I’ve been critical in the past of the widespread trashing of Heather Mills-McCartney, while admitting that she’s probably her own worst enemy. A recent marketing survey found she was at the top of the list of the most hated celebs in the UK. Not surprising, probably. But what’s interesting is the top five loved celebs are all male and four of the top most hated celebs are female (Simon Cowell is on both lists). This raises the question Finlo Rohrer poses - why are the celebrities most often vilified disprortionately female? I think it’s a very interesting question. A range of answers are given in the article, including one which is not quite an answer but perhaps more of an observation - that a lot of this vilification is related to the policing of femininity (disposition, motherhood, personal appearance, weight, etc.) What do LP-ers think?
This is just the usual madonna/whore neurosis isn’t it?
BTW, Kim I find it odd that the terms ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are applied to celebs so casually. We don’t know these people. We’re unlikely to have genuine emotions about them that are strong enough to be called ‘love’ and ‘hate’ (aren’t we?).
Or are we, Mercurius? That’s another interesting question. If you take a look at comments threads/bulletin boards/etc. about Mills or Spears or Winehouse…
If prostitution and drugs were legal everywhere then the haters would have more trouble getting traction. Its far too easy for them to wedge us all with stupid prohibitions like these. Lets outlaw Nanny-statists for a change.
Kim, Don’t you think its more to do with the monotony, intensity and frequency that the likes of outhouse, spears, wayne carey or whatever/whoever was last weeks fetish but now we’ve forgotten the name, is shoved down people’s throats by media?
I switch on my computer to find out whats happening in the world but find nothing but almost hourly feeds from publicity organisations concerning Paris Hilton and the rest, yet nothing elaborating on say, the privatisation of NSW electricity.
The people you mention are usually mentioned in contexts where they have acted out through binge drinking or something else designed to give them cred with the peer group aimed at, as to the “selling”.
So what do Iknow, then, about Whine house?
She has a surly face, she drinks too much and I subconsciously identify her rather those peddling her image, as the source of my loss of access to what I came online for, to visit as a NEWS site, in the first place.
Like, yawn…
Paul, but there’s a reason why the Age and SMH sites are full of Amy, Britney and Heather - tons of people go searching for them via google! And the millions of celeb gossip mags are profitable because people want to buy them.
“because people want to buy them”
Meh. People are idiots.
That’s not really a good answer to the cultural question of why people do this, Lefty E! Bloody elitist!
I suspect its one of the key reasons, actually.
Oh, and flattery will get you nowhere.
Well, I like Amy, myself!
Winehouse is an interesting case - she continues to have musical credibility (despite putting on the occasional awful show) but has parlayed the whole thing into a tabloid dream. Unlike the Britney/Lohan/Hilton spirals into news-for-news-sake in other words. I’m stuffed if I know what “policing of femininity” is though - is that the part where your crotch has it’s own blog where people can tut-tut?
I like her too! Musically. Cant say I follow ye omnipresent scandals etc.
Though I suspect you’re quite right about the gender issue, and the limit-policing reasons for it. Equally, maybe thats why Simon Cowell is the male star in the most hated list.
#5 Kim
I suspect that’s a ‘chicken and the egg’ type situation. perhaps not a ‘who came first’ but a self generating cycle of the media treating celebs as important and thus generating importance and interest and feeding back into each other.
Certainly its easier for the media to concentrate on whatshernamethisweek than to deal with major stuff which might accidentally tip over into an informed public, informed about something vital to the lives of the public I mean. Paul’s comment on electricity privatisation for example. Dangerous for the media to go too much in-depth there. Cricket and celebs is much safer.
As for the demonisation of women as such issue I am reminded of the treatment handed out by the media to Lindy Chamberlain whose main crime was that she didn’t behave in the stereotypical suffering mum manner and thus there was ’something’ clearly wrong with her.
Can’t have that.
I only heard snippets of Susan Faludi on LNL recently and haven’t read the book but I remember her saying that there was a group of women identified [you will probably know the name given to them] after 9/11 New York who were denigrated by the press because they did not behave in the media acceptable manner.
Didn’t fit the approved image.
Germaine might be relevant here.
She might well be, hannah’s dad!
“The Jersey Girls” were the widows in question. See here:
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If the post doesn’t explain it well enough, David, you could try following the link in the post.
Pretty anglo-centric link Kim. How come Tom Cruise isn’t on the most hated list with the nutjob religion, kidnapping of katie, chair stunts etc. I would have thought he’d be much more maligned than the Beckhams. Perhaps “polcing of femininity” is just a bit of old-style anglo conservatism, and a US-centric “most hated” list would be very different.
