Since when did making a sex tape become a career move? (SFW)

Who needs to go to uni or learn a trade when you can just sex your way to a career? Well, maybe not a career. But fame? Probably. And money certainly.

First came Paris Hilton (sorry, couldn’t resist the cheap gag). Then Kim Kardashian and Girls of the Playboy Mansion star, Kendra Wilkinson.

All three made sex tapes which ‘leaked’ and propelled them to huge fame and reality shows of their own.

And now we have 21-year-old Farrah Abraham, protagonist of American reality series Teen Mom.  Who, you ask? Well, exactly. As her 15 seconds of celebrity fame faded, Farrah was desperate to extend it. What she did next was a bit of a shocker.

As a reality show host might say, let’s have a look at Farrah’s journey so far…

2009: Gets pregnant at 16. Appears on MTV reality show 16 and Pregnant. Has baby daughter, Sophia, which leads to a starring role in MTV’s Teen Mom.

2012: Teen Mom is cancelled. Farrah releases book: “My teenage dream ended”. Releases a line of pasta sauces. Fame is fading without the TV show. Pictures of her dancing in her underwear and making out with a girlfriend mysteriously make their way to the tabloids.

2013: Farrah has almost completely fallen off the celebrity radar when she is spotted walking hand in hand with James Deen, a famous porn star, outside the offices of Vivid Entertainment, a porn distributor.

Farrah claims he’s her boyfriend. Deen apparently doesn’t get that memo and accidentally tells the media that she hired him to star in a sex tape with her. Awkward.

At first, Farrah denies the existence of a sex tape. She then says ‘there is a sex tape but I was taken advantage of’. Her mother backs this up and says she was filmed without her knowledge.

Always good to have mum in your corner.

Next, Farrah admits to a sex tape but says it’s for her own personal use and doesn’t plan to distribute it. Her mother stops talking to her.

She is spotted once again at the offices of Vivid Entertainment, the porn company. This time with her father and 4-year-old daughter in tow. Nice family outing.

On Tuesday, announces that she has sold her sex tape – called “Farrah Superstar: Backdoor Teen Mom” and starring herself and James Deen – to Vivid Entertainment for over $1 million. Tells US Weekly that she did it so that when she’s older, she’ll have her “best year to look back on.”

Possibly, she has ‘year’ confused with bottom.

Here’s Farrah on Teen Mom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-vbfnnPykY&feature=youtu.be&t=4m34s

In contrast, let’s look at what happened to Kim Kardashian. Her sex tape, fortuitously titled “Kim Kardashian: Superstar“, was leaked in 2007. Pre-sex tape, she was working as a stylist and ‘closet-organiser’ in LA.

Keeping up with the Kardashians premiered eight months after the tape’s release. Her mother convinced her to pose for Playboy a few months after that. Now she has a personal fortune of almost $100 million and is having a baby with Kanye West. Bam.

There has always been speculation over whether or not the sex tape was deliberately leaked by Kim or someone close to her. There have even been suggestions her mother/manager/momager orchestrated the whole thing.

Whatever the back story, the sex tape is what initially made Kim famous. Without the sex tape being released, she would never have landed a reality show and we would never have been subjected to the word ‘collection’ being spelled with a K (sorry but we can’t bear to actually write it down like it’s an actual word).

She has no discernible ‘talent’ to market to Hollywood; she can’t sing or dance or act. She doesn’t DO anything and unlike her former BFF Paris Hilton who also became internationally famous via a sex tape but went on to try acting, singing and writing books – Kim has wisely chosen to mostly just… endorse products, be photographed at events and star with her family in a never-ending series of spin-off reality shows that show her… doing not much at all.

Welcome to fame for a new generation.

But Kim has always maintained that her sex tape was released against her wishes.

Cough.

Will Farrah experience the same meteroic rise to product-placement stardom that Kim has experienced, or will her plan completely backfire due to her blatant attempt to manipulate the fame-game?

And when your future kid asks you “how do you get famous, Mummy?” – what exactly will you say?