Celebrity and New Media

This book looks back to the early days of new and social media, to examine the
potential threat that such technologies and platforms posed to the mainstream
corporate media’s gatekeeping, and its ability to exploit, humiliate, and even
violate famous women.
Drawing on her own experiences working as part of this gatekeeping system,
Stephanie Patrick argues that, in order to combat this threat, the mainstream
media doubled down on gendered narratives of meritocracy that legitimized cer-
tain (male) celebrities over others. Using a range of case studies spanning “old”
media sites and “new,” including Disney, Playboy, and reality television, this book
demonstrates that sexual exploitation and violation could be considered con-
stitutive of female celebrity, rather than a side effect. Patrick’s case studies include
some of America’s most (in)famous celebrities, including Miley Cyrus, Lindsay
Lohan, Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, and Donald Trump, urging readers to
question their assumptions about these figures and their public trajectories.
This nuanced exploration of patriarchal capitalism and women’s ongoing sexual
exploitation by the media will be an important reference for scholars and students
of digital and new media, journalism, celebrity studies, and gender studies.

Stephanie Patrick is a former casting associate for film and television productions
in Montreal, Canada. She obtained her PhD from the University of Ottawa’s
Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies. Her work has been published in Fem-
inist Media Studies, Television & New Media, and Media, Culture & Society.
Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

Consuming Utopia
Cultural Studies and the Politics of Reading
John Storey

Language, Image, and Power in Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies

Theory and Practice
Edited by Susan Larson

Illusion in Cultural Practice

Productive Deceptions
Edited by Katharina Rein

Activating Cultural and Social Change

The Pedagogies of Human Rights
Edited by Baden Offord, Caroline Fleay, Lisa Hartley, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes
and Dean Chan

The Covid-19 Pandemic as a Challenge for Media and Communication Studies

Edited by Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech and Bartłomiej Łódzki

Playing with Reality

Denying, Manipulating, Converting, and Enhancing What Is There
Edited by Sidney Homan

Celebrity Bromance
Constructing, Interpreting and Utilising Personas
Celia Lam and Jackie Raphael

Celebrity and New Media

Gatekeeping Success
Stephanie Patrick
Celebrity and New Media
Gatekeeping Success

Stephanie Patrick
First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Stephanie Patrick
The right of Stephanie Patrick to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
The data that support the findings of this book are available via Factiva.
Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under
license through the University of Ottawa for this study.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-032-21313-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-21497-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-26865-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268659

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

List of tables vi
Acknowledgements vii

1 Introduction 1

PART 1
Old Media, Girl Power 29
2 Disney Girl… Interrupted: The “Leaking” Sexuality of Girl Stars 31
3 Playmates and Centerfolds: Nostalgic White Femininity and Post-
feminist “Success” 67

PART 2
New Media, Old Power 101
4 Celebrity in Crisis: Reality Television and Sex Tape Stardom 103
5 Neoliberal Success Stories: Trump(’s) Women and Apprentices 140
6 Conclusion 178

Appendix 184
Index 185
Tables

2.1 Journalists describe the non-consensual release of Hudgens’

photo 42
2.2 Phrasing suggests direct examination of naked photo 47
4.1 Descriptions of Hilton 117
4.2 Mapping Authenticity onto Bay-Cheng’s (2015) Agency Model 131
Acknowledgements

This book is based on research that was supported by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council (grant # 752-2016-2001)
Thank you to Dominique Bourque, Mythili Rajiva, Shoshana Magnet,
Lori Burns, and Sarah Projansky for your immensely helpful and insightful
feedback on earlier versions of this work.
Thank you also to everyone at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of
Feminist and Gender Studies, as well as the Ryerson Communication and
Culture program for their support.
Thank you to the editorial and production team at Routledge.
Thank you to Leslie Patrick, Mark Patrick, and all my friends and family
for listening to me talk about pop culture over the years.
Finally, thank you to Mike Migliara, without whom this book would not
exist.
1 Introduction