Thanks Hannahs Dad, its always comforting to know someone understands, where a person is coming from.
Kim, its not like these “artists” are usually saying anything new, anyway.
Their stuff is only ever exclusively about THEMSELVES; about the stomach ache they have or someone starved their guinea pig, or some other victimhood/entitlement way they feel miserable about themselves ( probably actually the booze, if they ever had a REAL look at themselves!) and its always someone else’s fault, inevitably some comatose and or married bloke somewhere.
Now, why would folk like me be that interested. we heard it all years ago with Melissa Manchester and Alanis Morissette (A NSW lunatic asylum?)and Marianne Faithful did it better than any of them back in the ’seventies.
I doubt it, David. But given that the article’s on the BBC website, and the survey was done in Britain, I’m not surprised it’s anglo-centric.
Paul, there’s no doubt that the marketing of self is a big part of this and it has a flipside - but it still fails to answer the question of why male celebs don’t get as vilified (and pace David, don’t get vilified in the same way when they do).
Well, they have given the likes of Beckham a fair old hammerin’.
Then there is sort of stuff that gets harped on about for weeks over oafish social-skills deficient “blokes”( got to be black and white gender differentiation ) like Gary Ablett and Ben Cousins ( for rugby codes refer to own boof of choice )or whole rugby or aussie rules teams “acting badly”. Then there is usually a tiresome “Southpark” type Sermon at the end about the perils of drinking or the brain power of sports groupies.
But I suspect what Kim is really considering is along the lines of simulacra brave little feminist images supposedly transgressing the Gaze, through bad or transgressive “attitude”. Don’t forget, its the representation of transgression they want, not any inadvertant real transgression- that’d be the last thing they’d encourage.
But that’s ok by me, I loath commodification of each new generation as mentally maimed consumption machines for the rest of their lives, who get withdrawals when their credit cards finally get impounded, so you go for it, Kim!
BTW, is there any breakdown of this demographic you mentioned doing websites in search for celeb//cheesecake stuff, or any conclusions offered yet as to their motives?
Not that I know of, but it’d be interesting.
“BTW, is there any breakdown of this demographic you mentioned doing websites in search for celeb//cheesecake stuff, or any conclusions offered yet as to their motives?”
Probably journos looking for tomorrow’s news.
Heh!
I think part of it is that people get more excited/angry (and maybe a little bit aroused) about girls behaving badly. Especially conservatives.
But part of it is also that the majority of the celebrities splashed all over the gossip mags are women. One of the most ubitiquous sources of crap celebrity gossip here in the UK is the free papers handed out to commuters. Practically all commuters read these, so they have a wider readership than the magazines. And most of the celebs featured are women - Amy Winehouse, Sienna Miller, Kate Moss, Pixie Geldof, former spice girls etc cf a couple of men (Pete Doherty and a few who appear mainly as handbags. I’m not sure why it is, it might just be down to the woment taking a better picture.
Well I do love Amy Winehouse, particularly for offering us this stellar performance. And I do mean I love it and her. Instant Stress Relief. Check the faces of the musos
[link]
I think that there is is ancient unconscious culture idea that women are custodians of the morality of a culture. (Warning: painting with very broad brushes strokes here to convey a general idea) That way the men of a given culture can do what they will, but if the women are behaving then the society is not in decay. I am thinking of the Athenian codes and Roman laws which restricted women and the double standard apparent in myths like Ulysses (where he has an affair with Hecate but if Penelope his wife did the same thing, she would die). I think that women are still judged more harshly than men for similar transgressions and that when men misbehave its just ‘boys being boys’.
We have inherited our moral codes from some pretty patriarchal sources and while I feel society is striving to be ‘post patriarchal’ there is still echoes and hang up which reflect society’s overtly patriarchal origins.
Well, I would have said it’s just plain ol’ misogyny, but I’m not one of those high-flautin’ theory types.
[link]
Shoulda used this graphic from Lex10.
(via BoingBoing)
That link is just horrid. But it does show misogyny in all its glory. The concept itself is distasteful enough without the sexy girl ads the page is littered with.
Was referring to DR’s link at 25
“Germaine might be relevant here.”
She’s only ever an ‘i’ away from it!
I love Winehouse’s voice. Okay, maybe her boobies too. But she’s putting herself right out there as a ‘tude-toting wastrel, so can hardly object to her portrayal as such.
