And I’m not talking about Sarko…
This intriguing “blog” appears at Murdoch central today:
So if you go into your daughter’s bedroom to find it turned into a Paris Hilton shrine, you can relax. They might still become chief justice of the High Court or secretary-general of the UN. And they might do so because of, not in spite of their admiration for Hilton.
So, is Paris Hilton really good for kids? Hold on to your muesli, because the answer is yes.
I’ll resist the urge to point out that the Oz claims that it’s much much more noble than Fairfax, refusing to put up celeb stories in search of hits to boost its online advertising income. Actually, it’s a reasonably serious article – pointing out that a lot of what is written about teenage girls (GIRLS OUT OF CONTROL!) is pure moral panic bunkum – and that it comes from pundits as otherwise in disagreement as our old friend Dr Donnelly and Phillip Adams.
And I’d also wholeheartedly agree that the message that young girls and women should be accorded respect and freedom is worthwhile, and the findings of the Sydney Uni study about their desire to escape from the “surveillance society” interesting.
But, honestly, couldn’t the author find a better example of a young woman exercising self-determination and autonomy? I think it’s open to question how much Paris does exemplify that, and I think it’s pretty plain that “Paris can do anything” isn’t in fact a distillation of feminist empowerment goodness.
But maybe using her as a hook helped get the column published…
What about Pink?
Do young girls actually admire Paris or do they just enjoy reading gossip about her (there’s a difference)?
The whole notion that young girls should have unfettered freedom etc etc is nonsense because none of us do have that freedom. Seeing young girls dressed like junior hookers is just depressing.
What about youngsters just liking the idea of having unlimited money, attention, and cocaine, and the right to smoke grass in public—what’s wrong with that?
Won’t somebody think of the children?
I think you’re right about the gossip angle, Darlene.
But I’m not advocating “unfettered freedom”.
We’ll always have Paris, Kim.
Mum and Dad should begin to worry when their poppet cultivates an interest in fettered freedom.
“So if you go into your daughter’s bedroom to find it turned into a Paris Hilton shrine…” Paris Hilton is an invention of the media, not of teenage girls. Just how many teenage girls really worship Hilton enough to make her their poster girl and role model? I don’t know, but I don’t know any. Some girls might look at what she is wearing (not much usually) and might be interested in the latest gossip about who she is seen with, but the rest of the wall-to-wall media coverage, it seems to me, is manufactured by, and avidly consumed by older people, mostly men, I suspect.
Its the same with that danish couple having babies, just like normal people! This seems to amaze the MSM with their front page googah coverage, and all the gush about royalty and fariytale weddings. Let’s cut to the chase: it is mostly men who are inventing and marketing this fairytale princess bullshit, not women. Its not about women, and its not for women, its about (some) men’s sexual fantasies, in the case of poor little paris, and its about (some) men’s perfect marriage fantasies, with the submissive well-groomed baby-making machine, in the case of that danish couple, whose names escape me.
The very language used by one over-paid media exec in the company of his mates, that he was going to “bone” a television presenter, says it all.
The article by Duncan Fine says that:
“Conservative commentators see her as the poster girl for everything that’s wrong with youth culture. She’s the postmodern nightmare become a reality: she’s dumbed-down and she’s sexed-up…….
For political progressives, Paris is equally problematic. To them she’s a devious marketing tool taking advantage of our innocent kids, peddling sexy push-up bras to tweens and teens who, zombie-like, buy anything she endorses.”
Here’s a girl that has successfully challenged both progressive and conservative “frames of reference” so relied upon by way too many intellectuals.
(There’s the Right-wing stencil of solving society’s problems through “cultural analysis and criticism”, behaving as if economic inequality has nothing to do with those problems. Then there’s the Left-wing stencil of being paranoid about Marketing, which actually stymies the Left’s ability to locate a synthesis of social cohesiveness and economic responsibility, something I think can be extracted from Marketing theories, with a little bit of creative thinking).
If that’s what you achieve by being Paris Hilton, then I’ll have what she’s having, thanks
I have a niece who’d like to think she was Paris. Wealth, attention, guys, attention, fame, attention, skinny figure and attention are all very desirable things to a lot of teenage girls. Paris has got them all, so she’s the role model for millenials. We can all look forward to a whole generation’s “oops my broadcast-quality porno’s got on the net somehow” faux slips.