Context
Every day across America and Canada little girls decide that they want to be
famous when they grow up. They see female celebrities held up as the pinna-
cle of women’s achievements in our society, and likely imagine that fame and
fortune is one route out of the marginalization or minimization that they
experience in their own lives. Imagine one such girl’s trajectory. She perhaps
starts off acting in a school play or two, loves the experience, and decides to
take acting lessons in her spare time. Perhaps as a young woman, after fin-
ishing university – or maybe instead of going to university – she jumps into
her dream, moves to a big city, and starts checking advertisements for local
casting calls. She spots one such ad, placed by an acting and modeling
agency, and dials the number. She is invited to come for an “audition” and
the receptionist tells her to “dress to impress” (whatever that means). The
aspiring actor thinks this might be a break, so she spends her last bit of
money on some new clothes and a professional hair stylist. She memorizes a
scene and rehearses in her head throughout the day.
When she arrives at the agency, she sees another dozen young women just
like her waiting for their own apparent “break.” She tries to chat them up, but
they all look at her like she is the enemy; she is the competition after all. She’s
never been so intimidated, but she tries not to let it faze her. When it’s her
turn, she is greeted in the small room by three men who barely introduce
themselves. They ask her for a headshot, but she has none. They inform her
that she will need some, of course, but they’ll book the session for her at a low
cost of $100…if they decide to take her on. The men leer at her, ask her to
turn around for them. They tell her she should have worn a cocktail dress, not
a pantsuit. They ask her about her acting experience and smirk when she lists
all the classes she has taken. They mention she looks “ethnic” and “exotic,”
which can be an advantage – or a hindrance, it really depends on the director,
they say more to one another than to her. They tell her they’ll get back to her
soon as they usher her out of the room. She does not even perform her scene.
When they call her to let her know they are accepting her as a client, they
demand $100 for the headshots, an additional $200 for more acting classes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268659-1
2 Introduction
(with their own in-house instructor), and, of course, 20% of every gig “they”
book for her.
Now, imagine a different system. The young woman has access to portable
media technology. Perhaps she uses her camera phone to film her own audi-
tions and upload them onto a website directly available for producers and
directors to choose from. Suddenly there are no modeling agents or casting
directors to filter the women and serve as gatekeepers. What if young women
started writing and producing their own short movies, casting themselves and
their friends (who are no longer viewed as competition) in all the roles. Sud-
denly there is no stream of beautiful young women for producers and direc-
tors to choose from (and/or harass and assault). What if instead of short
movies, these women are producing beauty tutorials, Instagram fantasy
accounts, or starring in reality television shows? What if they decided that
acting – an arduous, and often sexist experience – was not nearly as exciting
as “being your own boss,” producing and sharing their own media content in
formats not even yet imagined?
I myself once had the dream of working in the media industry and suc-
ceeded. I worked as a casting associate: the one choosing which women could
audition for which role, often judging them by their beauty alone (via head-
shot – even for voiceover roles!), telling their agents to send them to us
“dressed to impress.” I had to ask young women – for they were almost all
under the age of 30 – what lengths they were willing to go to for the role:
nudity, kissing, sex scenes. I had to listen and nod when they said they would
do all of the above, even if only for a bit part in a small movie that no one
would ever see. I wanted them to refuse. I wanted them to not need me, to not
need to be there in that small room trying to seduce the camera. I wanted
more for these women than to be scrutinized, rated, and at the mercy of the
men in the room and on set. I wanted to see other kinds of women that
weren’t thin, “beautiful,” young, and white (or “exotic”-looking). I decided
one day to not be a part of that system anymore. I hope every woman can
make that decision eventually; numerous technological advancements have
made that more possible than ever. However, those same technologies have
often served to humiliate, punish, and undermine women’s efforts to escape
this system.
Media is not just a realm of entertainment and make-believe. It is increas-
ingly intertwined with our entire selves: socially, politically, and economically.
We can now build online profiles for both dating and job sites. We can “pro-
mote” our favorite products to our friends and to groups of total strangers.
We can use our webcams and Zoom accounts to connect with loved ones and
with potential employers. We can film our pets or kids being silly, and we can
film ourselves showing off our make-up skills to others who want to learn. We
can argue with our racist uncle on Facebook and we can produce our own
podcast where numerous racist uncles come to argue about “cancel culture.”
However, certain uses of technology are deemed improper and worthy of
disdain or even punishment, particularly when women are the users. The
 Introduction 3
now-pejorative sense of the term “influencer” speaks precisely to these double
standards. When women monetize the online audience they have built for
themselves, there is a collective mourning for traditional conceptions of
“talent” and “work.” When women show up crying and drunk on our televi-
sion screens, we blame them – and not the producers who put them there –
for the “dumbing down” of our culture. When women take “sexy” selfies,
they are vain, superficial, and naïve and not merely conforming (and adapt-
ing) to centuries of conditioning to perceive themselves as sexual objects
(Berger 1973). When her nude photos are stolen and shared without her
consent, it is the woman that is using technology improperly and not the
person who violated her trust and privacy.
On the surface, the connections across these issues may seem tenuous: the
success of some women depending on them being willing to invest in a system
that objectifies, harasses, and exploits them is a separate issue from the ways
in which violence is used to humiliate, police, and punish women’s use(s) of
technology. This book argues otherwise. Not only are these issues intimately
intertwined, but they are also part of a much longer legacy of patriarchal
domination and capitalist exploitation that extends beyond the invention of
media – and now new media –technologies. A woman’s success in a capitalist
society is not only dependent upon her willingness to sell her labor and her
sexuality (if she is privileged enough to be considered “desirable”), but also
her willingness to settle for receiving only a small portion of the profits that
her labor and sexuality generate. When neoliberal capitalism opens up new
ways for women to profit from their labor and sexuality, sexual violence steps
in to remind them of their “proper” place.
Much like sexual violence functions to police and punish women’s beha-
viors more broadly, image-based or technology-based sexual violence works
to police and punish women’s behaviors in networked and (new) media
environments. As noted by numerous feminist scholars, sexual violence –
whether physical or mediated – is a tool of patriarchal and white-supremacist
control and domination (Davis 1983; Collins 2000; Guillaumin 1995; Harding
2015; Plaza 1981; Projansky 2001). It targets women across all levels of pri-
vilege and serves as a reminder that women are always vulnerable to having
their bodies and sexuality weaponized against them. Furthermore, and cru-
cially, mediated sexual violence serves as a reminder to women that they are
under constant threat of real physical, sexual violence (Guillaumin 1995, 196–
200). Yet, as argued eloquently by Karen Boyle (2019, 67–68) in relation to
the #MeToo movement and Harvey Weinstein, sexual violence is not only
about power and control – it is also, often, about sex and desire. The dichot-
omy insisting that rape and sexual violence must be separated from desire and
(hetero)sexuality has been helpful in feminist critiques of rape culture (parti-
cularly the crucial insistence that there is a meaningful distinction to be made
between consensual heterosex and coercive sex), but it does not adequately
account for the ways in which female sexuality is frequently bartered for
power, capital, and visibility in contemporary culture.
4 Introduction
The tension between the growing opportunities for (certain) women to
barter their sexuality for power, capital, and visibility and the threat of vio-
lence used to contain how and when women use those opportunities is
exhibited in the debates that unfold when women’s images are stolen and cir-
culated without their consent. Is this an issue of privacy (the body as private
property) or of sexual violence (the female body as site of ongoing gendered
violence)? Is it reasonable to expect women not to use technology, even in
their private, sexual lives? What about in cases where a woman’s livelihood is
dependent upon presenting a sexualized image to the world? This book
examines some of the power struggles implicated in these debates: what rela-
tions between capital, the body, and female sexuality do new media technol-
ogies produce? How are these relations embedded in larger systems, such as
neoliberal capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy?
Female celebrity is an ideal site in which such tensions could be explored.
The celebrity has long been at the center of debates over what is and is not
public/private property: does the public have the “right” to access a celebrity
(take a photo, approach for an autograph) whenever and wherever they like?
When a celebrity sells their body, their image, and their sexuality in exchange
for massive amounts of visibility, money, and privilege, do they lose all right
to privacy and autonomy? What might new forms of entrepreneurial celebrity
in the neoliberal era reveal about the terms of success, and how are those
terms gendered, racialized, and classed? In order to think through these
questions, I draw on some key insights from feminist materialist analysis,
specifically the relations between gender oppression and capitalist oppression
(under an increasingly neoliberal regime). I also draw on post-structural
theory to unpack certain common, everyday terms that are taken for granted,
such as talent, work, scandal, and success.
This book tells a small part of a story that is still unfolding. It is a story of
technological developments that, at the very least, destabilize but also poten-
tially democratize the corporate media industry. Yet, technological change
does not unfold in a vacuum: there are social, cultural, economic, and poli-
tical shifts that enable and respond to new technologies. Such contexts are
central to this book. Choosing a focal point to this story, however, was not an
easy task: particularly as the roots of this story extend back decades, if not
centuries, to the origins of both patriarchy and capitalism. While some of
those roots are traced in section two of this Introductory chapter, the parti-
cular part of the story that this book is telling starts in 2007 and begins with
both the fall and rise of two key female celebrities: Paris Hilton and Kim
Kardashian.
I see 2007 as a critical time in America: economically, politically, and cul-
turally. In February of 2007, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama announced
his candidacy for presidency of the United States. In 2008, with his election,
Obama became the first African American President in U.S. history; the racist
backlash against such apparent “progress” would shift the course of Amer-
ican politics for the next decade (and into the foreseeable future). In the fall of
 Introduction 5
2008, the U.S. stock market crashed after the housing bubble collapsed,
sparking a recession with catastrophic effects that are still being felt, particu-
larly amongst the working classes and post-Baby Boomer generations. The
economic trends since then have only exacerbated wealth disparity, job inse-
curity, and growing poverty. Globalization, automatization, deregulation, the
“new”/sharing economy and, more recently, a global pandemic have all dras-
tically changed what working itself looks like, let alone who has access to
home ownership, security, benefits, and any hope of class mobility in con-
temporary America and Canada.
Already, in 2007, technological developments were changing our consump-
tion of and engagement with media. In 2007, Facebook and Twitter had
recently emerged as popular social media platforms, affecting not only social
relations, but also the structures and consumption of celebrity. YouTube,
launched in 2005, was not only part of a broader shift in television production
and consumption, but was also key in “democratizing” media distribution
and star-making, while being at the center of numerous battles over owner-
ship, copyright, and fandoms that continue to plague pop culture (see Jenkins
2006). 2007 was the year the iPhone debuted, and though it was neither the
first smart phone, nor the first phone with a two-way facing camera,1 it sig-
nified a broader shift in everyday communication and participatory culture.
However, there were also significant shifts happening in the media more
broadly, many of which we are only beginning to have the hindsight to ana-
lyze. In 1996, the United States passed the Telecommunications Act: one
example of the broader push across Western democratic nations in the 1980s
and 1990s to deregulate media companies, allowing for mergers, buyouts, and
massive conglomerates (Federal Communications Commission 2013; Hansen
and Machin 2019). The rise of such mergers and acquisitions (which are still
playing out in the contemporary media landscape with Disney’s recent buyout
of 21st Century Fox), has had numerous impacts across various media, but,
for the purposes of this book, I am particularly interested in thinking through
how these shifts have shaped journalism – and specifically celebrity coverage –
in the decades since. Not only have numerous publications merged under the
umbrella of large media conglomerates (see, for instance, Condé Nast or, in
Canada, Postmedia), erasing a diversity of perspectives and voices, but jour-
nalism has also seen a drastic shift in practice, with technological changes and
budget cuts transforming the everyday tasks and skills involved in reporting
the news (Hansen and Machin 2019, 40–49).
There has also been a significant push in the past decade or so to trace the
broader social, cultural, and economic impacts of the meteoric rise of reality
television. This rise is certainly not disconnected to the growth of conglom-
erate media, with an increasing emphasis on producing more and more con-
tent at a cheaper rate. In fact, the proliferation of reality programming in the
early 2000s fueled the Writer’s Guild of America strike lasting from Novem-
ber of 2007 to February of 2008 which, ironically, created a need for even
more fast and cheap television content. NBC’s almost-dead Trump-headed
6 Introduction
Apprentice was thus revived and reformatted into Celebrity Apprentice in the
fall of 2007, for instance. Yet the success of this show also reveals how celeb-
rity itself was evolving into a more “authentic,” “visible,” and profitable
commodity in America. As the power of media companies grew while eco-
nomic prospects for everyday citizens worsened, media and celebrity culture
increasingly became a valued site of American aspirationalism and identity.
If celebrity culture can be seen as a microcosm of society’s values at a given
moment, this moment additionally suggests a crisis in American femininity.
In 2007, several formerly successful young Disney stars experienced very
public breakdowns or lapses in image management: Britney Spears was
caught on camera shaving her head, and subsequently spent time recovering
in a mental health facility; Lindsay Lohan entered into another of several
stints in rehabilitation for substance abuse; Vanessa Hudgens was victim in
one of the first celebrity nude photo hacking incidents; and perhaps Disney’s
biggest star at the time, a then fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus, posed semi-nude
for Vanity Fair magazine in 2008, spurring outrage across America (Vares
and Jackson 2015).
Socialite and reality star Paris Hilton was arrested in 2007 and began ser-
ving her jail sentence, while Hilton’s former assistant and best friend Kim
Kardashian and her matriarchal family’s reality dynasty launched on E! net-
work. In 2008, Lady Gaga released her debut album The Fame, spawning a
number of successful songs and accompanying “Gaga feminist” videos and
appearances2 and in 2008, Beyoncé’s popularity skyrocketed after publicly
premiering her alter-ego “Sasha Fierce,” a persona that allowed Beyoncé to
experiment with being “aggressive, sexy, and provocative” (Kumari 2016,
407). The rise of the Kardashians, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga (as well as,
potentially, the transformation of Miley Cyrus’ Disney image across those
years, see Brady 2016; Mendenhall 2018) all signaled a shift in popular ima-
gery from an emphasis on blonde, thin, innocent, straight femininity to a
non-white, highly sexualized, and often queer aesthetic.
These cultural shifts provide the background for the case studies that I have
chosen to examine. Starting in 2007 with the stolen celebrity image (Vanessa
Hudgens) and the leaked celebrity sex tape (Kim Kardashian), I sought to
examine how female celebrities’ engagement with new technologies in their
private lives were taken up into broader systems of violent misogyny. I quickly
realized, however, that there was little meaningful distinction in the public
discourse between consensual and non-consensual sexualized imagery and,
thus, my case studies expanded to consider the connections between visibility,
misogyny, and profit in the media system. What started as a study of Vanessa
Hudgens and Kim Kardashian, then, quickly expanded to include Miley
Cyrus and Lindsay Lohan (both former Disney stars who – apparently to the
shock of many – willingly disrobed for magazine features). From there, I shift
my attention to Playboy and Anna Nicole Smith, whose untimely death in
2007 manifested the tragic ending that haunts both contemporary female
celebrity (as out-of-control “trainwreck”) and nostalgic imaginings of past
 Introduction 7
celebrities (such as Marilyn Monroe). I illustrate the numerous continuities
across these women’s public trajectories to demonstrate how reality television and
sex tapes disrupt such narratives. This is not to claim such media as either better
or worse for women than “traditional” media, but to show how current systems
of power bend and adapt to shifting notions of work, success, and gender.
Yet, as argued by Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (2014, 8) in their ana-
lysis of recessionary culture, centering such conversations solely around
women obscures the ways in which masculinity also operates within certain
social and symbolic systems and must adapt to change and crisis. Toward that
end, I included a foil to my female celebrities: someone who has much in
common with the women who are so often derided and debased but does not
face the same scrutiny and even abuse as them (that is, until he decided to run
for President). Like the women who are constantly held up as examples of
excess privilege and wealth, Donald Trump inherited his celebrity, offers
himself and his private life (his family) as objects of consumption, and has
produced little cultural “work” that marks him out as talented, interesting, or
newsworthy. In 2007 his faltering reality show was renewed and extended
instead of canceled, retrenching his failing celebrity and reinscribing neo-
liberal norms of both media production and consumption during a time when
many Americans were facing layoffs, foreclosures, and bankruptcies.
This book takes this moment of economic crisis and technological change
as its starting point, with the benefit of having seen how these events played
out and how each of these celebrities’ careers developed over the decade fol-
lowing. While much work in celebrity studies is either attempting to make
sense of current phenomena or looking back much further in history, this
book is focused on events in the not-so-distant past, whose effects we are still
seeing play out in contemporary American culture. Donald Trump’s rise to
the presidency, for instance, did not occur out of nowhere but was the result
of many years of legitimization by the media (especially NBC). Lindsay
Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Anna Nicole Smith often still serve as public pun-
chlines to this day, but the recent shift in how we view Britney Spears’ celeb-
rity image suggests that the public is potentially willing to grapple with the
structural misogyny that underpins female celebrity.
These particular cases are related through their deployment of narratives
about the “proper” and “improper” ways to succeed, and for the celebration
of men’s sexual prowess in relation to capitalist success versus the policing of
women’s sexualized behavior. These cases further allow me to juxtapose the
various forms of media stardom involved in relation to gendered forms of
value and to examine how these stars/texts fit into new media developments
(the “democratizing” potential and commodification of new forms of fame;
the nude selfie as part of smart phone technology; the rapidity and reach of
Internet distribution for leaked and released videos; the “meritocratic,” yet
invisibilized structures of film production). In the next section, I briefly out-
line some of these power relations and how they are key to the analysis that
unfolds in the remainder of the book.
8 Introduction
Women’s Public Work
In this book I draw on the work of feminist materialist theorists to think
through the ways in which the capitalist media system simultaneously pro-
duces, rewards, and contains female celebrity. It is important to acknowledge,
however, that often still only certain kinds of women are able to reach this
level of public success: women that are, for the most part, white, thin, able-
bodied, young, and gender-normative. This economic advantage provided to
certain women has held for centuries across numerous industries.
Throughout the history of capitalism, women in Western nations have had
varying and often precarious relations to the means of production, profits,
and labor market. Marxist and socialist feminists argue that in capitalist
societies, the means of production are “owned by one class (capitalists), while
another class (the working class) is excluded from ownership and thus com-
pelled to sell their labor power” (Williamson 2016, 114). In selling their labor,
the working classes are exploited – their labor generates a surplus profit for
the capitalist owner who pays them only a small portion (a wage) of those
earnings. The working class, of course, historically has varyingly included
ethnic and racialized groups, yet often excluded white women, whose labor
was not for sale (exempting the poorest class), but instead was channeled into
the family and the ability of the man to sell his labor (Williamson 2016, 114;
see also Smith 1985).
In the broader relations of capitalism, white women’s domestic work also
signaled an important shift in notions of public and private service. Dorothy
E. Smith (1985, 5–6) points out that the inception of private property was a
key moment in which women were pushed out of the realm of the social
(when previously property and work were conceived of in communal terms)
and made to be dependent upon male wage earners to support them. This
dependence did not mean that their work was unnecessary or superfluous to
the wage-earners – indeed, the domestic labor they provided ensured the
ability of wage-earners to leave the home for long periods during the week
and their reproductive labor ensured the ongoing labor supply. This posi-
tioned white married women in Western countries in a doubly exploited
state – both in terms of their labor (exploited by both wage-earners and their
employers) and in their subordination to men/husbands (Delphy 1980) –
while racialized or poor women often faced even more exploitation (directly,
via their own exploited wage labor and indirectly, via their own additional
domestic labor).
However, for many white women class mobility was possible – not via an
improvement of one’s skills (as it might be for a laborer), but, rather, via a
domestic and sexual arrangement (i.e. marriage to a richer man). White
women’s status in relation to exploitation, then, was highly dependent upon
her sexual capital3: her ability to seduce and keep a husband (Delphy 1980,
34–35). As urbanization and consumption further took hold in North Amer-
ica across the twentieth century, women were increasingly judged worthy of
 Introduction 9
status (marriage) via their decorative and consumptive qualities, rather than
their productive ones (see Roberts 2014, 146). Their success in this endeavor
to become beautiful consumers often results in other women’s continued
exploitation, as the upper-class wife brings in a lower-class, often racialized
woman to perform the domestic labor that she can now outsource (Davis
1983).
Despite the regularity with which certain women have exchanged their
sexual capital for status and security in capitalist systems, there remains a
fairly consistent rhetoric about who is and who is not worthy of such status.
This rhetoric, often deemed the “myth of meritocracy,” suggests that, for a
capitalism rooted in democracy and self-advertised as treating everyone
equally, anyone who works hard and has talent will be able to “rise,” and
should be able to rise up the socio-economic ladder to success (Littler 2013;
2017). As the paid labor pool expanded to include women/people of color, the
narrative remained, often occluding the differences that constrain one’s like-
lihood of being able to advance up the socio-economic ladder of capitalism,
as well as the sexual politics underpinning such advancements.
The celebrity system plays a key role in perpetuating this myth of mer-
itocracy (Dyer 1979; Littler 2013). Celebrities rise through the system of
media production by virtue of what is presented discursively to audiences
(through promotion, interviews, biographies) as a unique blend of talent,
work ethic, and luck (Holmes 2004; Littler 2004; Marshall and Kongsgaard
2012). Such discourses, again, occlude the structural forces at work, and the
roles of those with enough power in media systems to determine who can and
cannot have access to media jobs (i.e., producers, directors, casting directors,
studio heads). They also occlude the gendered and racialized regulations of
media access. Although I focus in this book on women who become visible
publicly (through their appearance on film, television, and other media
screens), it is important to note that those working off-screen producing, dis-
tributing, and profiting from media content, are more likely to be white men
(Associated Press 2015; Business Insider 2013; Conor, Gill and Taylor 2015).
Such demographics and their interests affect the promotional discourses that
frame certain stars as deserving of fame through having the appropriate forms
of talent and displaying the proper modes of wealth and consumption
(appropriate, of course, to their perceived gender, race, class, and age).
The relations between women, success, and visibility (in and through the
media) have long been sites of broader political tension. As early as there
have been female stars whose private lives were known, such as the likes of
Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt in the late nineteenth century, and Jose-
phine Baker in the early twentieth century, there has been public concern over
shifting relations between sexuality, talent, and success. Historical studies
suggest that public discourses reflected both a sense of titillation as well as
impropriety in publicly knowing and consuming the details of these famous
women’s private lives (see Berlanstein 2004; Hindson 2011). An 1878 news-
paper description of Lillie Langtry, for instance, as being “more famous for
10 Introduction
beauty than for talent or virtue” (Hindson 2011, 34), hints at a longstanding
tension between the public woman and traditional conceptions of rewardable
public skills: women can be beautiful/attractive, but not economically rewar-
ded for it, or, if they are economically rewarded for beauty, it is secondarily,
through marriage.
Kirsten Pullen’s (2005) thorough history of stage actresses outlines concerns
over public women blurring the distinctions between sex work and “perfor-
mance” work. Female labor defies categorizations in these terms, as women
who sell themselves publicly are often assumed to be selling themselves sexu-
ally (either on the stage, as a fantasy, or in the bedroom, as a prostitute); at
the same time, for many women, femininity is itself – to varying degrees – a
performance that includes the rehearsal and practice of appropriate ways of
styling oneself and behaving (Butler 1999; McRobbie 2009; 2015). The public/
private binary has long been destabilized by not only a public (patriarchal)
backlash that insists on discursively connecting female stars and their private
lives (through, for instance, news reporting on female stars’ love affairs), but
also, as shown by Pullen, in many early actresses’ own provocative and
sometimes fictional autobiographies, demonstrating that such confusion was
perhaps beneficial to them in ways that a model of male supremacy cannot
fully account for (i.e. financially).
The proliferation of mass media forms at the end of the nineteenth century
into the twentieth further entrenched many of the anxieties around the female
star: anxieties heralded by the inception of what has come to be known as
celebrity in its contemporary form. The rise of industrial capitalism coincided
with an expansion of two large media spheres at the turn of the twentieth
century: the growth of the daily newspapers and the emergence of the Holly-
wood studio system (Basinger 2007; Dyer 1979; Hindson 2011; Williamson
2016). It is this moment – in and through the symbiotic relations between the
film industry and the dailies used to promote the films and their stars – that is
often cited as the birth of today’s conception of celebrity: a figure that is
“famous for their private li[fe] as much as their public achievements” (Wil-
liamson 2016, 27).
The distinction between “star” and “celebrity” is more often a discursive
one – a gendered and classed one at that – than an empirical one. Although
the term celebrity is assumed to connote a certain public knowledge of a
private life in comparison to the star, whose success is authenticated and
legitimized by a performed public talent (see Holmes and Negra 2011; Weber
2014), the proliferation of varying, and increasingly converging media plat-
forms troubles such dichotomies. Instagram and Twitter, for instance, allow
fans to access stars’ performances of everyday intimate selves, while reality
television, on the other hand, allows “ordinary” people to monetize (through
media visibility) their ordinariness, thus becoming celebrities (Hearn 2013;
Marwick and Boyd 2011; Psarras, Stein and Shah 2021; Turner 2010).
The hierarchy between the star who performs and the ordinary person who
just “exists,” is tied to gendered conceptions of public and private spheres
 Introduction 11
4
(Geraghty in Holmes and Negra 2011, 13; Davis 1983, 32 ; see also Collins
2000; Smith 1985). Furthermore, the distinction between the two terms is
often framed in temporal terms of a decline from stardom to celebrity
(Holmes and Negra 2011), as the private and public are less and less distin-
guishable from one another; as though female celebrity today suggests that
there is a new kind of fame that is unique and lesser-than in form and func-
tion. It is important to consider the implications of such assumptions – that
is, what purpose does it serve to suggest that (female) celebrities today are less
talented/useful than they once were? Who benefits from upholding a public/
private divide, particularly in relation to media success? In this book, I follow
scholars who depart from the accepted hierarchal distinction between star-
dom and celebrity (Holmes and Negra 2011; Weber 2009) and use the terms
interchangeably as a way to deconstruct those hierarchical binaries. However,
I also am attentive to the ways that reporting on female celebrities (no matter
which term is used), reinforces these gendered narratives of decline, unearned
success, and being “too public” with one’s self (even and especially when
private moments are stolen and made public).
Media producers and owners have a vested interest in convincing both
themselves and their audiences that they have earned their success by being
creative, entertaining, important artists and/or cultural commentators
(Cloarec 2016; Conor, Gill and Taylor 2015). They also sometimes have a
vested interest in convincing us that performers (their wage-laborers) are not.
In other words, stars are one way that the institutional power of the media
can be deflected onto “the realm of personal experience and feelings” (Barry
King quoted in Dyer 1979, 31). The injustices we experience to varying
degrees on a day-to-day basis because of inequality can be taken up by the
media into discourses about the merit or non-merit of individual stars, despite
the fact that all stars need and, therefore, function as a part of the media.
At the same time, almost all media producers rely in some way or another
upon stars (or, at the very least, performers), marking them as unique within
the systems of a capitalist labor economy; as noted by Richard Dyer, stars are
“both labor and the thing that labor produces” (quoted in Williamson 2016,
108). In other words, stars are both labor and product, and their status within
this system is not necessarily tied only to their own labor investment, while
the profit they generate in either capacity (as product or as labor) is often not
owned exclusively by them. Within this system, the female celebrity, whose
work provides profit to media owners (as well as to herself), provides addi-
tional labor over and above the male celebrity – the work of feminine
beauty – but is often not directly compensated for this labor (although it can
be commodified as sexual capital, as will be discussed throughout this book).
Famous women of color often must take this labor even further, “erasing”
signs of their racialization in order to appeal to mass markets (Gordon 2015;
Thompson 2009) or, conversely, “playing up” an essentialized racial identity
(Hall 1997). Such excess labor becomes the appropriated labor in the media
industries, resulting in an exploitative relation.
12 Introduction
This is the Marxist understanding of the term exploitation, as opposed to a
more colloquial sense of “one group tak[ing] unfair advantage of another”
(Williamson 2016, 114). David Hesmondhalgh uses Marxist and socialist
feminist analyses to distinguish between “oppression” and “exploitation”: in
the former, the success or “welfare” of one class (the ruling or dominant class)
is based upon the ongoing deprivation of another class, while in the latter, the
dominant class not only relies upon the ongoing subjugation of the domi-
nated, but also appropriates their labor, reaping surplus profit from their
labor, which is purchased – if it even is purchased – by the dominant class at a
much lower wage (summarized in Williamson 2016, 114; see also Delphy
1984; Guillaumin 1995). This key distinction helps in analyzing women’s
economic relations to labor (their sexual and/or reproductive labor; the labor
of fashion, beauty, etc.): exploitation occurring when a woman’s labor is
appropriated toward the profits of the capitalist/ruling class (owners), while
the concept of “self-exploitation” does not speak to capitalist concerns over
owner-worker relations (entrepreneurs cannot self-exploit in this way). Indeed,
this distinction is helpful in thinking through how famous women’s sexual
capital is bartered for economic and symbolic capital – female celebrities are
not “exploiting” their own sexuality the way that media owners appropriate
and exploit their sexuality (be it for box office returns, or Instagram views).
However, the continuous referral to this process of “self-exploitation” does
connect to the more colloquial sense of the term (as unfairly taking advantage
of something) and can therefore reveal certain anxieties about the “unfair”
places/spaces that women occupy in today’s publicly visible labor market.
Yet the term “exploitation” remains, for many, a problematic one to apply
to female stars whose visibility and wealth generates, for them, hugely dis-
proportionate amounts of privilege. However, in applying it in a Marxist
sense – as referring to appropriated labor – I hope to illuminate some of the
underlying relations that, I argue, are shifting in response to new media
technologies, as well as evolving conceptions of ownership and means of
production in these new media systems. If we understand exploitation to not
merely mean oppression, but to be about a specific condition of surplus labor
and profit, it becomes easier to conceive of the female star as exploited,
though not (necessarily) oppressed. Certainly, exploitation does not occur
across the board in all circumstances of media employment, thus it becomes
crucial to examine the relations of production surrounding specific female
stars within specific contexts. When considering, for example, the case of
Harvey Weinstein, a producer with significant structural power in the media
industry, both exploitative and oppressive relations can be delineated: he
reportedly5 demanded that women provide sexual labor (i.e., sex) in order to
access the employment opportunities that men in media access without pro-
viding said labor (generally, as there are exceptions to this rule). This sexual
labor is not compensated, and therefore marks a form of exploitation that can
be escaped by women who operate outside of those structures (even if they
are “using” their sexuality to build visibility and capital). This relation is also
 Introduction 13
oppressive, however, producing an entire class of subjects (i.e. women in
media) who have less autonomy, mobility, and power than their oppressors
and thus – again – the women who operate successfully (i.e. visibly) outside of
this structure escape this particular form of oppression. However, and perhaps
more importantly, such women also destabilize that hierarchal relation
altogether.
This produces a tension between the economic opportunity afforded to
some women in today’s neoliberal, tech-based society, and the ongoing gender
oppression needed to maintain the structural power to determine who enters
the media industry and how. As noted by Paola Tabet (1982), many societies
have long relied upon a division of labor wherein technology and tools are the
domain of men. The monopolization of technological tools by men in patri-
archal societies ensures the ongoing domination of women in several ways: it
reinforces the narrative that men are more skilled than women, which
mutually reinforces the social/economic value of certain technologically based
skillsets that women are discouraged from developing; it ensures that women
do not have (widespread) access to tools, which can usually also be weapons
and are thus tied to notions of masculinity and virility; it keeps women
themselves at the level of tool for the use and betterment of men; it also limits
the amount of time that women have to pursue other activities, be they paid
or leisure ones (Tabet 1982).
The ability of women today to monetize feminine labor specifically, through
new media technologies (i.e. tools), is a development that is often challenged
and undermined by discourses lamenting the increased visibility and success
of “untalented,” “non-working” women across the media (Holmes and Negra
2011; Negra and Holmes 2008). This “concern” extends to the discourses
surrounding women and girls’ use of new media technologies in their private
(sexual) lives (Hasinoff 2015). Such concerns often center on the controversial
issues of sexting and “revenge porn” wherein women are imaged as – para-
doxically – both naïve victims and as transgressive, over-sexualized manip-
ulators of new media technologies. This framing mirrors the broader
positioning of celebrity women as both non-agentive victims of their industry
and a potential threat to (i.e., bad influence upon) other women and girls.
In today’s neoliberal environment, where there is not only wider access to
celebrity and celebrity culture, but also a new media environment in which
traditional lines between public and private – for both ordinary people and
for celebrities – are increasingly blurred, the stolen or leaked celebrity image
serves as an ideal case study to examine the tensions across sexuality, sexual
violence, bodily autonomy, new media technologies, and capitalist citizenship.
The celebrity body is often framed by the media as having no right to privacy
(their body is public property), while also signifying capitalism at its apex.
Success – whether merited or unmerited, celebrated or denounced – is held as
representational of contemporary values: for example, the success of the
Kardashians becomes symptomatic of today’s narcissistic, consumerist
society. But who decides what successes are merited and celebrated? These are
14 Introduction
not neutral terms that reflect an objective reality, but, rather, are ideologically
loaded and wielded in ways that both challenge and reify existing power
relations in the media.

