Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s
The Story of Nine Famous Women in the Tabloid 2000s
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A scathing reexamination of the lives of nine female celebrities in the 2000s—Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Aaliyah, Janet, Amy, Kim, Chyna, and Jen—and the sexist, exploitative culture that let them down
Welcome to celebrity culture in the early aughts: the reign of Perez Hilton, celebrity sex tapes, and dueling tabloids fed by paparazzi who were willing to do anything to get the shot.
The internet was still the Wild West: slut-shaming, fat-shaming, and revenge porn were all fair game, and celebrity was seen as a commodity to be consumed. And for the famous women of this era, they were never as popular—or as vulnerable—as when they were in crisis.
In Toxic, journalist Sarah Ditum tells the stories of nine famous women who defined this era and explores how they were devoured by fame, how they attempted to control their own narratives, and how they succeeded or (more often) failed.
Whatever you think you already know, leave it at the door. Toxic reveals these women neither as pure victims nor as conniving strategists, but as complex individuals trying to navigate celebrity while under attack from a vicious and fast-changing media. It’s time to come to terms with how these iconic women and their experiences living under the public gaze shaped the way we see ourselves, our bodies, our relationships, and our aspirations. We are all products of the toxic decade.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Toxic will change the way you look at early-2000s female celebrities like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. In her exquisitely researched work of feminist critique, journalist Sarah Ditum investigates the ways these prominent women, and others, were wronged by voyeuristic gossip media. Ditum covers the reign of cruel gossip bloggers like Perez Hilton and high-profile stories like Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” along with edgier stories that only made cultural waves on snarkier sites like Gawker. With her wonderfully conversational writing style, Ditum holds a mirror up to the media world’s misogyny, examining how blogging, social media, and traditional news coverage all played a role in destroying the lives of several famous women. If you’re curious about pop culture or 21st-century feminism, don’t miss Toxic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Ditum debuts with a damning indictment of tabloids' treatment of female celebrities in the early 21st century. The rise of digital cameras in the early aughts, Ditum argues, provided tabloids with "more shots than ever before," while the internet opened opportunities for gossip bloggers willing to publish stories even tabloids wouldn't touch. Examining how these cultural forces affected perennial paparazzi targets Aaliyah, Jennifer Aniston, Chyna, Paris Hilton, Janet Jackson, Kim Kardashian, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Amy Winehouse, Ditum suggests Spears's 2007 decision to shave her head was a revolt against the sexualized femininity she "had been groomed to perform" since she was a teen. Elsewhere, Ditum excoriates the media's sexist coverage of Jackson's 2004 Super Bowl performance for falsely claiming the musician "deliberately" bared her breast while sparing Justin Timberlake, who exposed Jackson after an apparent misunderstanding about a costume reveal. Ditum's sympathetic treatment of her subjects contrasts with the enraging accounts of tabloid sexism and overreach, demonstrating how such coverage obscured and trivialized hidden hardships (after Paris Hilton revealed in 2020 that she been sexually abused at a psychiatric treatment center when she was 16, Ditum writes, "the slutty attention seeker of the aughts was suddenly, obviously no such thing: Paris had been a damaged child acting out"). Readers will rethink what they thought they knew about some of the most publicized celebrity stories of the early 2000s.
