Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s
by Sarah Ditum (Abrams, $28)
“We have a tendency to insist that the treatment of famous women 20 years ago would never fly today,” said Helen Holmes in The Daily Beast. But in that notso-distant era, when Britney Spears and Paris Hilton were at peak fame, brutally misogynistic coverage of young celebrity women “did fly, and even thrive,” and all women who came of age during those years are still contending with the effects. Author Sarah Ditum labels the era “the Upskirt Decade” and “digs deep into the particularities that made public recognition so excruciating for the women who dominated the collective consciousness at the time.”
Ditum “treats pop culture with a rare seriousness,” and “she is right to do so,” said Helen Barrett in the Financial Times. As she revisits the stories of Spears, Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse, and others, she reminds us that girls learn the rules of womanhood from what’s said about female celebrities. Though the book’s subjects suffered different types of abuse, “common threads emerge,” including a public obsession with their bodies and wide acceptance of their atrocious treatment. R&B singer R. Kelly secretly married his protégé Aaliyah when she was 15 yet was showered with acclaim well after the initial reports. Spears, while still a teen, was fielding questions about her virginity Janet Jackson had her career destroyed by the “oddly righteous moral panic” that followed her 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction.” Ditum claims that the advent of an online gossip culture made the era especially toxic. Revisiting that time “starts to feel sickening.”
But the book concludes “in upbeat mode,” said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Ditum cites the backlash over the 2013 hit “Blurred Lines,” with its lyrics about men forcing themselves on women, as the symbolic end of the Upskirt Decade, and claims that social media has since enabled female celebrities to bypass hostile coverage and better control their own images. But is celebrity really easier now that any hater can post insults or even death threats? “Perhaps that’s the real message; that every generation unwittingly creates something the next will eventually regard with horror.”