These nine feminist essays about female celebrities of the 00s expose the casual sexism of the era and the way it shaped ordinary women’s lives
ritney, Paris, Kim. Poor Jen, messy Lindsay, talented yet tragic Amy. If you were an even vaguely young woman in the 00s, these celebrities’ first names alone probably conjure memories. They were our cultural wallpaper, female icons made and too often broken by mass media, in whom we hunted “for clues about what a woman ought to be”, as the journalist Sarah Ditum writes. Sexy, but not too sexy; empowered, but still unthreatening.
Ditum’s hotly anticipated book brilliantly captures the prevailing millennial mood of anti-nostalgia, or looking back through newly appalled eyes on the past – in this case an era of prurient, tech-enabled misogyny she christens the “Upskirt Decade”, elastically located between 1998 and 2013. “I lived through the noughties. I read the blogs. I laughed at the jokes,” she writes. “And yet, in writing this book, I haven’t felt like I was revising familiar territory.
The story of partying heiress Paris Hilton is cleverly rendered into a story about how porn went mainstream. Ditum was 17 and Spears 16 when …Baby One More Time came out; the author soon had a poster Blu-Tacked to her bedroom wall. Only slowly did it become clear how little power Britney really had.
The story of Paris Hilton, the partying heiress devoured by gossip bloggers, is equally cleverly rendered into a story about how porn went mainstream. In 2004, the sex tape a 19-year-old Hilton had made with a boyfriend leaked online to widespread hilarity. Who cared if she hadn’t consented to the world seeing her naked? Hilton was a “rich bitch”, a woman even other women felt comfortable hating.
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