Let me tell you a tale of two sex tapes. One is a seven-minute music video called Bitch Better Have My Money, starring Rihanna. It was released earlier this month and has been viewed more than 22m times. The other is, well, I’ll get to that in a minute. It is Rihanna’s that is the controversy du jour, so let’s concentrate on her first.

BBHMM, as the video is known, has a simple plot. The singer’s character decides to take revenge on the man who has embezzled her money. She enlists the help of three friends to kidnap his wife and hold her to ransom until he agrees to cough up the missing dough. But the no-good, lying, cheating husband prefers to let his wife rot in the hands of her captors while he lives happily off his ill-gotten gains. However, he has not reckoned on Rihanna, who succeeds in both exacting her personal revenge and getting her money back.

Anyone who was not born yesterday will recognise the premise of Elmore Leonard’s 1978 novel The Switch, the 1986 black comedy Ruthless People and the 2013 crime caper Life of Crime, starring Jennifer Aniston. But BBHMM is no mindless rehash of an old favourite — Rihanna’s version takes the trope of the kidnapped-wife-in-the-boot to a whole new level of candied cruelty.

The wife in question is strictly fodder for the Occupy Wall Street crowd: thin, pretty, blonde and expensively clad. Every mincing step she takes is a signpost that says “she has it coming”. Having put the audience in the right frame of mind, Rihanna spends the next five minutes humiliating and torturing the woman.

In one scene the wife, played by the supermodel Rachel Roberts, is strung naked upside down and “played” with. During the final seconds of the video the errant husband is murdered off camera in a chainsaw-style massacre (interestingly, he gets to stay fully clothed). Keeping up with the theme, Rihanna closes the video herself lying bloodied and naked in a trunk stuffed with money while smoking a big, fat roll-up.

The explicit nudity, violence and sadism of the video have produced some of the angriest responses I have ever seen to what is basically a piece of expensive advertising. In one camp are the critics and fans who find the video misogynistic and repulsive — not to mention deeply exploitative. In the other camp are commentators who claim it is a celebration of black female empowerment — and that the fuss is simply about the sight of a white woman being abused.

This is an argument that is never going to be resolved because the two sides do not see the world in the same way, speak the same cultural language or have the same values. One side sees abuse; the other sees irony. One camp cries “anti-women”; the other shouts “payback”.

In the New Statesman, Helen Lewis identified a core complaint about BBHMM: it is manipulative and cheap in the extreme. “Let’s put this bluntly: a lot of men who get off on images of women being tortured are going to be turned on by this video,” Lewis wrote. Critics who waffle on about its profound “intersectionality” (that is, the unique moral and social sensibility of people who suffer several types of discrimination) are either grasping for air time or have drunk too deeply from the fountain of media studies.

Rihanna’s video is a mash-up of the usual stock themes peddled by the music industry. To that extent the violence is run of the mill compared with what you see in many other hip-hop videos: the women’s prison fight scene in the 2010 Lady Gaga/Beyoncé video Telephone is far more visceral. Nor is the nudity greater or more skewed than, say, the full frontals in Robin Thicke’s 2013 hit Blurred Lines.

AS FOR the lyrics, you must be kidding. BBHMM has nothing like the hyper-commercial amorality of some of Rihanna’s previous work, such as her 2011 Love the Way You Lie, a non-ironic hymn to domestic violence. That song, a collaboration with the cartoonishly misogynistic Eminem, took the high road with such charming features as the victim singing, “Watch me burn, that’s all right because I like the way it hurts”. By contrast, “Bitch better have my money! Pay me what you owe me” repeated ad nauseam is lame. (The “bitch” in question is the accountant, not his wife — another overused trope like “woman, tied up”.)

Frankly, Rihanna’s defenders who say her videos are works of art are apologists for a system that operates along the assumption that the only difference between a prostitute and a pop star is the fee. As for those who claim critical immunity for BBHMM because it is only a video, and then insist that it be regarded with the utmost sincerity because its themes are grounded in reality: that is just risible. But now it is time for some of that reality.

I said this was a tale of two sex tapes and it is. A couple of months ago two real-life Rihannas — 17-year-olds called Erica Avery and Patricia Montes, from Hollywood, Florida — were sentenced to four years in prison for luring a friend to a house and filming themselves attacking her.

Apparently the “friend” had annoyed them, so they planned a beating and rape as her punishment. The video, parts of which ended up on television, showed what it is like to be dragged, kicked and punched so hard that it leaves facial bones in pieces. In contrast to the sexual solipsism of the BBHMM video, the Florida recording also gives the victim’s side of the experience: her screams and sobs; the sound of blunt force on her body.