Post-structuralism in Casting
This book emerges out of my experiences working as a casting associate. In
this position, I held a vital gatekeeping role. I decided who made it into the
audition room and who did not. I decided who to show to the director and
whose auditions were scrapped. Although I did not make the final casting
decision, I presented the final options. This was a position of structural power
and, even with that level of power, my agency was constrained at every level: I
did not decide what roles would be filled, they were presented to me in for-
mulaic, stereotypical scripts. I did not decide what “type” would be best, that
was determined by the directors and producers, who were used to doing
things in certain ways. Even if I had a preferred actor for a role, my opinion
was extraneous, expendable, and almost always ultimately overruled.
After several years of repeated disillusionment, I returned to academia to
make sense of this system I had experienced. When I learned about post-
structuralism, something clicked – it was such a helpful tool in thinking about
the ways in which I operated as a part of a broader system of power, all the
while feeling constrained and frustrated by my lack of agency. As a casting
associate, I became familiar with the wide range of working white male actors
in town (who ran the gamut of ages, backgrounds, and body types) but saw
the same handful of interchangeable, young, beautiful women for every role. I
pushed back where I could: if a description was vague, I brought in people I’d
rarely see: older women (which, in that job meant over 30), racialized actors,
people with accents, and all sorts of types who my boss thought were wasting
our time. They were rarely picked, but it didn’t hurt to put them in front of
the director. One time, a hilarious young female comedian – who was not
hegemonically “beautiful” in the same way as most young female actresses we
saw – was so great and so funny in her audition that the director added a role
specifically for her. It was a small win in a series of disappointment after
disappointment.
These experiences shape the essence of the arguments of this book. I
quickly learned that the audition room was no meritocracy: the best actor
rarely won out on the role; talent was a highly subjective term; and women
were judged for their looks much more than for their performance. In
articulating these experiences, then, I draw on two critical insights emerging
from post-structuralism: the agency–structure dialectic and the power of dis-
course in shaping our understanding of reality. These two elements are, of
course, related because discourse itself operates through an agency–structure
dialectic. As Judith Butler (1997) has powerfully argued, we are constrained
by the rules of language if we want to communicate an idea, but within those
constraints we have agency. So much so that the meaning of words can be
 Introduction 15
contested and even appropriated to subvert power structures. I apply these
insights in my analysis of celebrity culture in several ways: firstly, I concede
that celebrity is only ever a discursive construction – the “real” person behind
the celebrity cannot be accessed or known by the public or researchers like
myself. She is always mediated through a representational system, be it news
reporting, social media, interviews, reality television, etc. Secondly, I acknowl-
edge that those working in the media – like myself several years ago – are con-
strained by the system in which they operate. Journalists, who are increasingly
beholden to corporate interests, are limited in which stories they can tell (about
celebrity, success, and work). So too are female celebrities, who are constituted as
celebrities with symbolic, economic, and sexual power by the same system that
abuses and denigrates them, while reveling in their downfall. At the same time,
however, both journalists and celebrities have agency and can challenge these
systems, which they often do in and through speech acts that call into question
common sensical ideas, misogynist assumptions, and capitalist “truths.”
The connection between words and economic, material reality is a recur-
ring frame in my analysis of representations of sexual violence against
women. I set out to investigate the ways that famous women’s uses of new
media technologies and their sexuality affect their status as famous women,
thus altering or containing the social, cultural, and economic capital they
wield. Women have long been subject to regulatory forces and disciplinary
power, but their use of new media technologies, especially to amass wealth
and visibility, inspires new forms of policing and punishment, which include
public humiliation and (sexual) violence via digital technologies.
While in general terms, “police” often refers to an authoritative arm of the
government connected to the juridical system, policing can and is done by
people across all levels of society, including someone policing their own
behavior. As described by Michel Foucault (2010, 277) in his influential work
on systems of power, policing refers to “the ensemble of mechanisms serving
to ensure order, the properly channeled growth of wealth and the conditions
of preservation of health ‘in general.”” This definition is particularly helpful
because it connects the systems of “order” (i.e. the status quo) to both health
and wealth, two prominent themes in the reporting on celebrity women.
Policing is highly effective when done by the media (such as news and gossip
sites), as it produces both a public punishment via humiliation of the trans-
gressive subject (the celebrity herself) and sets a broader example for women
as to how they ought to behave. My analysis will specifically attend to the
ways that the news media produce and police norms around how to engage
with technology, what forms of sexuality are acceptable versus unacceptable,
and what forms of “success” are legitimate and worthy of public admiration.
In fact, the public punishment and policing of famous women by the news
media runs parallel to the sexual violence they experience when their intimate
images are stolen and shared online. The reporting on these issues necessarily
amplifies them, furthering the humiliation of the celebrity, and the reminder
to non-famous women that if they engage with technology in similar ways,
16 Introduction
they can also be publicly humiliated. This book is centrally concerned with
how the media industry itself discursively mirrors and even extends the sexual
violence of the hackers who steal and post women’s images without their
consent; to the point that we might actually begin to conceptualize sexual
violence as constitutive of female celebrity more broadly.
This is a complex assertion that will be unpacked throughout this book, but
here I want to explicitly state what I mean by this. While I do think it important
to maintain the boundaries between consensual and non-consensual acts – the
enthusiastic bartering of one’s sexual and bodily capital for, say money or status,
versus the coercive appropriation of that bodily capital for someone else’s gain –
the ways in which female celebrities are always already understood to be con-
senting to something/anything structures much of the reporting on their private
lives, their bodies, and their economic choices. The female celebrity is under-
stood to be trading in her privacy (moving from her “protected” and natural
sphere into a dangerous, public one) for rewards (extreme wealth and visibility)
which, in turn, makes her inauthentic, ambitious, and calculating. Because she
can always be reduced back to her body – she offers nothing more “meaningful”
and “valuable” to the public – her violation is one way to strip her symbolic
power, return her to her “natural” sphere (the private and the authentic) and
send a powerful message to other women who long to be like her and wield the
kinds of capital that she does.
Sexual violence is a tool of power and control over women that works on
both a physical level and a symbolic one (Collins 2000; Davis 1983; Guillau-
min 1995; Harding 2015; Plaza 1981; Projansky 2001). Its utility as a tool of
control is dependent on its ability to exert such a power across all intersecting
forms of privilege for women, including economic privilege, and to do so
visibly, as a reminder and an example to all women. Of course, this is not to
say that the violation of celebrity women is or ought to take importance over
the violations of racialized women, non-status women, working-class and
disabled women, or others who are more vulnerable to sexual violence in con-
temporary society. It is, however, to say that the celebrity body is a key site in
which we can trace a very public convergence of capitalist, white, patriarchal
discipline. She is the figure whose body is framed as public property yet sig-
nifies a specific kind of privatization (i.e., capitalist commodification) of the
body; who embodies the anxieties/concerns over the public–private duality; and
who often is celebrated for exemplifying ideal capitalist citizenship, while being
castigated for failing to exemplify or, on the other hand, excessively performing
capitalist citizenship.
The frames operationalized in the reporting on these instances of violation
work to bolster the sentiment that these women are transgressive subjects (for
being sexual and/or capitalizing on that sexuality) and thus deserving of their
fate. For instance, the use of the “bad role model” framework and the invo-
cation of upset and/or disappointed parents and fans mark out female celeb-
rity victims of violation as being in the wrong. Additionally, such frames
reinforce gendered moral panics around if and how women (and the young
 Introduction 17
women they potentially influence) are using technology. Cassell and Cramer
(2008) note that such panics are not restricted to the age of digital media and
Internet; they replicate similar panics over the role of first, the telegraph and
then, later, the telephone, in the lives of women and young girls. They found
that the discourses circulating through media moral panics are often less
concerned with new technology itself, and instead focused on “the potential
sexual agency of young women, parental loss of control, and the specter of
women who manifest technological prowess” (70). Such frames will be a
centering concern in my analysis: how the news media produce moral panics
signifying not just an apprehensive view on new media technologies, or even
concern for female celebrities, but also suggesting that these celebrities serve
as a (bad) influence precisely because they potentially signify sexual agency,
loss of patriarchal control, and technological (or media) prowess.
Finally, it is important to acknowledge the instability of the category
“female celebrity” which structures much of this discussion. While the celeb-
rity identity must constantly be performed and reconsolidated, so too must
the female identity in interconnected ways. For instance, female celebrities
who do not perform their gender properly, “let themselves go,” gain weight,
age inappropriately, have promiscuous or queer sex, or are “masculine” in
appearance are all subject to heightened public scrutiny, humiliation, or loss
of status (Morey 2011; Weber 2012). In this book, my focus is specifically on
the female celebrity because she is more likely than the male celebrity to have
her sexual privacy violated and, additionally, because patriarchal power rela-
tions ensure that such violations will serve as punishment to the woman her-
self (rather than her male partner, or the men who share and circulate the
photos). Female celebrities are also more likely to be framed as successful
because of their sexual appeal (thus justifying sexual privacy violation), while
also vilified for using their sexual appeal to succeed. In saying this, I recognize
that the category of “woman” is unstable and contested. The intention is not
to essentialize gender or sexual identity, but rather to illuminate how these
discursive categories/constructs are mobilized toward real sexual violence.
Toward that end, and because of these constraints, my sites of analysis are
not those that were or might have been created in the private context; neither
the sex tapes, nor the stolen photos have been obtained or analyzed for this
project. Not only would that re-victimize those whose privacy was violated,
but also these texts themselves, in my view, are not the site where scandal and
outrage are produced. Indeed, scandal and outrage are discursive responses to
the texts which reflect the positionality of those doing the responding. In
other words, as the news reporting shows, only certain people are outraged by
the existence of these texts (rather than the stealing and non-consensual
sharing of them) and those people often have both a platform to produce
outrage (i.e. a newspaper column) and an economic incentive for doing so
(“clicks” on an article). It is this discursive response – and what it tells us
about sexuality, violence, gender, and success in America – that interests me
more than the text which incites it. Whether or not Kim Kardashian’s sex
18 Introduction
tape was purposefully leaked or not, the repeated assertion that it was, as well
as the repeated counterclaim that it was not (by Kim), both perform ideolo-
gical work. Consuming illicit images of women – whether they were complicit
or not – produces certain reactions and assumptions in those viewing the
imagery, and these reactions can be analyzed in the discourse that circulates
around them. It is this form of ideological work that interests me, rather than
an ability to uncover some form of “reality” behind the image. I, therefore,
focus primarily on celebrity news coverage in order to think through this
institution’s role in gatekeeping female success in times of media change. In
the next section, I briefly describe my methodology before outlining the
structure of this book.