Whatever happened to Hanoi Hilton anyway?
I am sure Paris Hilton is the reincarnation of the ‘Gilded Fly’ from Emile Zola’s Nana of the 19th Century Paris demi-mondaine fame – and we all know what awful fate befell her. Beautiful, vacuous, materialistic, she lures legions of men to their financial doom as she sings her glitzy siren songs. Though Nana was actually a courtesan so she had to work for a living, whereas Paris ‘works’ except that most of her income seems to consist of cashing in on her heiress name cachet. Unlike Nana though, Paris will probably just end up snoozing away her days on a deck chair by the pool in some luxury resort, diamond-studded mobile and double margarita by her side, face-lifted to the gills. A fitting end for a more civilised and progressive society.
Actually I was intrigued when the normally detestable Sheehan of the SMH noted there were thousands of Paris Hiltons and Jessica Simpson’s sisters around the Royal Easter Show, which he found depressing. He wrote about these inspiring girls who were into this woodchopping alternative subculture and I had to agree with him. Yeah, the way the mainstream media just plugs these meaningless plastic images of Paris Hilton everywhere is hideously depressing. You can’t go anywhere on earth without getting her image rammed down your throat somewhere and I’m beginning to wonder what tribespeople in darkest New Guinea who’ve never seen a white man before think of her when they have their first cup of tea and bikkie courtesy of World Vision and see her dial on the TV.
However maybe the lesson from Emile Zola is that there always has been and always will be boring trash around. As for the gossip, I used to be addicted to it until thinking vaguely that maybe it wasn’t exactly healthy for my ten year old daughter to be reading avidly about celebrities with endless eating disorders and dazzling arrays of all kinds of apparent dysfunctions. Besides, after a few turns the floating world starts to look very much like the same old boring thing is happening all the time. Honestly what happened to the good old Woman’s Days and Woman’s Weeklies I read when I was 10 years old? The celebrity gossip then was positively good wholesome celebrity gossip in comparison, intellectually bracing and morally instructive.
Maybe it’s not so much the people but the weird obsessive focus the media puts on them – getting into moral panic mode about celebrities with eating disorders but at the same time subtly encouraging them. That kind of focus is perhaps not good for young people because they don’t see someone with an eating disorder or whatever and that’s a bad thing – they just see someone getting a hell of a lot of attention for just that very reason.
Paris sells it.
Her epigones will give it away.
Is it worth keeping at any price?
Big ask, Kim.
I found this blog thanks to today’s crikey!
Thanks for all your comments – especially the perceptive Bearcave.
And thanks for saying my piece was “reasonably serious” – I think the Australian has nothing at all to apologise for in running it – it’s not a gossip column – it’s trying to look at ideas about celebrity and trying to go beyond shallow knee-jerk responses to PH.
anyway – it’s just a matter of time till Paris’s people send me a 1st class ticket to LA – I’ll send a postcard!
duncan
That article or “blog” or whatever it is made me shudder, not so much because of what it claims (yr usual ‘hey, think again, you media-naif’ op-ed pabulum) as because the writer uses “singular they” to refer to a subject whose gender (and singularity) is already clearly established.
your daughter’s…..They might…..And they might…..their admiration
Illiteracy is the real scourge destroying the future of our children, not poor PH.
Kim
You accept the probity of “Sydney university research” far too gullibly. Who conducted this “research?” Psychologists? Social Scientists? or the CultiStudi bimboes. Me sniffs the nonsense of Catharnine Lumby and Elspeth Probyn here. Research, my ass.
According to Grace Pettigrew oldies, mostly men, are out there producing and consuming these girlie myths and sucking up to these celebrities. Nothing to do with females apparently, in spite of them being the target audience. Apparently gossip mags almost exclusively consumed by women from teen years to mid-life are all just about oldies, mostly male, indulging in fantasies.
And the princess myth is all the invention of males. Women don’t have anything to do with the perpetuation of this myth. The fact that no man understands it, or has any idea why a woman would aspire to this, doesn’t excuse us from blame either.
