Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s

Journalist Ditum debuts with a damning indictment of tabloids’ treatment of female celebrities in the early 21st century. The rise of digital cameras in the early aughts, Ditum argues, provided tabloids with “more shots than ever before,” while the internet opened opportunities for gossip bloggers willing to publish stories even tabloids wouldn’t touch. Examining how these cultural forces affected perennial paparazzi targets Aaliyah, Jennifer Aniston, Chyna, Paris Hilton, Janet Jackson, Kim Kardashian, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Amy Winehouse, Ditum suggests Spears’s 2007 decision to shave her head was a revolt against the sexualized femininity she “had been groomed to perform” since she was a teen. Elsewhere, Ditum excoriates the media’s sexist coverage of Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl performance for falsely claiming the musician “deliberately” bared her breast while sparing Justin Timberlake, who exposed Jackson after an apparent misunderstanding about a costume reveal. Ditum’s sympathetic treatment of her subjects contrasts with the enraging accounts of tabloid sexism and overreach, demonstrating how such coverage obscured and trivialized hidden hardships (after Paris Hilton revealed in 2020 that she been sexually abused at a psychiatric treatment center when she was 16, Ditum writes, “the slutty attention seeker of the aughts was suddenly, obviously no such thing: Paris had been a damaged child acting out”). Readers will rethink what they thought they knew about some of the most publicized celebrity stories of the early 2000s. (Jan.)