Internet sex scandal snares young TV star

Hanoi: Vietnam is having a Paris Hilton moment.

An online sex video featuring a popular young TV star has riveted the nation for more than a week now, much as Hilton's notorious clip seized the attention of Americans when it hit the internet a few years ago.

But unlike the naughty American celebrity, the 19-year-old woman at the centre of Vietnam's sex scandal had cultivated a good-girl image. And unlike Hilton, Hoang Thuy Linh won't be able to capitalise on her newfound notoriety.

Thuy Linh's show has been cancelled and her career is over, capped by a tearful farewell on national television during which she apologised for disgracing her family and disappointing her fans, most of them high school girls.

Her fall from grace has highlighted the generational fault-lines in Vietnam, a sexually conservative culture within which women have been taught for centuries to remain chaste until marriage and stay true to one man - no matter how many times he cheats on them.

Like everything else in this economically booming country, ideas about sex and gender roles are quickly changing as satellite TV and the internet bring Western influences to a society cut off by decades of war and economic isolation.

But for many in communist Vietnam, new ideas about free love are much harder to accept than the free market. And unlike men, women who break the old sexual taboos are not easily forgiven.

"Kids today are crazy," said Nguyen Thi Khanh, 49, a Hanoi junior high school teacher. "They often exceed the limits of morality. They have sex and fall in love when they're much too young." In the old days, Khanh said, a woman who had sex before marriage would be ostracised - and rightfully so.

The 16-minute video hit the internet on October 15 featuring Thuy Linh in bed with her former boyfriend, both of them apparently aware they were on camera.

"People will forgive him, but not her," said Tran Minh Nguyet of the Vietnam Women's Union, which promotes gender equality. "Vietnamese think it's OK for a boy to have sex at that age, but not for a girl. It's absolutely unfair." The scandal, Nguyet said, is certain to destroy Thuy Linh's career.

"Vietnam is changing quickly, but there's no way Thuy Linh will be forgiven," Nguyet said. "That will take another generation."