Method and Chapter Outlines

Method: Reception Analysis and Autoethnography

This book started out as a doctoral thesis which was necessarily narrower in
scope and method. Initially, the project was focused solely on news, looking at
articles about my chosen case studies (as discussed in the first section of this
chapter) from January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2008. As discussed in the
previous section, I chose to examine news reporting because it is one of the
key sites wherein celebrity is publicly constructed (via news reporting on and
interviews with celebrities). However, the news is not often imagined as an
observable site of reception – a public platform through which we can view
the decoding of celebrity texts and practices in real time.
The news media, because of its embedded location within the media land-
scape, is often figured as being on the producer side of the producer–text–
consumer paradigm; the news creates content and messaging of its own that it
circulates directly to an audience. But, as pointed out by Richard Dyer in his
canonical work on stardom (1979, 71), the news also reports on other medi-
ated content – including celebrities and celebrity culture – and in this way,
becomes not only a very visible sight of media consumption, but also an
influential one, shaping public opinion about celebrities and popular culture
(see also Fairclough 2008 on the celebrity blogger). The news is thus a valu-
able site for locating everyday, common-sensical social scripts about celebrity
which are, in turn, internalized, resisted, and/or re-circulated by audiences as
social discourse (important work such as that of Keller and Ringrose 2015;
Vares and Jackson 2015, demonstrate the ways that young women adopt the
language of “media literacy” that circulates through public discourse criti-
quing female celebrities, but exhibit less critique in terms of the structural
elements of media production). Because so many of these ideas are socially
constructed, I do use scare quotes (i.e., “success”) in many instances to draw
readers’ attention to the fact that these terms are not objective realities
reflected by the media but instead are created and policed by them. A media
scandal, for instance, does not exist outside of its discursive construction as
 Introduction 19
such, and therefore is very much a reflection of certain norms and expecta-
tions of those working in media, rather than objective and uncritical realities.
Indeed, news media not only report on but also interpret events, often using
cause-and-effect sequencing, selecting one dominant frame over other possible
understandings (S. Elizabeth Bird and Robert W. Dardenne quoted in Scheiner
McClain 2014, 104). Audiences who may never encounter a specific popular
culture text (or celebrity) may repeatedly and exclusively consume mediated
interpretations of that text (or celebrity) through the news, thus shaping an
entire/broader audience understanding around a select few journalists’ decoding
processes. Furthermore, the conception of journalist objectivity simultaneously
grants authority to news discourses while occluding the structural interests of
news media owners (Bock, Pain and Jhang 2019, 54), many of whom benefit
from the entrenchment of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal ideologies.
Toward this end, I collected 1888 articles from the Factiva news database
(see detailed breakdown of search results, Appendix A). After removing irre-
levant articles6 and duplicates, I ended up with 976 articles for analysis and
then organized them, by case study, according to various emergent themes.
For example, the articles about Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian were coded
in relation to themes around textual containment, sexualization of culture,
and reality television. These themes provided the basis for the chapters’
structure. However, where it was relevant, I added analyses of other key cul-
tural artifacts, such as the television programs which supplement – or, argu-
ably, constitute – these women’s celebrity more broadly (i.e., Hannah
Montana, The Simple Life, The Anna Nicole Show). It is worth noting that,
because of the large number of articles I was working with as data, I have
separated them into a different reference list for each chapter, comprised of
primary sources. Because there are newspaper articles in both sections, I
decided that the simplest way to indicate to readers which one is from which
list was to include an asterisk (*) for all in-text citations that quote or refer to
articles that were collected as primary sources. As my analysis developed, I
also included television shows and films as primary sources. Readers thus
should look to Reference List 2 to find the full citation information for all
primary sources, denoted with an asterisk (*).
In my analysis, I use a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis (see
Machin and Mayr 2012) and materialist theory to examine both the ideas
that circulate through these cultural texts about women’s changing relation-
ships to success, sexuality, and technology, as well as the economic relations
underpinning them. This combination of textual analysis and political eco-
nomic analysis may seem incongruent, but I operationalize these methodolo-
gies on two levels simultaneously throughout: at the micro-level I analyze the
words, sentences, and integrations of sentences that are specifically about
material relations, and, in particular, discourses about work, labor, success,
talent, and sex. At the same time, at the more macro-level I also analyze the
fields of power in which these discourses operate: a field structured by mate-
rial economic relations. In these instances, I examine the relations of media
20 Introduction
ownership in and across the celebrity texts themselves, as well as the news
texts which comprise my corpus. I bring both of these analyses into con-
versation with one another.
I also bring these analyses into conversation with my own experiences as a
casting associate, through autoethnographic “vignettes” which open each
chapter. To date, there remain few scholarly insider perspectives into the
world of media production. This is perhaps one of the reasons that so many
studies of cultural workers focus on reality television show participants rather
than the supporting actors, grips, makeup artists etc. who rely upon insider
networks and their own reputation to be able to land their next gig. Non-
disclosure agreements are rampant and often wielded to intimidate pre-
cariously employed workers (which comprise most of the media workforce)
who might otherwise speak about their experiences (see Patrick 2015). When
researchers are lucky enough to land an interview or even an ethnographic
study with media workers, they must keep in mind the politics of this access:
most of the day-to-day work of casting that I did would have been heavily
filtered and sanitized for the benefit of outside observers. Indeed, when I read
studies of casting like that of Kristen J. Warner (2015), I find few of her
observations align with my own experiences in that role; of course, much of
this is due to the smaller scale of productions I worked on and the different
national context, but there was also a lot of effort to make sense of processes
that have neither rhyme nor reason, that are based in instinct, and that are
not, at the end of the day, fully controlled or even known by the casting
directors themselves.
My use of vignettes to contribute to these important conversations reflects
this disconnect. Rather than a more traditional autoethnographic approach
where I weave the details of my own experiences into the chapters in order to
make sense of these processes (see, for instance, Anderson 2006; Ellis 2004), I
present them as stand-alone tableaux: each has a loose thematic connection to
the chapter that follows, but I am not trying to make sense of what I experi-
enced or did, justify the decisions that were made, nor work within the
familiar cause-and-effect logics that – I believe – are a key way in which news
reporting undermines the realities of work in the media industry. Further-
more, my own complicity in these systems – as an able-bodied, cis-gendered,
white woman – in many ways shielded me and continues to shield me from
the effects of my practices and decisions on the most marginalized groups
whose own stories from in and outside the audition room would surely illu-
minate many of this book’s blind spots.
As Warner notes, casting teams are not only the gatekeepers for talent, but
also “a repository for important cultural notions of race, ethnicity, and sexu-
ality” (2015, 34). The workers who are most affected by these processes are
usually those who are sidelined if not shut out of the industry all together –
who never achieve the kind of economic and symbolic success of the highly
privileged women discussed throughout this book. My point in centering
those women – who, in many ways are already the center of the media
 Introduction 21
industry – is not to argue for their cultural worth or legitimacy but, rather, to
demonstrate the ways that compliance and even success within these systems
of power is always conditional, fleeting, and precarious. It is also to demon-
strate that the stakes of these success stories – whether Paris Hilton’s or
Donald Trump’s – are always much larger than the constant dismissal and
trivialization of celebrity culture might lead us to believe.

