Toxic coverage of celebrity women in the 2000s changed everything
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. We collectively clutched our pearls when Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s breast during Super Bowl XXXVIII yet took out our ire on her. We unabashedly sang along to “Rehab” with Amy Winehouse, not recognizing her croons as a cry for help.
“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.” “In the entrails of their reputations, we hunted for clues about what a woman ought to be, and this has always been one of the functions of celebrity women.”
Ditum says the book’s title, inspired by Spears’s classic single of the same name, was “the perfect tag for the whole era.” In it, she tells the story of the period through the lenses provided by nine celebrities: Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Aaliyah, Janet Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Kim Kardashian, Chyna and Jennifer Aniston. “It’s the treatment of women, the celebrity culture generally and also the idea of addiction — compulsively coming back to something that you know is bad for you,” she said.
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The Washington Post spoke with Ditum about how feeding into the narratives spun by gossip blogs affected everyday women’s self-esteem, whether the coverage of celebrity women has improved, and whether social media is a blessing or a curse for them today.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Why are we just now realizing that we ignored, diluted and misconstrued the stories of celebrity women in the early 2000s? Why didn’t we know better?
You can see “Toxic” as a part of this cycle of books in popular culture that revisits that period with a sense of apology or shock or horror. Writing this book, I didn’t want it to be about those things so much. I wanted it to be about going back and saying, what was it like for these women to be at the center of this stuff, and what was it like for us as consumers? Because the thing that’s really difficult to reconstruct is what was it like to not know what was coming. None of us knew what was coming — the technologies that we were dealing with, the internet, the blogs, the changing nature of paparazzi pictures and surveillance culture. How could you be prepared for that kind of technological and societal change?
How did you settle on the nine women you wrote about?
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” and “Aaliyah: Possession.”] 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. All of these things are up for grabs in this period, and every one of these women is a window on a different part of that social transformation.
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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.”
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. So many of my friends felt harrowed by that as young women in their 20s to early 30s. They read that coverage, and their reaction was, “Oh my God, if she’s not enough, then how will I ever be enough?”
The coverage of these women becomes pressure on the women who consume it. I think women are probably the primary consumers of gossip culture. 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.
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Is social media hindering or helping celebrity women to reclaim their narratives today?
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’re in public, everything they do is on their own terms. 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.
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?
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. So she continues to be successful as an R&B artist. She has roles in Tyler Perry movies.
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With Aaliyah, I think the fact that she was Black and the fact that 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. But because R. Kelly was held in so much regard, particularly within the Black community, one of the first reactions was to say, “This is just people trying to bring down a successful Black man.”
Added to that, the fact that as a young Black woman, the risk of her being perceived as hypersexual, slutty, unrapeable was always present for her that she protected her image meticulously. 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?” There was so little vocabulary for talking about that kind of abuse.
Are we in a more toxic or less toxic era today?
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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 is not, “Oh, we’re going to send a bunch of cameras around to try and 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 is still completely disgusting, and it affects “civilian women” as much as it does 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 that it was during the noughties. But the case is no longer that there are few people whose privacy is relentlessly intruded. Everyone’s privacy is liable to be intruded on a little bit.
Toxic
Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s
By Sarah Ditum
Abrams. 352 pp. $28.
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