Female celebrities and the media: the gendered denigration of the ‘ordinary’ celebrity

Abstract

Today, the widespread scorn and derision directed at celebrities is aimed predominantly at a particular kind of female celebrity. This celebrity is either an ordinary girl whose fame is a result of appearances on reality TV shows, or she is a pop star who has been on a drug- or alcohol-fuelled course of self-destruction. The gendered politics of the treatment of these female celebrities is questionable, and it acts to mask a deeper class prejudice which has resurfaced in recent years in Anglo-American culture. This piece will treat Britney Spears and Kerry Katona as examples of the way the treatment of ‘ordinary’ and ‘car crash’ female celebrities serves to highlight a return to open class prejudice that is concealed behind sexism.

The media treatment of Britney Spears is one of the most visible signs of this cultural trend. Globally there has been intense media interest in Spears's breakdown and widespread speculation about the nature of her problems. It is hardly a surprise to note that most of this treatment has been unsympathetic. While her stints in rehabilitation clinics have garnered the usual epithets of a pop star car crash (‘toxic singer’), it was the episode of her shaving her head that precipitated a frenzy of media interest: ‘Bald and broken’ screamed the headline of ABC on-line news, ¹ while America's favourite gossip magazine, People, told its readers ‘Britney Spears goes bald’, recapping a year later with a commentary on Spears' ‘Mental meltdowns’. ²

What emerges from an examination of the coverage of Britney's shaved head is a misogynistic attitude towards the pop star, who is judged by a set of paradoxical female norms that she is seen to be failing. ³ By removing one of the key signifiers of femininity – her hair – Spears is not just failing in her femininity, but also in what Dyer has identified as the central ideological function of the star – the holding together of contradictory social ideals (Dyer 1979, p. 49). Spears's sexualised image – her naughty schoolgirl outfit in her ‘Hit me baby’ tour of 1998 – and her much-publicised virginity (and her equally publicised loss if it to Justine Timberlake) manage to suture together the ‘virgin/whore’ dichotomy that has long been at the heart of female fame. Spears' ‘erratic’ ⁴ behaviour subsequently revealed, rather than covered, this gendered paradox and made her an easy target for the celebrity-orientated media. While it is true that Spears and her publicity team constructed her dualistic image carefully, it is also the case that female pop stars today are constrained in their image construction by a focus upon their sexuality that is not the case for their male counterparts. Media interest in Britney has certainly focused upon her sexual status; her short-lived marriages, her divorces and her ‘out-of-control-lifestyle’ ⁵ are seen to have resulted in the ultimate female crime – bad mothering and the loss of custody of her two sons in September 2007. It is not insignificant that Spears's comeback has been accompanied by widespread comments on her improved mothering. While People reporter Joey Bartolomeo couples female baldness with bad mothering when he tells readers in September 2008 that ‘you'd never know it was the same girl who shaved her head and had her kids taken away’, a month later People treats readers to the headline ‘Britney's boy time with mommy: singer gets into maternal mode with sons Preston and Jaydon as friends say Spears is “getting it together” ’.

However, underlying the gendered treatment of Spears is more than a hint of class prejudice and this, too, is a significant trend in contemporary celebrity culture. Spears's southern, blue-collar origins are derided regularly as ‘trailer trash’, and this reveals that a deeper class chauvinism is in play. On 24 February 2008 the British tabloid News of the World online ran a piece on the top 10 most tasteless and low-class celebrities. It was an all-female list, with Britney Spears coming second. Spears is condemned thus:

One time pop Princess Britney Spears has been called trailer trash – and she's the only American to make it on to our chavs' top table… . Looking this rough she'd be more at home in Croydon, then [sic] LA.

Yet Spears, despite the waves of condemnation, is still seen to have talent. The tendency to conceal class bigotry behind sexism is even more pronounced in the media treatment of ‘talentless’ female celebrities who emerge from reality TV. The remaining nine celebrities on this list are all female celebrities who are ‘famous for being famous’ rather than because they have any special talent or skill, and all are deemed to come from a lower-class background. Number one on the list is Kerry Katona, the first female winner of I'm a celebrity get me out of here in 2004. At the time of her win, Kerry Katona (then Kerry Mcfadden) was heralded as an ‘ordinary’ girl – an unpretentious working-class girl made good. Four years later she was ridiculed as the News of the World's ‘Chav no. 1’ accompanied by her picture, topless and flabby on a beach, hunched over burger and chips. The paper provides the reader with a fictional checklist of ‘chavdom’ to explain Kerry's place at the top:

Boobs out? Check.

Belly hanging over bikini bottoms? Check.

Busy stuffing her face with a burger? Check. (Walford 2008)

The term ‘chav’ is a relatively new term of abuse in Britain that refers to working-class people who are seen to possess little established ‘taste’ or culture (not unlike the US term ‘trailer trash’). It is a term that connotes ‘disgust and contempt’ for working-class people in British society (Lockyer 2010, p. 6). The term ‘chav’ has been used recently to label certain celebrities who are seen to embody a lack of taste and accomplishment, and the ‘celebrity chav’ in Britain is almost exclusively gendered female. Kerry Katona may top their list, but she is only one of a raft of female celebrities from working-class backgrounds who, having become famous due to media exposure rather than ‘talent’, have become the widespread objects of derision and scorn.

Leo Braudy points out that the dichotomy between idolisation and denigration of stars has long been with us (1997). However, the gendered and classed derision of the ‘ordinary’ (female) individual that characterises today's celebrity-bashing points towards a wider return to open class prejudice that may have a new lexicon but which, as Biressi and Nunn have pointed out, comes from a previous era (2008). The United States and Britain share a context for this phenomenon, despite national differences. Both countries have long promoted the myth of ‘meritocracy’ and this ideology has intensified in recent years. Indeed, this myth sits at the heart of celebrity culture. Both countries are also in the throes of neo-liberal economic policies which are attacking welfare provision, resulting in a staggering reduction in social mobility. In this atmosphere, fewer people are able to ‘make it’ and the poor are blamed for their poverty. ⁶ The ‘ordinary’ celebrity emerges out of this context. The rise of the ‘ordinary’ celebrity has tapped into narratives about media-driven social mobility for the working class while their ridicule and denigration in the media indicates that they are not really part of the ‘meritocracy’: their fame is based on luck, not talent, and this figure holds up a mirror to (particularly female) ordinary working-class people which alludes to their place or potential place in public culture. The question remains, then: is the mere fact of visibility of ordinary people in celebrity culture a cause for celebration of the growing democracy of our culture, or is the content of that visibility an important question to which we must attend?

Notes

1. People, 2007. Britney Spears goes bald. People, 16 February. Available from: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20012195,00.html [Accessed 1 July 2008].

2. People, 2008. Mental meltdowns. People, 31 January. Available from: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20179866,00.html [Accessed 1 July, 2008].

3. For a full discussion of the paradox of femininity for famous women see Stacey, 1994.

4. People, 2007. Britney's latest bizarre behavior sparks concern. People, 25 July. Available from: http://www.people.com/peple/article/0,,200480818,00.html [Accessed 1 July 2008].

5. People, 2008. Mental meltdowns. People, 31 January. Available from: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20179866,00.html [Accessed 1 July 2008].

6. The gap between rich and poor today is wider than it was in 1997 and a recent report states that social mobility has declined since the 1950s. A report from the National Office of Statistics (NOS) shows that inequality rose between 1995 and 2002 and looks likely to rise again in 2008/9 (Blanden and Machin 2007).