TABLOID FRENZY
Toxic coverage of celebrity women in the 2000s changed everything
Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s
Sarah Ditum Abrams
Before the rise of social media, we scrolled Perez Hilton's bubble-gum-pink website and gawked over the latest unflattering paparazzi shots of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. “For the public, tearing these women to pieces was both a social activity and a form of divination,” writes the British journalist Sarah Ditum in her new book, Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q How did you settle on the nine women you wrote about?
A Each of them had to be someone who had a story that told part of the overall story of what was happening to all of us in the noughties, which is why all of the chapters are a name and a word. (For example, Paris: Invasion.) Every one of their stories tells a different aspect of how the noughties gossip culture was remaking ideas about fame, about privacy, about sex, about innocence.
Q You wrote, “The stories of these women, as told through the tabloids and the blogs, became vehicles through which we made sense of our own existence.”
A For Jennifer Aniston, her experience with the gossip press was so unpleasant because they basically invented the character for her — “Sad Jen,” who was desperate for a baby, still in love with her ex-husband. This tragic singleton edging toward 40.
The coverage of these women becomes pressure on the women who consume it ... A lot of gossip culture is attacking other women, but it's also attacking us and teaching us lessons about what kind of women we're supposed to be.
Q Is social media hindering or helping celebrity women reclaim their narratives today?
A What happens, I think, after 2013 is the power starts to swing back toward celebrities. We rarely see Taylor Swift or Beyoncé caught off-guard ... If they want to communicate with people, they can do it through their own social media channels. I don't think there's anything wrong with using the tools at your command to manage the most valuable thing you've got, which is your image and access to you.
Q Two of the nine women you covered were Black. How did race play a role in the maligning of Janet Jackson and the lack of coverage of Aaliyah's sexual exploitation?
A In Janet's case, she's a huge crossover artist. In American music, you have Black music and white music, and the Jacksons help to break that down. And then Nipplegate happens, and the consequence of that is she basically loses her crossover status. The places she finds success after are basically within Black culture. With Aaliyah, I think the fact she was Black and ... her abuser was a very successful Black man worked in a slightly different way. Because when the allegations were first published, everyone could have known all along right from the moment that Vibe magazine published the marriage certificate. That should have been game over. Somehow it's held in this state of suspended truth until the trial in 2021. Because R. Kelly was held in so much regard, particularly within the Black community, one of the first reactions was ... “This is just people trying to bring down a successful Black man.”
Added to that ... as a young Black woman, the risk of her being perceived as hypersexual, slutty, unrapeable was always present for her ... She never, ever talked about herself as a victim of R. Kelly because the cost of her image would have been huge. There's an MTV News report about the marriage certificate from the late '90s, and the way it's reported is not: “Oh my God, this young woman has clearly been sexually assaulted.” It's: “Will she be in trouble? Is she some kind of reprobate or delinquent because she's done this?”
Q Are we in a more toxic or less toxic era today?
A We don't have the same kind of misogyny in the mainstream media. If a star announces, “I'm having a mental health crisis,” the reaction isn't, “Oh, we're going to ... catch a picture of you looking absolutely awful.” They would make a well-managed Apple TV+ documentary about how they've come to terms with their demons.
Outside mainstream media, there's a lot that's still completely disgusting, and it affects “civilian women” as much as ... celebrities. Revenge porn hasn't gone away just because sites like Gawker aren't publishing sex tapes anymore. If you look at the kind of comments you find on social media around celebrities, there's a lot of toxicity there.
On the whole, I think it's better and healthier for celebrities, and also for onlookers, that it's not this free-for-all of viciousness it was during the noughties.