As to why women cop it more from the tabloids, I dunno. Pete Doherty seems to get a bit too - is that just cos he dated Kate Moss?
Kim, Don’t you think its more to do with the monotony, intensity and frequency that the likes of outhouse, spears, wayne carey or whatever/whoever was last weeks fetish but now we’ve forgotten the name, is shoved down people’s throats by media?
Paul, why do you feel the need to call her “outhouse” if you don’t want to play the media game? If you know the media are manipulating you to hate Amy, why do you so willingly roll over and oblige?
Also, please resist conflating AW with the vapid, ‘famous because they’re famous’ sexbots like Spears and Paris Hilton. Look at her Wikipedia page for a quick rundown. She’s a singer-songwriter, not some chanteuse. Go to Youtube and pull up the video of her performing “Rehab” live on some UK TV show (and a comedy talk show similar to Spicks and Specks, the name of which escapes me now, pre-anorexia, where she displays her conviviality and good humour.) She was a delight (and look at her band. No Spice Girls / Britney-style production there.) This is a genuine musician who has crashed and burned, and I find it immensely sad, not least, selfishly, because there may not be another Rehab. Yes, she looks terrible now in her photographs. That is the object of the paparazzi who stalk these people. She is ill, tired and pyschologically unwell, that’s clear. I read a very sad account of her scuttling through the city, in tears, trying to avoid the constant photographs and just get to the bloody shop. And when they get a truly bad photo, all the magazines lap it up with glee. They are scum.
Word, Helen.
“Pete Doherty seems to get a bit too - is that just cos he dated Kate Moss?”
Oh I dunno ,maybe the photos of him shooting up ( with heroin )an unconscious 17 year old fan might have negatively impacted his media profile?
I’ve never heard of Amy Winehouse and couldn’t give a toss about about Heather whoever. Surely it’s mostly women, and in particular tween and teenage girls, who find this star stuff interesting. Yawn.
You know who I always loved? Margaret Hamilton. She was I think in her early 30s when she created the role of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Back when cinema was much more highly structured and elaborated (thinking mostly of Hollywood, but also of the British and German studios, and the fact that back then it was just a younger fresher art form), the star system provided the public with an elaborate panoply of archetypes: sexual, social, psychological, historical figures whom you could love or hate, emulate or use as an object lesson. Some of the lessons were complex: there were monochrome types like Edward G. Robinson and Pola Negri and W.C. Fields, but there were also ambivalent, complex creatures like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and James Cagney who moved back and forth across the good/bad lines. It was also a very outward-looking, society-oriented manner, an art form that served its public unabashedly; if it served its own interests as well, this was a more arcane matter.
I think now that Hollywood fictionalizing has become somewhat more enervated, restricted, and self-serving in its interests (rather than reflecting a public ethos), some of the void has been filled by “reality” programming and fixation on tabloid scandals in supplying archetypal characters. But since a lot of this stuff is driven by the antics of people who are not really elaborate “creations” but merely folks at the mercy of their weaknesses (like Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse), the story lines are thinner and duller, and the public’s responses cruder.
Why the gender split among the most-loved/-hated columns? Probably a lot to do with the fact that women are more interested in these particular story lines than men, whose attention is divided between the sports pages, the tabloids, and other stuff (where you’ll find similar narratives under different auspices). Men and women, being kind of different, just tend to like different things, and if women like stuff that’s about personal behavior and relationships and so forth, well that’s their prerogative and they probably have their reasons. It’s the crudity of the story lines on offer that I think jars us, not the fact that they exist in the first place.
I haven’t been to the UK in a gazillion years, but I keep reading that there’s this mad binge-drinking youth culture that is much more decadent and crazy and drunk than I remember it being, back when I last visited. Is that true? If it is, do Amy Winehouse’s antics have something complex to do with the phenomenon at large? (btw, I like Amy Winehouse fine, she’s got a good voice and talent, but I find her musical conception somewhat pedestrian. Didn’t PJ Harvey kind of do this whole thing to completion in just one album, during her “To Bring You My Love” period?)
As to this business of the “policing of femininity,” well, geez louise, you’ll discover steam next. In a complicated highly-structured society with a lot of moving parts, as a matter of simple maintenance (and the methods are likely to get cruder and less refined the bigger the set is) lots of things are going to be “policed” including masculinity (and boy have I got some good stories!). I remember the excellent Mets pitcher Tom Seaver being vilified as a cry-baby in the sports pages in the early 70s for the mildest deviations from a masculine sports ethos. So it’s not new, and it goes on in many more arenas than gender. But you already know that perfectly well, so instead of just calling it out, why not explore it more carefully?
