Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Why is it so popular to make fun of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears?

In the previous Parish Hilton thread in this folder, LabRat made the following comment:

Well, I quite agree with you, LabRat. To me, Britney Spears and even more Paris Hilton seem extremely uninteresting. Paris Hilton in particular seems to lack almost any sort of talent. So the question is: how the heck can she be so famous? When she has so little to show for herself?

To me Paris Hilton's fame is a problem in itself, and when you couple it with the lack of fame for many women who really are bright, talented and accomplished, I think you can begin to discern a pattern here: women often get famous for the wrong things.

Before I try to delve a bit deeper into this, let me tell you about a male colleague of mine, Lasse Eriksson, teacher of literature and history. When you meet and speak to Lasse, you begin to discern how untouched he is by sexist ideas and trends our society. And you also begin to understand how sexist our society really is.

Lasse is a man who deeply admires and loves talented and accomplished people, be they writers, artists, actors, politicians, diplomats, reporters or doctors (he is married to a highly skilled and specialized medical doctor himself). The most amazing thing about Lasse, however, is that he admires so many skilled women. He can talk at length and so enthusiastically about all kinds of skilled female professionals. His eyes light up when he speaks about these great women: Cecilia Uddén, Sweden's best reporter, Selma Lagerlöf, a great female writer who died in 1940, Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, famous and very accomplished Swedish actresses, Sigrid Hjertén, a well-known painter, Anna Lind, minister of foreign affairs who was killed by a half-crazed man in 2002, Caroline Krook, bishop in Stockholm, a female professor of Chinese whose name I've forgotten, a female professor of neuroscience whose name I've also forgotten....

Does Lasse have some sort of fetish about great women? Does he know everything about skilled and accomplished women but little about skilled and accomplished men? Not at all. Lasse can talk with equal enthusiasm about great men. But, probably unlike virtually any other man I know, including many incredibly nice guys, Lasse never for a moment thinks of a woman as a woman first, and as an interesting person second. To Lasse, women are every bit as smart, bright, creative, intellectual and brave as men. And this is not something that he needs to make a point of. Why should he have to remind people of something that is so self-evident? The sky is blue, water is wet, and men and women are equally fascinating and brilliant. How could things possibly not be that way?

I don't think I have ever met another man who has this pure, perfect respect for women. Lasse respects women not because they are women, but because they are people, and because he loves people who are smart and interesting.

However, the world we live in, the world which makes Paris Hilton an important celebrity, does not respect women the same way it respects men. If it did, how could Paris Hilton ever be famous? In what ways is she bright, talented or accomplished?

The truth is that Paris Hilton is famous because she is an "ideal woman": she is young and beautiful, she is inordinately rich, she has a name that nobody can forget, and she likes to expose her body and her sexuality. So what if she can't act? So what if she can't sing? So what if she hasn't got anything interesting to say? So what if she is just a stupid sex object? Isn't that enough if you are a woman?

But what about those women who aren't perfect sex objects, but are really talented? How does the world respond to them? Unfortunately I think that the media aren't going to be really interested in these women if they haven't got a pair of lovely legs and big boobs. Lasse, my colleague, is probably just barely aware that Paris Hilton even exists. Why on earth should he take an interest in someone like her? But all the brilliant and brainy women that Lasse admires are seen as just too boring for the world to take much notice of.

A woman like Paris Hilton is held up as an impossible ideal to women everywhere. How many of us can have Paris Hilton's perfect face and body? How many of us are super-rich heiresses? How many of us can get paid for partying, more or less?

It's no wonder that many women are jealous of Paris Hilton. So when Paris falters, when she goes to jail, when she cries in public, when she makes a spectacle of herself, when she says those unbelievably moronic things that drive ordinary people crazy, is it any wonder that ordinary women laugh and jeer at her? Paris Hilton's previous successes made many of these women feel fat, ugly, poor and unsexy. Now that she stumbles they can get back at her and laugh.

And why do guys laugh at Paris Hilton? Maybe because most guys, unlike Lasse, think that women really are somewhat inferior to men, and then it's nice to see Paris Hilton confirm the idea that women are stupid?

When it comes to men, few guys become famous only because they were born rich and are beautiful. All right, a few male models are famous only for their looks, but generally the world asks for other talents in men. Therefore famous men usually have talents that are unrelated to their looks, because if they didn't have such talents they probably wouldn't be famous in the first place.

I think that the problem is that the wrong kind of women become famous for the wrong things. Then lots of people will be contemptuous of these untalented women, who don't seem to deserve the fame they have got. And maybe by extension many people will also become somewhat contemptuous and suspicious of the talents and accomplishments of women in general.



Ann