Organization
This book is separated into two parts: the first focuses on old systems of
gatekeeping in traditional forms of media and the second examines new
media’s challenges to and complicities with these systems. Part 1 – Old
Media, Girl Power – examines women who have obtained success via tradi-
tional forms of media work via acting, singing, and modelling. Chapter 2
centers the Disney corporation (and specifically The Disney Channel) as a site
that produces and exploits girl stardom. I compare and contrast the discursive
construction of and response to two photo “scandals” that surrounded young
female Disney stars across 2007 and 2008: High School Musical star Vanessa
Hudgens’s stolen, private photo and the then 15-year-old Miley Cyrus’ con-
troversial – but consensual – partially nude photo shoot for Vanity Fair in
2008. I situate these young women’s transgressions within broader media
panics about young women’s sexuality, new media technology, and their
growing symbolic power within a corporate media system. I examine how
discourses around and representations of race and family inflect these scan-
dals and the reactions by Disney, comparing the “lower class whiteness” of
the Cyrus family star image to that of the racialized Hudgens who is marked
as “different” both in and beyond High School Musical.
Building off the previous chapter, Chapter 3 argues that Disney and Play-
boy are not, in fact, far removed from one another when it comes to exploit-
ing female celebrity. With a discussion rooted in critical whiteness studies and
post-feminism, I discuss how the figure of Marilyn Monroe “haunts” the
figure of the contemporary female celebrity and invokes a nostalgic longing
for a classic Hollywood pre-feminist woman, despite the consistencies
between her narrative and the “trainwreck” stories of young women like
Lindsay Lohan and Anna Nicole Smith. I then delve deeper into each of
these women’s public trajectories, comparing the former Disney star’s
Monroe-inspired New York Magazine spread from 2008 (and the reaction to
it) to the Playmate and Guess model’s descent into reality television fame
before her untimely death in 2007. I demonstrate that the anxieties sur-
rounding the girl star’s burgeoning sexuality do not go away once she is an
adult, but, rather, transform into an anxiety about improper sexuality or a
sexuality that is always on the verge of being lost to age, weight gain, and
“trashy” public spectacles.
Part 2 of the book – New Media, Old Power – turns to two figures whose
life trajectories were actually quite similar, but whose media trajectories were
22 Introduction
vastly inflected by gender: Paris Hilton and Donald Trump. Chapter 4 looks
at the female reality television star in relation to stolen/leaked sex tapes and
the commodification of female sexuality. Whereas the previous chapters
examined female stars who are known for having a traditional, media-based
“talent,” this chapter looks at stars who threaten the meritocratic myths of
the media industry by using non-traditional, but often very neoliberal skills to
amass cultural capital and economic reward. The anxieties produced by such
shifts often crystallize around a certain kind of female celebrity: one who was
born into privilege, leveraged that privilege into a reality television deal, and
“exploited” her sexuality in unacceptable ways (as the leaked sex tape is dis-
cursively framed as being worse than modelling, acting, and other formats
wherein the importance of women’s appearance and sexual appeal is dis-
cursively masked through notions of “talent”).
In Chapter 5 I then turn my attention to another socialite-turned-reality-
star: Donald Trump. I examine the news reporting on Trump and The Appren-
tice and Celebrity Apprentice television shows (NBC, 2004–2017) across 2007–
2008 and compare those discourses to the ones analyzed in Chapter 4. Despite
his similar trajectory to Paris Hilton, in particular, Trump was legitimized by the
media, as evidenced by the reality show that lauded his supposed business
acumen, normalized his nepotistic corporate structures, and gave him control
over the careers of numerous candidates more educated and qualified than he.
While his female contemporaries were being judged for having no talent and
being money-hungry “famewhores,” Trump escaped such pathologizing and was
lauded, rather than chided, for his ability to appropriate women’s sexual capital.
I further connect The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice to the broader legit-
imization and celebration of neoliberal corporate capitalism, which, I argue, has
been much more damaging to our political, social, and economic structures than
“sexualized” female celebrities.
In summary, this book is centrally concerned with exposing the gatekeeping
mechanisms that ensure women’s ongoing sexual exploitation in and by the
media. While new media offer new terms of economic and symbolic success
for women (though still heavily reliant upon their sexual capital), the dis-
ciplinary apparatus of corporate capitalist patriarchal media steps in to con-
tain and undermine those possibilities. Although female celebrities are among
the most privileged class of women (and certainly, that privilege is susceptible
to revocation or erasure), celebrity is one site where young women have
unmatched visibility and symbolic power in contemporary neoliberal society.
Examining the discourses around the supposed “successes” allows for a more
nuanced understanding of how gender norms are modeled and policed more
broadly, as well as what happens to women who challenge gender and sexual
hierarchies rooted in economic privilege. Of course, the distaste for public
women is not new, but what is new is the capacity for and techniques used to
humiliate and punish her. This aim of this book is to reframe these discus-
sions and, hopefully, illuminate the invisible forms of power that circumscribe
what futures are and are not possible for women more broadly.
 Introduction 23
Notes
1 The iPhone was not equipped with a two-way facing camera until the fourth ver-
sion, released in 2010 (Wolcott 2014).
2 Halberstam (2012, 5) identifies “Gaga Feminism” as “a politics that brings together
meditations on fame and visibility with a lashing critique of the fixity of roles for
males and females.” Though Halberstam articulates a hesitation to ascribe “Gaga
feminism” to Lady Gaga herself (her image), I would argue that a contextualization
of her work within this important cultural moment necessitates recognition of her
as a key figure in this formulation of feminism.
3 This ability – to seduce and keep a man – has been alternately referred to as erotic
capital (Hakim 2010) or bodily/“girlie” capital (Mears 2015), but throughout this
book I use the term sexual capital. I depart with erotic capital because, in Hakim’s
usage it connotes a range of behaviors and traits that can be cultivated by (usually)
women (for a critique, see Green 2013) – my usage is more specifically in reference
to beauty/sex appeal and is not only about those traits cultivated by women and
girls, but also those imposed/read on them by others (i.e. as in the chapter about
girl/Disney stars). My usage much more closely aligns to what Mears calls bodily or
girlie capital as, not a personal asset, but a relation within a broader field of eco-
nomic and social power (and I do discuss Mears’ work more extensively in chapter
four), but I do extend it to men as well (and thus it does not solely operate within
and across “girl” bodies).
4 In her discussion of the gendered relations within industrial capitalism, Angela Y.
Davis (1983) points out that prior to such a system (i.e. during pre-industrial
capitalism) the home was a feminine domain, but not outside of or in opposition to the
public economic system. Women worked not only to provide the reproductive
labor necessary to sustain capitalism, but often to produce the goods necessary
for the family within the home, working as equals alongside their husbands.
Only when the production of such household goods moved to the manufactur-
ing sector did the understanding of women’s domestic work shift to become
distinct and separate from economic systems (and therefore to having no economic
value).
5 See Boyle 2019, 14–15 for a discussion of reportedly vs. allegedly.
6 Many searches returned articles that were not about the chosen celebrities but
mentioned them offhand. These were not included unless deemed relevant to the
themes of the book as, for instance, when Lindsay Lohan was offhandedly men-
tioned as a bad influence or symbol of young women getting out of control.

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Part 1
Old Media, Girl Power
2 Disney Girl… Interrupted
The “Leaking” Sexuality of Girl Stars

Prologue
The process of casting children worked much differently than it did for adults.
We did not send out sides (excerpts of the script for an audition scene), nor
did we schedule and select actors based on photos submitted by their agent.
Children’s casting was also one of the few places in my job where we did not
discriminate by gender (although we would still discriminate by race: white
actors necessarily meant white children1). Both boys and girls could be up for
the same role, as most producers had no problem switching out a boy for a
girl, or vice versa, to make a better fit.
The audition process itself was often much more general and totally dis-
organized: we would send the agents a breakdown of what we needed [i.e.,
boy or girl, 6–8 years old, must pass as child of so-and-so (with a picture of
the actor attached)] and tell them to send us all their kids who fit the
description. Because only a handful of agencies in town represented child
actors, their rosters were large, and we would usually have a line that stret-
ched down the hall and out of the building. Parents, children, and even entire
families would wait for hours, not having any idea of what was expected of
them in the audition room; oftentimes, we would not know either.
I was not particularly good with kids. Luckily most kids that have an agent
are not shy. They came into the audition room excited, outgoing, and game
for any improv situation we wanted them to play out. When it was their turn,
we would give them a scenario: something playful and energetic for an upbeat
scene or film; something sad for a drama. I remember one session where we
asked kids – tiny, young kids! – to imagine someone or something they loved
(e.g., a pet, a parent) has died. Many of the children were able to cry on the
spot. It was impressive to me.
Parents had to wait outside the audition room unless there was some
extenuating circumstance (most commonly being that the child did not actu-
ally want to be there and was only doing what their stage parent wanted them
to do). I believe this was done because my boss didn’t like parental interference,
but he gave an excuse about them needing to be able to perform without their
parent beside them on set. Whether or not the child was passionate about acting,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268659-3
32 Old Media, Girl Power
it was obvious to me that many parents were extremely invested in their child’s
potential career (why else would they repeatedly show up to these disastrous,
hours-long cattle-call casting sessions?). Being a stage mom or dad often requires
missing work (you have to accompany your child on set), spending ridiculous
amounts of money (acting, dancing, singing lessons etc.) and time (driving them
to auditions and gigs). Not every parent can afford such things. Not every parent
is given a chance.
Now, over a decade later, I try to think back on whether we ever cast chil-
dren who were not white. Perhaps we did – it is certainly possible, we cast
dozens and dozens of (mostly silent) roles, some of which included entire
families – but when I sift through the memories of those sessions, all I
remember are white children, most of them already stunningly beautiful (male
and female). The emphasis on looks begins right away – if an actor is good-
looking (which is almost certainly the case if they are female), their onscreen
child must be beautiful too, of course. The cutest kid will always win out.
If one’s kid is cute, and that kid (or the parent) wants to pursue this career,
they have to find an agent to represent them. As noted earlier, the agent will
often require that the child obtain acting lessons, headshots, professional CVs,
all of which cost money. The playing field in the audition room is never level
because getting into that room in the first place requires privileges that many
children do not have.
Even fewer children are able to move to Hollywood to pursue their dreams of
acting. Many of those who do – and succeed – tell tales of their parents quitting
their jobs, packing everything up (including other siblings who did not necessa-
rily ask for that life) and uprooting their lives in support of their ambitious
young child. In this case, the child actor becomes the sole breadwinner for their
entire family, multiplying the pressures that such young kids face. That Disney
has centered an entire billion-dollar industry around child actors (most notably
through the Disney Channel) demonstrates how valuable these young actors are
(actors who are often “triple threat” singers and dancers too) yet, also, and
importantly, how replaceable and plentiful they are: at any moment, your career
can be over and you can go back to being a “regular” kid that no one dotes on or
idolizes. The world of acting – whether for children or adults – is tough, com-
petitive, and rarely ends up in a million-dollar (let alone billion-dollar) career.
Those young girls who manage to “make it” through, like the young women
discussed in this chapter, may not yet have had to face the objectification and
humiliation of older actresses trying to succeed in the media. This does not mean
that their time for objectification and humiliation will not come… indeed, it
seems that such humiliation is the price paid by all young women who have such
high and public ambitions.

