Young, famous, and FUCKED
Britney Spears shaving her head. Paris Hilton serving as Britney’s night-time wing woman and apparently, therapist. Lindsay Lohan spending some quality time in rehab. The Olson twins stumbling their way through adolescence, the world their ashtray. Nicole Richie and whatever it is that she does. I don’t care about any of these people or their problems (except the time Richie rubbed her two little problems against my chest to pass by me in a crowded nightclub), but I am forced to think about them by the media, and my social network. You can’t pass by a newsstand or a deli without seeing these people all over the covers, you can’t turn on a television without one of these people appearing somehow, you can’t attend a party without someone asking whether you heard that Britney shaved her head.
Something about these pop icons has begun to bother me greatly. From what little I know about them, they have lost their minds, and our society is clearly to blame. When a rag such as the NY Post puts a pop tart on its cover just because she cut her hair off, I see that as a sign of irreversible societal rot on three levels. It shows that Britney wants to publicly display her mental problems, people are happy to print pictures of this non-event and analyze it, and millions more people are willing to buy and read the junk. It shows the media is supplying the demand of an incredibly overfed, bored, and unsophisticated population, in a world where real problems exist but aren’t getting on the front page. Here is a true tragedy for you: how many budding journalists forced to work on the haircut story would rather be writing about Darfur, Sudan?
The inevitable result is an army of paparazzi following Paris Hilton around, trying to catch her every move on camera- whether it’s a trip to a clothing store, lunch at a cafe, or another booze-soaked nightclub jaunt with absentee mom Britney. I’m sure Paris knows that she’s one of the most-searched names on the Internet and that she helps sell gazillions of magazines. She is a veritable brand unto herself. The hunted starlet therefore gets an artificially inflated sense of self, even though she lacks any sort of talent or education. I saw her sex video online and she wasn’t even good in bed, folks! An army of agents, publicists, managers, and other handlers see the dollar signs, which guarantee that they will encourage and perpetuate a star’s 15 minutes in the limelight for another minute or two.
The following result is mental illness and obnoxious, self-deprecating behavior. As a society we are destroying these young womens’ lives. We are encouraging their outlandish and embarrassing activities because we like the drama. We buy their crap and supply them with the many millions of dollars that help fuel their outrageous lifestyles. This simply adds to the problem, as they build up a separate reality for themselves that is very different from the real world. And then we know exactly what happens. Three words. Anna Nicole Smith. Two words. Michael Jackson.
Money up the wazoo and fame don’t buy the tarts (or any of us) two other things that are more important: health, and happiness. The tarts, partying their way in and out of therapy and rehab, are neither healthy nor happy. And when they are washed out in a few years- when a new crop of young tarts gets through their first menstrual cycle to take Britney and Lindsay and Paris off the stage- they will be even more depressed, ever more fucked than before once they know that the world doesn’t care about them any more, that they were simply used like two-bit whores and then discarded. I dread to know what those poor souls will go through when they fall from the public eye. There are no resources in the world- medical, spiritual, or social- that can undo the fall for all of them. You can hope some of them can get their pieces back together, raise families, etc. but we know that some will not.
I often think about why I resent this phenomenon of pop tarts running themselves ragged, and yet have always defended the rock star lifestyle, which can be equally decadent. From Jimi Hendrix to John Bonham, and Axl Rose to Kurt Cobain, the music industry is littered with the corpses and walking wounded of the rock ‘n roll lifestyle. Overdosing, suicide, alcoholism, and depression are par for the course with these guys just as much as it is with the pop tart set, and yet I think it’s cool when it’s part of rock music. I’ve figured out that the simple difference is a matter of opinion: I think that Nirvana and Guns ‘n Roses were pure bursts of genius. They were talent expounded at the highest levels achieved by entire generations of musicians. These people had to be head cases, like Mozart was, to even be able to create the music that they did. And if they had to be all fucked up to make it happen, to bring their art to life, if they had to lose their very lives in the process, I am somehow ok with it morally. Then maybe there’s this gender and age thing going on, where I think it’s ok for grown men in their 30s and 40s to throw their lives away in a tupperware container full of cocaine, but when it’s a female teenager, a chord is struck in my heart that makes me regret what is happening all the more.
So maybe I am a hypocrite. I think it’s ok for society to destroy you if you’re a grown man contributing something important to society, but if you give the world nothing but crap and you’re a young woman, I think it’s unfair that the world brings about your ruin. And I don’t care about you and your problems in the first place.
