Given this site's history of posting about ill-behaved Princesses (or well-behaved, depending on the hat you're wearing), it is with some enthusiasm we note that the City Journal has a piece called Trash Princess. Dirty work, but someone's gotta do it.
Quickly becoming my favorite magazine. Brace yourselves - more to come, no doubt...
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3 comments:
I once read an article about gossip, specifically, celebrity gossip. It made the point, all snideness and mean-spiritedness aside, that gossip plays a very important social role - of defining and sharing societal norms - albeit by voicing criticisms.
Once upon a time, people in the same community all knew the same people. So there were common points of reference.
However, in the current day, the only truly common points of reference are celebrities.
So I am in full agreement with the author of the article. And actually, I might even go further. The fact that we talk about Paris Hilton, the fact that we hate her, is more than just a sign of "lingering cultural sanity." It's part of the process by which we jointly define and share our ideas of right and wrong, and that wearing panties, at least when donning short skirts and getting out of cars, is highly recommended.
I feel sorry for her - born in wealth with great opportunities to study in the best universities. With that experience, she could be able to contribute to society in a significant way. Instead, here she is in gossip magazines. What a waste of life?
Gossip and, um, being a porn star. I think this paragraph sums it up. And we as internet trawlers can claim partial credit for her reign. (One Night In Paris... not bad):
But then: kismet! A few months before her television series was to air, The Tape hit the Internet. It revealed Paris, 19 when it was made, in various states of undress and engaged in a Kama Sutra of sexual acts with Rick Solomon, an entrepreneur and her boyfriend at the time, and it temporarily silenced cynics who claimed she had no talent. Websites that merely mentioned the video, titled One Night in Paris, crashed. In office cubicles, workers ignored their spreadsheets and desperately tried to track down clips of naked Paris; an industrious scholar could probably locate a blip in worker productivity the exact week the video hit the Web. So big was the impact of The Tape that it changed the dynamics of celebrity making and turned Paris into the first New Media superstar. While “Page Six” and Vanity Fair helped to give her fame, it was the Internet, with some help from cable television and tabloid magazines, that launched her into the celebrity stratosphere.
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