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

Hmmmmm. It's so interesting to hear that all of you insist that not only are you yourself not jealous of Paris Hilton, but you don't know of anyone else who might be.

I'm sure you're right. Paris has become such a ridiculous character that everyone knows that she is someone to be mocked, not someone to be envied. But for all of that, I'll insist that to many young girls, Paris - or girls who look more or less like Paris - are people to be emulated.







Young girls know that this is what they ought to look like. They see pictures of young women looking like this all the time. Kmar, you siad that your niece admired Britney Spears when she was nine. Well, when my niece was nine, she adored Spice Girls in general and Baby Spice in particular:



"She is so fine", my niece once said about Baby Spice, and you could hear the intense longing in her voice. She wanted to be just like that herself.

My niece is eighteen years old now, and she is a terrific girl. She is doing great at school - so far she actually has a perfect score!, she's got two jobs at the same time, she is almost always happy and smiling, and she is really popular. Not even my brother and his wife complain about any teenage petulance or obstinacy on their daughter's part. I'm so proud of her. But I can tell you it's obvious that she has been raised on role models like Baby Spice: She has long hair which she dyes very blonde, she looks after her body by working out, eating carefully and spending quite a lot of time in the solarium, and she dresses acceptably, but quite sexily.

My niece isn't trying to be Paris Hilton. My brother and his wife are very sensible people, and Linnea knows that wild partying and provocative sexual behaviour just isn't acceptable. She isn't imitating that kind of behaviour. But she is trying to look like a model. When it comes to her looks, she, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Baby Spice are all reaching for the same ideal. Paris Hilton, therefore, is not so much a trendsetter herself as she is someone who is doing her very best to live up to a current ideal. Because she did not create the ideal, but just tries to live up to it, it is possible for young girls to dream of being models and actresses and singers, and to dream of being sexy and beautiful and rich, and still scoff at Paris Hilton.

I'm fifty-two years old. I was born in 1955. The fifties was an unbelievable different time compared with today, not least when it came to fashion and general ideals for young people. I searched for some pictures of young people from the 1950s, and I found this one:



These young people actually lived in an orphanage, so they were not your typical 1950s kids. Even so, their clothes and general style don't look that off to me, compared with what was normal in Scandinavia in the fifties.

In the fifties, few kids were overweight, and practically no kids at all were grossly fat. We didn't get fat because we didn't have junk food. I never saw a hamburger until I was sixteen, and I was about the same age when I tried my first pizza and Coca-Cola. (I didn't much like it.) And I was allowed to eat candy and chocolate once a week, on Saturdays, and I only got cookies when we had any at home.

Because none of us were fat, it would have been easier for us to look like Paris Hilton than it is for most of today's young girls, who are often overweight. But we weren't trying to look like Paris Hilton. We didn't know that we were supposed to look that sexy, that provocative, that blond.

Paris Hilton represents an ideal that is so hard to reach for girls of today. You have to work so hard to even get close to her looks, and so many girls just give up, eat junk food and get really fat instead. And then when someone has managed to turn her body into that impossible ideal, like Paris Hilton, and she wants to be liked and admired for it, the world jeers and laughs at her.

I'm just wondering what all this does to young girls' self-esteem. What do they have to do today to be "right"? How do they make people like them?

Ann