The new book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Tabloid 2000s is a fantastic piece of cultural analysis. Written by British journalist Sarah Ditum, it explores the digital revolution of the early 21st century and how it intersected with feminism, celebrity, and tabloid journalism — to the detriment of young women.
The thesis of Toxic is simple enough: In the late 1990s, the kind of privacy once enjoyed by the famous evaporated with the arrival of the internet. The coverage of women such as Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Aaliyah, and Janet Jackson was not only intrusive but vicious, violent, and unprecedented.
After roughly a decade, the power shifted back to celebrities’ favor with the rise of social media, which allowed celebrities to be their own public relations firms and direct their fans to counterattack the press. This new position of power, however, has flaws, namely letting celebrities avoid hard questions and the immolation of anyone who questions #MeToo or the new feminist orthodoxy.
Toxic comes into brilliant focus in the chapter on Britney Spears, which is worth the price of the book. Spears was still a teenager in 1998 when her first smash single, “…Baby One More Time,” was released. As Ditum observes, Spears was a bridge between an old way celebrities had of negotiating with the media, via public relations handlers who tightly controlled things, and the “casual cruelty” of the then-new internet.
Ditum knows how to write a sentence that captures the essence of a person or cultural phenomenon. “Everything about Britney’s image asserted her innocence,” she writes, “and everything about that innocence’s ostentatious performance encouraged at least one part of the audience to imagine her despoiling.” Indeed, Spears was exploited by her family, her managers, and the journalists who should have known better. A photographer for Rolling Stone, for instance, encouraged a 16-year-old Spears to undo buttons on her blouse. He later expressed regret, but Ditum isn’t having it: “He was nonetheless able to master his discomfort and go on taking semi-nude pictures of an underage girl for a national magazine.”
How did things get so bad? The explosion of the internet, ubiquitous and cheap digital cameras, and a broken legal ethic are all to blame.
What Ditum calls the “Upskirt Decade” is exemplified in a 2006 case in Tulsa in which an adult man was caught in a store trying to take pictures up the skirt of a 16-year-old girl. He was let off because the judge concluded that the girl was in a public place “that did not offer the expectation of privacy.”
Soon celebrities, especially women, were being hunted. The sociopathic website Gawker launched the “Gawker Stalker,” which revealed the location of celebrities in real time. On her 18th birthday, actress Emma Stone was bombarded by paparazzi, many of whom were trying to get indecent pictures. Gossip trolls such as Perez Hilton reined down verbal abuse on the women, calling Spears names that can’t be printed here and delighted in her and others’ humiliations.
”I didn’t feel bad because they were rich and famous and knew what they were signing up for,” Perez Hilton said.
It’s become a common refrain that people who seek fame need to be ready for a rough ride and a nasty media, but Ditum strongly makes the case that the cruelty of the internet was savage in a way that was novel. Britney Spears was play-acting at losing control due to passion, but in real life was being used by evil handlers. “At some point,” Ditum observes, “the girl’s perfectly controlled appearance of losing control would be replaced by genuine, terrifying helplessness.”
Eventually, things began to change. Kim Kardashian figured out that she didn’t have to negotiate with People magazine to deliver wedding or baby pictures — she could go straight to Instagram and do it herself. Spears went to court and exposed her terrible treatment at the hands of managers and family. Like Kardashian, she also now has millions of fans and followers on social media she can marshal against the tabloid media.
Taylor Swift is only three years younger than Spears, but her experience, as Ditum describes it, represents “a generational gulf” between the scabrous internet media of the 2000s and the post-”Upskirt” age. Swift mostly controls her image and can sic her “Swifties” on reporters who treat her unfairly. But “for Britney, Paris [Hilton] and Lindsay [Lohan],” Ditum writes, “the internet had been a brutal imposition, wrenching control of their images away from them. For Taylor, it was an accepted part of the order of life.”
Also crucial was the case of Hulk Hogan and Gawker. When the mean and sleazy website published a private sector tape featuring Hogan, Hogan sued and won. Gawker went bankrupt. Ditum reveals an interesting fact about the trial — Hogan’s legal team looked for regular women as jury members. Even though Hogan is a man, they bet that women would not like the invasion of privacy he endured. They were right.
Finally, there was “Blurred Lines.” The 2013 song by Robin Thicke featured skimpily dressed models and was heavy in sexual innuendo. Asked if he thought the video was degrading to women, Thicke said, “Of course it is. What a pleasure it is to degrade a woman. I’ve never gotten to do that before. I’ve always respected women.”
The mask was off. “Blurred Lines” caused an uproar, and reports surfaced that there had been sexual assaults on the set of the video. Just a few months later, Taylor Swift said there is “a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” The women had had enough. The “Upskirt Decade” was over.
As Ditum concedes, the correction to the “Upskirt Decade” has had its own problems. Notably, innocent people have been destroyed by false accusations — and banning a song like “Blurred Lines” is never the answer.
It is also just a fact that the same irresponsible, strafing media is still at work. It’s just shifted its attention to politics. “These moments did not signify justice, exactly,” Ditum writes of the new witch hunts, where the press napalms anybody they don’t like, “but they did represent a change: the snark, spite, and violation that had been part of the acceptable treatment of celebrities (particularly women) were no longer to be tolerated.”
I’m not sure that it’s any better if the snark, spite, and violation are now happening to people who aren’t famous.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
