sally Bercow, also injured herself – her ribs, not her gob, so she’ll be able to carry on just fine.

We all accept this kind of caper as “normal”, but on what premise is such dangerous and sadistic television justified? I thought Splash! was irresponsible (unfit semi-famous people falling off high-diving boards after minimal training). But ski jumping – are they kidding?

A test of mettle, my derriere; this is Lord of the Flies with frostbite. Why don’t programme makers go the whole hog and push C-listers into fast-moving traffic and allow viewers to vote on who gets squelched by an articulated lorry the fastest? If people dislike celebrities, then fine, but breaking their bones should be off limits.