Florida was not an isolated case. Last month the Steubenville outrage resurfaced in the news. This was a case involving a gang rape in a small town in Ohio where the student perpetrators and their friends took videos of their unconscious victim. On the night of August 11, 2012, members of the town’s star American football team pounced on an intoxicated girl at a party. Over the next six hours she was carried from party to party, used like an inanimate sex doll, urinated upon and finally dumped in a basement.

Despite online footage of the assault, nobody was arrested until the web took notice and started a firestorm of protest. It is in the news again because the blogger who exposed the town’s cover-up has been arrested for illegally obtaining that information. He faces 10 years in prison, eight years longer than the sentences given to the juvenile rapists.

BEFORE I leave the topic of sex, violence and videotape, I should mention that last week prosecutors in Nashville, Tennessee, set a retrial date for a case involving a 2013 rape and assault by four Vanderbilt University football players. By chance it was caught on surveillance camera. The victim had been drugged and did not know what had happened to her until campus security officers saw it on tape while looking into a spate of dorm-room thefts.

Of course, these three tapes were not set to music. A common thread runs through these sexual assault videos and countless others like them. In contrast to BBHMM, they are real; they have no themes, symbols or semiotics. They are not sordid, cheap or provocative. They are simply visual testimonies of women’s suffering and as such are an inconvenient truth against the prettified fantasies and narrative overlays that a video such as Rihanna’s relies on to sell transgression without leaving the safety zone of entertainment.

On this single point you cannot blame the music industry for doing the very thing it was created to do: sell fantasy. Rihanna herself is, while not a fantasy, certainly a creation. Brought up in Barbados, she was signed by Def Jam at the age of 16 after a chance encounter with a holidaying record producer. The label’s president, Jay Z, told Rolling Stone: “I signed her in one day. It took me two minutes to see she was a star.”

Notice he did not say she was a singer, dancer, songwriter or artist, so at least he was being honest. She is no Amy Winehouse; if you want to hear what Rihanna really sounds like, go to YouTube and watch Rihanna G4L Acoustic Unplugged.

The idea that Rihanna was personally or mainly responsible for BBHMM unravels within a minute’s investigation. Like all music videos, it was a collaborative effort by a bunch of ethically challenged media types with the sole aim of translating clicks into dollars. No, really.

When asked in an interview whether the video was meant to have some kind of deeper meaning — feminist or otherwise — one of the directors answered: “We wanted to keep it cool and funny . . . I wouldn’t say it was a feminist statement . . . There aren’t any political or moralistic ideas in there at all.”

In fact, so many people were involved in the making of BBHMM that one did not even know she had taken part — a Houston-based rapper called Just Brittany, whose 2014 Betta Have My Money sounds suspiciously like a first draft for the song (especially the chorus).

As with the Kardashian sisters, Rihanna’s special talent lies in her ability to reflect the world around her. She is a human mirror into which millions of fans can gaze lovingly. But unlike Kim Kardashian, bless her, who for all her vapid materialism has never uttered a mean word about anyone, Rihanna is the living embodiment of the so-called Mean Girls generation. She is notorious for using Twitter and Instagram to humiliate easy targets. It takes genuine moral blindness, and not a little ignorance, to go to Thailand and sneer at the women who have been sold into sexual slavery.

Funny how the intersectionality experts were silent when Rihanna tweeted from Bangkok in 2013: “Either I was phuck wasted last night, or I saw a Thai woman pull a live bird, 2 turtles, razors, shoot darts and ping pong, all out of her pu$$y . . . then she tried to turn water into coke in her $!!”

Experts are mystified as to why Rihanna’s generation is so lacking in empathy: it turns out they are monsters of indifference. A 2010 study by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research found that empathy — the ability to imagine how others feel — had declined in college students by 40% in just three decades. At the same time, arrests for aggravated assault among high school pupils — especially girls — have gone through the roof.

It is a social problem that has got even Barack Obama talking. In his view the “empathy deficit” is one of the most serious problems America faces. There can be no common future if there is no shared today.

As sociologists and commentators have pointed out, empathy is the social glue that holds society together. In the words of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff: “Empathy is the reason we have the principles of freedom and fairness.” Without it, the winning arguments are fear and violence.

It is not so much that Rihanna and people like her have lost the ability to feel empathy; it is more that they prefer its darker twin, schadenfreude.

As that nasty little video BBHMM shows, they can feel another’s pain all right — that is what makes it so satisfying.