A few months ago someone, maybe it was Chuck Ross, had a post up about the ‘It’ girls and their all too predictable tragic endings. Whether it was Marilyn Monroe, Edie Sedgwick, or some other ingenue, or should I say coquette, they all went through a series of men and scandals followed by an untimely end. Thoughts of these women, their pushing boundaries, their flagrant sexuality, and their lives cut short, fires the imagination of many a young boy. Let’s face it, most of us know some omega man-boy who’s obsessed with some long dead celebrity. Their unattainable bitch-goddess of perfection.
Currently, we are assailed daily with the sex tapes, the reality television shows, and the escapades of attractive (and I suppose in some cases beautiful) women who seem to fit the ‘It’ girl mold. They bed hop, have little or no shame, take it upon themselves to pontificate on matters they have little or no knowledge about, and try to be generally more outrageous and more vampish in behavior so as to attract more attention.
But are these ‘it’ girls cut from the same mold as those from the past? Oh, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Brittany Murphy all seem to be pale reflections of the ‘it’ girls of the past. They all have or had careers, if you could call them that. With the fracturing of the entertainment market it must be more difficult for any one of them to capture the imagination of a whole generation of young boys and men. Then there are the other ‘it’ girls of the moment, the ones who are famous for being the progeny or famous people, or famous for being nothing more than reality television constructs. Girls like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian (and her sisters), and Heidi Montag (and her ferret like, soon to be ex, husband).
The old saying goes that history begins for most people when they are born. I bring this up, because it seems to me that the last decade or so has seen the rise of the empty fame whores. Those women in the second group above, who are famous for being famous, or for being related to famous people. They don’t have careers per se that created their fame, instead they try to parley their fame into a career. They expose the harsh and ugly truth of women unleashed from any constraints. That grrl power attitude that no one can tell them what to do and they are going to prove it to the world.