The weird thing I think about a Foucouldian anatomy of complex power structures, is the concomitant but not strictly necessary idea that simply because a thing exists and is structured, that evil must inhere in it. “Room for improvement” is a constant in human affairs, and it’s not synonymous with “evil”. Is your gall bladder wicked because it isn’t your lung?
I wish we could ask Margaret Hamilton!
The most ecstatic applause I ever heard was at a film premiere maybe 15 years ago, when the actor Liam Neeson made an appearance and gave a banal speech. I found that depressing. If I understand things correctly, in Shakespeare’s day actors where only one step up the status hierarchy from whores and were more likely to be pelted with rotten cabbage than put on a pedestal. I think the medieval types had it about right, although they may have been a little harsh towards the whores.
Hell I’m getting old and grumpy.
Self-selecting population perhaps? People who aspire to celebrity are quite possibly not that nice to begin with.
The popular/vilified lists highlight one thing to me. The popular people are celebrities because they do something well with celebrity as a by-product, whereas the vilified have celebrity because they’re (or their partners are) famous, and have achieved almost nothing that might deserve it.
It would be interesting to know the gender vote breakdown for those lists as well as how many votes each candidate got. I suspect they would reveal many other patterns.
Yes, these surveys are pretty gross indicators. It’d be good to have a much more rigorous one!
But not always - as a number of people have said, Winehouse has a lot of talent as a muso.
Yep Kim, Winehouse would have been a superstar regardless of persona - with her particular musical stylings, any time in the last 40 years would have done nicely. Lyrics might not have gotten a run though (at least from a honky).
Steve Munn, actually they have a point. There is a thesis here and it was further unpacked by Rayedish in the excellent 24 before that poster fell into the same
the same gender essentialist trap as her targets, the myoginists, at 27.
But am both suitably chastened and better informed for the thread and JPZ’sc omments are the reward for perserverence.
I think the post mod “audience complicity” theory of curent media studies certainly is the necesary response to Frank furt media critique, but whilst helpful and a part of the dialectic of media theory, is nonetheless just a bit to twee, a bit nice as a way for lefty academics to oblige neolib patriarchal vice chancellors eyeing off departments for funding cuts. The left wingers go first and those willing to subscribe to”blame the victim” complicity and ultimately social atomisation and consumer capitalism alibied find life less stressed than they might have otherwise ( btw, I know that I’m going to be seen as contesting a certain interpretation of certain types of feminist theory, but those theories themselves arose out of contestation of Frankfurt new left theorising, after all ).
I understand the points being made by Kim, R ayedish, Helen and others and agree it is rewarding to “see” a situation from the new vantage point, once the intial surprise wears off. Contrast is all.
It is not so unusual for highly creative people, like Amy Winehouse, to be troubled by alcohol and drug addiction. We must remember that they are not run-of-the-mill people. Truly creative people take the culture a step beyond where it was, and that is what Amy Winehouse has done. Who, in the history of the world, has actually written words, and sung them, about the reality of the role of psychological denial in the illness of alcohol and/or drug addiction, and made a hit record of it to boot? As the saying goes in Alcoholics Anonamous, “Denial aint just a river in Egypt”. Amy is like a microcosym of the earth at this point in history. We are all addicted to consumerism, to dependence on our institutions which are faltering, to the gas-guzzling and polluting automobile, to the terrible expense of war, while millions are starving. We are all in denial, and how ready are we to change, and clean up? Amy Winehouse is the mirror image of ourselves, and we don’t like what we see. Myself - I like Amy and I think she is a marvellous talent.
Amy could be on death’s door if someone does not take control of her life soon. Where are these exceptional places where those with addictions are placed. Poor girl, life is ebbing away.
June 27, 2008. Amy will perform at Nelson Manela’s 90th Birthday Concert, which is also an Aids Benefit, at his personal invitation, today, at Hyde Park in London England. I’ll be watching this in Canada on live TV, and so will millions of others. If all of her millions of fans say a prayer for her, we can pull her out of this hell of addiction that she is in, with the help of God. Amy needs love and kindness, and appreciation, not vilification, along with rehabilitation and rest. When we are at our lowest ebb is when we need our friends to show some respect for us. Amy has worked very hard to hone her talents to the pitch they are at - singing, song-writing, guitar playing, and performance. It must be harder and harder for her to face the world when thoughtless, lesser people are jeering at her.