Introduction
As a corporation that is known for children’s entertainment, the Walt Disney
Company may not seem like an ideal site to examine the relations across
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 33
women’s bodies, sexuality, media, and the market. However, the company’s
dependence upon and exploitation of young female stars – stars mandated to
represent and embody a kind of sexual innocence and purity that is not
necessarily marketable in the wider entertainment industry – in effect exem-
plifies many of the broader concerns of this book. Young female Disney stars
are sites of mass investments of money, time, and labor. They undergo and
model the sexual regulation that structures white, middle-class girls’ sexual
lives more broadly: as noted by R. Danielle Egan, “[t]he white bourgeois
body [is] conceptualized as pure, hygienic, and emblematic of restraint and
rationality; and the middle- and upper-class child the embodiment of inno-
cence, purity, and the bright future of the class, race, and nation” (quoted in
Banet-Weiser 2018, 83). Young Disney stars start out as sites of exploitation:
they generate massive profits for Disney, of which they earn a small-to-large
share or wage. They (and their families) invest tremendous amounts of labor
and often money into their career, through dancing/singing/acting lessons,
regular auditions, and performances (which can necessitate parents taking
time off work to accommodate). As they mature, which, if they wish to retain
their success/fame post-Disney will necessarily require building their sexual
capital, they learn to wield their image in ways that could threaten media
conglomerates’ ability to exploit them (i.e., they become less dependent on
specific platforms, producers, and directors). Young Disney stars who can
successfully navigate this transition potentially represent a site of media power
that far exceeds that of an adult female actress in Hollywood, whose power
often diminishes as she ages.
While there are numerous divisions and, more recently, acquisitions of the
Walt Disney Company (e.g., Walt Disney Studios, Marvel Entertainment,
The American Broadcasting Company, Pixar Studios), the majority of Dis-
ney’s young stars are fostered and nourished through the company’s cable
television network, Disney Channel. In 2018, Disney Channel had over 89
million subscribers in America and 225 million worldwide (“Number of Sub-
scribers” 2019).2 The programming on this channel is specifically targeted to
“tween” children, ages 9 to 15, with the recently launched Disney Junior
Channel serving even younger audiences (Disney Channel 2019). Although the
Disney Channel President across 2007–2008 (serving from 2000 to 2014) was a
woman, the Walt Disney Company itself has never, in its nearly 100-year history,
had a female president, chairman, or CEO (“The Walt Disney Company” 2019).
The Walt Disney company in 2007 earned over $35 billion and, in 2008, over
$37 billion (“Investor Relations” 2019), thanks in part to the massively success-
ful, female-led franchises launched on Disney Channel in the 2000s, including
Hannah Montana (starring Miley Cyrus), Lizzie McGuire (starring Hilary Duff),
and That’s So Raven (starring Raven-Symoné).
This chapter explores when and how famous young women’s sexual capital
is framed as “normal” and morally acceptable, arguing that it is most accep-
ted when safely exploited and/or sanitized by media companies and channeled
into their profits rather than actresses’ own pockets. I examine this tension
34 Old Media, Girl Power
using two “scandals” that unfolded around young female Disney stars across
2007 and 2008: Vanessa Hudgens’ stolen nude photo and Miley Cyrus’ semi-
nude Vanity Fair photo. Although the circumstances surrounding the public
circulation of each photo differs, the similar panics they invoke point to many
of the problems that our society has with young women’s sexual agency and
capital. Using these case studies, I explore the creation of a Disney gaze – a
culturally/socially/economically sanctioned form of “gazing” at young
women – that produces a palatable (and impossibly idealized) form of Amer-
ican femininity for young audiences. I contrast this against the anxiety sur-
rounding the male/pedophilic gaze: a gaze that always underlies young female
celebrity (Barrett 2017; Projansky 2014), even when that celebrity is created
and nourished by Disney. Furthermore, I also delineate a separate tween gaze
and parental gaze, both of which are encouraged to view female celebrity via
these other determining gazes (but do not always do so). I argue that the
anxieties and moral panics surrounding the male/pedophilic gaze emerge
most notably when the young female celebrity recognizes/acknowledges this
gaze and learns to market herself toward it, as that point of recognition sig-
nifies a compelling threat to the male-dominated media machine: young
female Disney stars have significant social and cultural capital, that, if
retained into adulthood, could allow them much more agency and freedom in
their careers than most (adult) female stars. In this way, the consent of the
star matters little. The moment she produces herself as an object of the gaze
(whether privately, as was the case with Hudgens, or publicly, as was the case
with Cyrus), she reveals the contradictory anxieties underpinning her fame,
her gender, and her labor, thus becoming a site of panic, pushback, and
containment.

Girl Stars and the Disney Gaze

The Disney formula has proven that young female stars are immensely prof-
itable. While the corporation’s role in “discovering” and “nurturing” female
stars at transitionary ages and, in turn, developing idols of American hege-
monic femininity, is not new (e.g. Annette Funicello’s career across the 1950s
and 1960s), Disney’s “star-making machine” (Ho 2007*3) consolidated its
means of production in the early 2000s via the Disney Channel, a speciality
cable channel that does not rely upon the traditional advertising structure,
but, rather, uses subscriptions (and merchandising) to generate profit and
build an immersive brand experience for its young viewers (see Potter 2012).
The years 2006–2008, in particular, marked a point of transition at Disney
Channel, as That’s So Raven came to an end (2007) while new franchises
were being launched, including Hanna Montana (2006) starring a then 14-
year-old Miley Cyrus, High School Musical starring a then 18-year-old
Vanessa Hudgens (2006), Wizards of Waverly Place starring a then 15-year-
old Selena Gomez (2007) and Camp Rock (2008) starring a then 16-year-old
Demi Lovato.
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 35
Disney seemingly encourages its young audience to identify with its female
stars and characters, most evidenced by the sale of merchandise that immer-
ses them in the worlds of their favourite female characters and/or costumes
enabling young girls (and boys) to dress up as them. Although this form of
marketing has been critiqued – particularly the Disney Princess line for its
limited representations of girl/womanhood (see Golden and Jacoby 2018) –
most writers in the news uncritically reproduced the role-model discourse. In
other words, rather than challenging the idea that these characters – especially
those not animated but embodied by real, young, working girls/women –
should be role models, the media often instead judged how well they perform
this seemingly common-sensical role.
As noted earlier, I take a post-structuralist approach toward celebrity in
this book such that common-sense conceptions of talent, work, and role
models are not, in my view, objective truths but form part of our constructed
reality and reflect broader power structures. The celebrity system serves many
functions in American society, including doing the ideological capitalist work
of propagating the notion of the American Dream: that anyone can “make it”
if they work hard and have talent (see Dyer 1979; Littler 2004; 2013). At the
same time, paradoxically, celebrities’ failures (gendered, economic, social,
etc.) also secure a multi-million-dollar tabloid/gossip industry: these public
figures are both expected to perform their hegemonic role and fail in that
performance (see Fairclough 2008). In other words, there is a purpose and a
place for failure in this system. In the case of the Disney stars examined in
this chapter and the Playboy stars in the next, I ask what work both sides of
this paradox – the role model and the failure – are doing. In this chapter I
look specifically at two young Disney stars’ early “lapses” (as Disney would
call them) to examine how success and femininity are constructed for a young
(i.e., tween) audience. I also examine how these star texts spill out of the
Disney world into the mainstream media, and the implications of the report-
ing on them through an adult lens that reproduces, and sometimes challenges,
the role model discourse.
Although young stars have long been positioned as potential role models
for their audiences, the stakes of such positionings were upped in the mid
1990s as the media industry increasingly differentiated children as a separate
audience segment (as opposed to families). The rise of straight-to-video chil-
dren’s films, as well as the launch of specialty cable channels, like the Disney
Channel, and the emergence of a sub-genre of pop music aimed at kids, gave
rise to a child star whose main audience was children and tweens (those “in
between” child and teenage years), rather than adults (Bickford 2012;
O’Connor 2017; Potter 2012; Marshall 2017; Valdivia 2008). This was the
case with former infant stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, whose careers
began on a family sitcom, but became much more targeted to younger chil-
dren through a series of straight-to-video films released throughout the 1990s
and early 2000s, along with numerous other product lines through which they
built their empire (O’Connor 2017; Shetley and McCauley 2017). Although
36 Old Media, Girl Power
this young audience clearly supported their products, the Olsen twins were
not able (or potentially did not want) to build a wider fan base for themselves
as adult actors. Such a transition for young stars is often difficult to achieve,
as young stars epitomize many paradoxes that are not easily reconciled.
As several scholars have argued, the contemporary child star in Western cul-
tures embodies numerous contradictions central to capitalism: innocence and
ambition; labor and fun; exploitation and protection; wholesomeness and con-
sumerism (Bickford 2012; O’Connor 2017; Projansky 2014); as well as, I would
add, success and failure. Further, the child star is always also a site of loss or
potential loss and nostalgia, as they will inevitably lose their “childness” (Barrett
2017; O’Connor 2017; Projansky 2014). Of course, this nostalgia is also rooted in
an American national mythology that centers whiteness and white children as the
“ideal” and the future of the nation (Edelman 1998). The inevitable transition of
the child star to adulthood also brings with it – for young girl stars – an addi-
tional anxiety around their already-there sexuality and the cinematic relations of
looking; thus, this tension around lost innocence also invokes a need/desire to
“protect” the girl, which usually means protecting her purity (Projansky 2014, 33;
see also Barrett 2017). As noted by Sarah Projansky (2014), the girl star’s sexu-
ality produces a specific form of anxiety that centers on gazing: a question of who
is doing the looking and their intents and desires. This is a central tension around
young Disney stars, as the child star-for-child-audience relation complicates the
implications of gazing. As will be discussed in this chapter, there emerges an
authorized gaze that properly contains her sexuality (I call this the “Disney
gaze”) and an improper one that “exploits” it, which, notably, can be the girl’s
own. The terms of authorization are therefore highly contested, and it is often
money, rather than the interests or protections of girls, which drives these debates.
Such debates are certainly not new, but they did take on new valences around
2007–2008. The rise of new media technologies, including the development of
smart phone technologies (with two-way facing cameras) and the growth of
social media, initiated a shift in how female sexuality is mediated and circulated.
Cassell and Cramer (2008) note that moral panics around new communicative
technologies center on the access that they provide – “access to others, access to
information, access to opportunity” – which, in turn, disturbs the social order by
“dissociating physical place from social ‘place’” (Cassell and Cramer 2008, 62).
New communicative technologies thus produce social, political, and economic
threats to the status quo, allowing women (and girls) to socialize with “undesir-
able” mates, to commiserate and form solidarity with other women and/or other
marginalized groups, and to access the job/economic market in new and poten-
tially destabilizing ways. However, the public framing of these panics usually
centers on the first threat, as it specifically relates to female sexuality, purity and
innocence. In other words, the development of new technologies produces a
specific threat around young, white, “innocent” female sexuality, and thus can be
located in the same affective register as the female child celebrity.
Returning to the mid aughts, we see a rise in familiar discourses lamenting
the impact that new media technologies are having on girls, with a particular
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 37
focus on the trends of “sexualization” and “pornification.” This is true both
of mainstream media and academia, with texts like Ariel Levy’s (2005)
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture straddling
both spheres (see also, on the academic side, Attwood 2009; Dines 2010;
Durham 2009; McNair 2002). As more interest turned to this new “wave” of
sexualization – Levy’s key example being the Girls Gone Wild video series –
the classic tensions of the so-called feminist sex wars were revived for a new gen-
eration and transposed onto the “selfie”: a self-captured photo that is more easily
produced and circulated via smartphone technology like the iPhone (introduced
in 2007). The oft-sexualized poses that women produce in these images invoked
concerns about a (now internalized) male gaze that re-centers the power of erotic
looking [i.e. Laura Mulvey’s (1989) classic conception of woman’s to-be-looked-
at-ness], despite the selfie’s necessary consolidation of both the power of looking
and the power of being looked at into a singular female subject/object. That shift
of power is one of the key threats of this new form of technology: the relations of
looking can no longer be counted on to produce docile, proper feminine sexual
objects as power shifts from the gazer to the systems of circulation, which allows
women to create and share those images in ways they so desire (some public, for
profit; others private, for pleasure; some both). Thus, in taking those pictures out
of their intended context – that is, circulating them without the consent of the
women – the power of looking is re-inscribed onto the image to contain her
transgressive sexual subjectivity. The notion that victims of stolen photos deserve
their violation, which was much more pronounced in the reporting across 2007–
2008 than it is today, in combination with the notion that new technologies pro-
duce an overly “sexualized” girl/woman (despite this being a longstanding “con-
cern”) reveal that the anxieties surrounding young white women’s sexuality are
just as much about who wields it, profits from it, and takes pleasure in it, as they
are about its very existence.
Such anxieties are often framed around young girls being particularly sus-
ceptible to media messaging, whether in the form of sexualization or Dis-
neyfication (Bragg and Buckingham 2009; Sørenssen 2016). However, and
somewhat paradoxically, young girls’ use of media – and new media – allows
them to be more aware of these concerns and debates than ever before, with
studies showing that tween girls are rather media savvy and skeptical of
celebrity culture (see Jackson, Goddard and Cossens 2016; Keller and Ring-
rose 2015; Lowe 2003; Vares and Jackson 2015). Although the rise of social
media might produce self-surveiling young women who are internalizing the
male gaze in their production of imagery, so too does social media allow the
“panicked” discourses around such imagery to reach beyond the scope of the
adult-targeted media. This chapter, then, attempts to shift the site of concern
toward adults and media, rather than young girls. I am more interested in
how their images are mobilized in broader debates and panics around the
identity of girls – an identity which itself is not an absolute or essential iden-
tity but is also constructed by media discourses. Thus, instead of asking what
these trends are doing to girls (which is, no doubt, an important question, but
38 Old Media, Girl Power
one that others are trying to answer), I ask what do debates about sexualiza-
tion reveal about the media’s understanding of girls and womanhood? And
why is their understanding – which is often the framing that shapes the
broader terms of debate (including those in academia) – invested in (re-)pro-
ducing these same panics around girlhood? In other words, this chapter asks:
what is so threatening to the media about girls’ sexuality?

