a fight for the soul of poptimism...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

...has broken out on this thread. Since I am now using 'poptimist' with scare quotes, it may be possible that I am about to publicly 'break' with 'the' 'movement'. :-)

Comments

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I think it's super-questionable to ascribe being repulsed by Paris Hilton to an anti-feminist stance, though. I think the repulsion specifically directed at her sexual behavior was more confirmed by the sex tape than actually generated by it, and Paris herself seems to be consciously marketing herself by embodying every negative stereotype possible--she's presenting herself as shallow, greedy, lazy, bitchy, and stupid, whether or not she actually is any of these things, and it seems actually fairly anti-feminist to cheer these things. (Plus the whole "apparently she's racist" thing.) I mean you can say "if a man was doing it people would cheer" but probably the same people who are cheering for her as it is.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

(I'm not saying any of this should change one's perception of the album of course since I'm a Good Poptimist, but I think it's wholly understandable why people of good character might not particularly like Paris Hilton.)

[juror8.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not even "apparently". The video footage is out there.

Lex, what do you think of Paris referring to two black guys as "dumb niggers"?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I don't, because I don't actually believe internet-spread rumours as a matter of course! Anyway dude I listen to homophobic dancehall with 0 qualms*, I am entirely botherd about popstars' morality.

[cis.livejournal.com]

Dude, seriously, have either Lex or I ascribed being repulsed by PH to an anti-feminist stance? I know quite a few feminists who I can confidently predict would be repulsed by PH if they think about her at all. Also, ffs, misogyny is not anti-feminism, nor is anti-feminism necessarily misogyny.

My point is not that disliking PH cos of her behaviour post-sex video is inherently misogynistic, but that it can involve misogyny - does Dom's claim that she orchestrated the whole thing for exposure, then lied in order to get even more money from it, which attributes her with the lion's share of the power in this situation, mean that he's expressing his fear of potential female use of her sexuality for her own ends, or that he's celebrating her cunning at playing the gender-roles system? Or does it mean neither? That he heard it somewhere and thinks it plausible? That it's nothing to do with his attitudes to women, just to do with his attitudes to Paris Hilton? I'm not sitting here going "if you hate Paris you hate all women" because it's patently bollocks. But it's just as untrue to pretend that there isn't any misogyny involved in the reaction to Paris Hilton which boils down to "the correct reaction to the sex tape being sold would have been to never be seen in public again (never mind that she would still be known forever as 'that girl from the sex tape' no matter what she did), since she hasn't done that she is clearly shameless and A Bad Person who is probably to blame for it in the first place".

I'm confused, I'm afraid - Dom's version of events tells me that no-one knew about Paris before the sex tape which was two weeks before The Simple Life started airing; your version says that people were repulsed about her sexual behaviour before the sex tape appeared to confirm their repulsion, which implies either that she was known for her promiscuity or sexual adventuring (although i've heard the tape is very vanilla and she's mostly bored during?) or that only extreme prudes find the tape distasteful. Do we have a timeline anywhere that we can refer to?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

But none of those stereotypes are new! Plenty of popstars, AND their material, have been shown to be any to all of those things ever since the form began. And it's not limited to pop music either.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

But Paris wasn't a popstar before this--she was doing all these things as an actual human being without any legitimating entertainment-industry activities to justify all this. This is what people have such a hard time with, and it's a stance riddled with contradictions, but at the same time I think that's why you can't pretend this is Just Another Pop Album. If you're making music, there's something separate from the persona to enjoy, however flimsy, whereas with Paris prior to this, there was only the persona. And that's why I think it's pretty understandable for people to take the album as an extension of the persona and judge it based on that.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Well she wasn't a popstar but she was a TV star, or an entertainment star, or a nebulous brand star, this is surely a common enough phenomenon that it doesn't get people's backs up?

In any case I think there's a bit too much conflating of the person and the persona going on, a few too many assumptions that Simple Life Paris = real Paris. Curiously Paris seems to have a reasonably good grip of this:

Hilton says the baby voice she uses on the reality TV show "The Simple Life" is an act.

"I'm always playing a character," she says. "I don't talk like this really -- like a baby. I don't act like myself in public, because I don't really want to show everyone the real me. Because I have no privacy whatsoever, the only thing I have is who I really am." (http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Music/08/21/people.parishilton.ap/index.html)