It must be wonderful to live in a world where you can just assign blame to others to explain all the worlds ills.
To clarify further Grace, I don’t know any males who spend more than about a nano-seconds thought on Paris Hilton, or care at all about where Paris is or what she is doing, and if they ever spend a moment contemplating the subject, it is to stand in absolute bewilderment at why anyone worships at the altar of celebrity at all, particularly women!!!
Hope your day gets better.
Typical vaccuous straw that CultiStudies types munch on 24/7. Who the hell let these people into the universities?
Arse.
It’s an arse.
Since this morning’s revelations that the Citizenship Test has not been written yet, I propose that this question be included when it is: ‘In Australia, is a backside an ass or an arse?’
A correct answer to this one is mandatory, never mind the 60 per cent. Anyone giving an incorrect answer will be immediately deported.
PC
Well yaaaiirrrsssss. You say potato, I say pahtaytah darl. And still we have Paris Hilton and the vital “research” at Sydney Uni.
“Who the hell let these people into the universities?”
The same people that let you in.
Now, there’s food for thought.
John Greenfield at uni? Shit, things are worse than I thought.
You wanna watch it with this increasingly obsessive focus on “multiculti” John G. Otherwise you could end up as another local blogosphere figure of fun like all those Graeme Bird, Jon Ray, Jack Strocchi, Rafe Champion and Evil Pundit (bless him) aging monomanical and rather cranky gentlemen who seem to treat the intertubes as a combination of de facto therapist’s couch and knee-friendly soapbox.
Have I mentioned before how much I enjoy watching footage of crabs sucked into underpressurised pipes at 6000 feet?
Interview with a young 18th lady of leisure:
“What do you do each day?”
‘I get up at noon, dress all afternoon, dine in the evening and play cards until midnight’
“What do you read?”
‘I read lewd plays and winning romances’
“Whom do you love?”
‘Myself’
“What! No one else?”
‘My page, my monkey and my lapdog’….
So what’s new about Paris? Yes, Kim – they sure could have picked a better example of a free spirit. As for a trip to LA Duncan Fine, make mine Antarctica.
‘But, honestly, couldn’t the author find a better example of a young woman exercising self-determination and autonomy?’ – As an afterthought, maybe the word should be ‘typical’ rather than ‘better’.
Actually I was too busy getting up at noon etc to get much work done at uni, come to think of it….
Snap!Megan.
Except you presented your elegant example rather more elegantly.
Nabakov
If that is your attitude to the abominable cultural politics of the author of the Oz article, I am glad you are very much in the minority. But don’t take my word for it, here it is from a Child Psychiatrist.
Paris Hilton: a human being who has no centre
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Letters
DUNCAN Fine’s admiration of Paris Hilton (”Paris is good for kidsâ€?, Opinion, 18/5) makes all the sense in the world. She stands for the same values he does, an addiction to being noticed, and a difficulty constructing a coherent life.
The real person that is Paris would, in a better world, be left alone. Caring friends should take her home. But the Paris of media creation is a different matter: she’s an icon, and we make our icons to reflect our times. Feminism has lost its momentum, yet little girls and young women are still being trashed. Paris represents the clear and present danger that all affluent young women face – what happens to a human being who has no centre.
The growing societal anger about advertisers sexualising children, corporate pedophilia as it is perceptively called, comes in a context of the disappearance of love in our society. Adolescent girls receive less and less nurturing from older women, parents, grandmothers, aunts, older friends. They spend more and more time with screens, magazines and their equally lost peers. They are easy prey for marketers, who now slink in like hyenas waiting to drag them down.
Sexuality is an empowering and beautiful force in adolescence, when the adolescents choose and control its unfolding on their own terms. But when sex is presented as a trading chip for those who haven’t been loved enough, then millions of young lives are diminished, harmed and sometimes thrown away.
We need to see clearly what Paris Hilton represents. We also need to remember every day the image of those two soft-faced young girls Jodie Gater and Stephanie Gestier, hanging by their necks from the limb of a mountain ash tree overlooking the city lights of Melbourne. Then perhaps we will take better care of our girls.
Steve Biddulph
Legana, Tas