“Leaking” Sexuality: Vanessa Hudgens’ Stolen Nude Photo

The rapid worldwide success of the High School Musical franchise (hereafter
HSM) signaled, according to Anne Potter (2012), Disney’s ability to harness
the digital global media environment. Disney’s format – which does not rely
upon outside advertisers – means that it can replay (with slightly different
packaging) the same program throughout the course of several days, as it did
with HSM. High School Musical’s (dir: Ortega 2006*) “debut,” consisting of
four airings of the film across three days in January 2006, was watched by a
staggering 35 million Americans (Potter 2012, 124). Starring teenaged actors
playing teenagers (a rarity in many American productions), the first HSM
film tells the story of two protagonists from opposite high school cliques – the
prototypical jock Troy (Zac Efron) and brain Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) –
who are brought together by their passion for performing in their high school
musical. As noted by Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen (2018), the film series presents
a highly Americanized conception of individualism, where people/teenagers
have an inherent, essential “true” self (which may be multifaceted) that seeks
realization. The individual may have to go against their peers, parents, and
even other authority figures, but their pursuit of self-interest, in the end, is
presented as beneficial to all in the wider community (Sørenssen 2018): Troy’s
pursuit of his passion not only leads to the success of the production and,
therefore, the drama “club,” but also ends up benefitting his basketball team,
whose wishes he contradicted by joining the musical production. Despite its
young target audience, the narrative clearly draws on age-old (adult-oriented)
stories about star-crossed lovers, such as Shakespeare’s classic romantic tra-
gedy, Romeo and Juliet, as well as the 1978 hit film Grease (Kleiser).
The first HSM film, of course, was a massive success, generating an esti-
mated $500 million in DVD sales, merchandising, and live concert events,
while only costing a modest $4.2 million to produce (Potter 2012, 122). Its
young stars, Efron and Hudgens, as well as Ashley Tisdale and Corbin Bleu,
would all go on to other projects, both with Disney and beyond, while
building a large and dedicated young fanbase. The sequel to the film initially
premiered to 17.2 million viewers in 2007: the highest ratings for any televi-
sion program that summer (Bauder 2007a*) as well as, to that point, the
most-watched “individual program in cable TV history”4 (Keating 2007*).
The number-one ranking soundtrack for the second film sold 1.2 million
copies in the first week (Keating and Zeidler 2007*) and was the third best-
selling album of 2007 (Blank 2008*). In just one city stop (Atlanta), the High
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 39
School Musical tour (which featured different actors than the film version)
grossed $4.4 million over a three-week run (Ho 2007*). These profits are
bolstered by the extensive merchandising, with affiliated products including,
among others, a NYT best-selling novel, paper cups, Magic 8 balls, and even
girls’ panties (Galarneau 2007*).
In late 2007, shortly after the August airing of the second film, its lead
female star, a then 18-year-old Vanessa Hudgens became a site of outrage,
scandal, and Disney’s apparent disappointment when a private nude photo
she had taken of herself was stolen and leaked to the public without her
consent.5 At this time, Hudgens’ stardom was almost entirely sutured to the
Disney brand. After a series of bit parts in both television and film, Hudgens
became a star at the age of 17 when cast by Disney in the first HSM film. In
between the first HSM film and the second (released on the Disney Channel
in summer of 2007), Vanessa Hudgens recorded and released her debut album
V (2006), also under the Disney umbrella through their recording company
Hollywood Records. In this way, she followed in the footsteps of both earlier
and contemporaneous young female Disney stars.6
A central feature of the Disney brand and the HSM franchise is their
“unflinchingly G-rated” narratives (Blank 2008*). HSM’s central protagonists,
Troy and Gabriella, played by, at that time, real-life couple Efron and Hudgens,
do not even share a kiss until the very end of the second film, thus providing
parents with a show that, reviewers argue, “won’t make for any uncomfortable
questions [from children]” (Bauder 2007a*). In the film, Gabriella’s racial
ambiguity leaves room for interpretation. Gabriella Montez is a new transfer
student, who arrives at the fictional East High School in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. Her mother is played by Socorro Herrera, and thus the character reads
as potentially Latina (see also Larson 2016 on Gabriella’s name and geo-
graphical background). That she is portrayed by a Filipina actress marks her out
as ambiguously racialized, thus fitting into larger ideologies about “post-race”
America where markers of race are taken up into individualizing discourses of
“difference” and “diversity” (see Graefer 2013; Hasinoff 2008; Warner 2015). It
also allows Hudgens’ racial status to disappear in the reporting, as none of the
journalists contextualized her violation with regards to longstanding distinctions
between the sexuality of white, Asian, and Latina women in America. In the next
sections, I examine the reporting on this violation, which draws on two main
frames: firstly, the advent of new media technologies and how they ought and
ought not to be used by young women more broadly (of which Hudgens is an
example); and, secondly, the relation between Disney and its young “role
models” (of which Hudgens is an exemplar).

Dangerous Technologies and the Girls Who Use Them

Although Hudgens’ violation in 2007 was an early example of “sexting” gone
wrong (sexting being the practice of interacting sexually via mobile technol-
ogies, usually involving texting a nude picture or selfie), the continued growth
40 Old Media, Girl Power
in new media technologies since then has normalized both this practice –
particularly among young people – as well as the non-consensual use of such
images to punish and humiliate the (mostly) women who pose for them. This
normalization of both sex and violence in a specifically mediated format [i.e.
what legal scholar Clare McGlynn (2017) calls “image-based sexual vio-
lence”] mirrors our society’s broader “rape culture,” which accepts the nor-
malization of violence against women, polices their desires, shames them for
their bodies, and contains their sexual pleasure and agency (see Buchwald
et al. 1993; Friedman and Valenti 2008; Harding 2015). In the early days of
these technologies however, such potentials were only first being realized, and
there were – as is evident across the news reporting I examine – few attempts
to engage with feminist discourses around consent. While I certainly would
not argue that contemporary North American society has fully come to
embrace the nude female body as a site of desire, agency, and sexuality, there
has been a significant pushback to some of the early ideas around such
images and violation. In this section, I trace some of the early moral panics
around this new practice as they emerged, both in the Hudgens’ case, as well
as in other, non-celebrity contexts at the time. I focus on two particular
frames in relation to these stories: white sexual purity (which ties to the sex-
ualization of culture thesis) and victim-blaming (which stigmatizes both those
who are too sexual and those who use technology in the “wrong” ways).
Hudgens’ so-called scandal unfolded at a time when teen sexting was just
emerging as a concern for parents and society more broadly as smartphone
technology became widely accessible. In fact, the “using cell phones badly”
phenomenon was so pervasive that it served as a narrative device in the first
HSM film when Troy and Gabriella’s entire class is punished for using their
cell phones in homeroom. In the media, Hudgens was also discursively pun-
ished for using her cell phone badly: like most young women “caught” sexting
at the time, she was blamed, not for presenting herself as a sexual object, but,
rather, for her inability to contain her sexuality to the private realm or chan-
nel it through the appropriate media institutions. The transgression repre-
sented in this scandal, according to the news framing, is Hudgens’ use of
technology to capture and share her sexuality with her boyfriend, rather than
the sexuality itself (again, this sexuality is not scandalous when contained in a
Disney program as a female love interest/object of “innocent” desire). Hud-
gens is then able to serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of young
women engaging with technology for pleasure and thus plays into larger
moral panics unfolding in the United States and Canada at the time.
Using Hudgens as an example, several feature-length news pieces, including
one for the Philadelphia Daily News and one for the Boston Globe (both
award-winning news publications) hint at a moral panic over this new rela-
tionship between technology and (white, female) sexuality, while at the same
time reflecting differing generational norms over these relations. The statistics
included in both pieces (from the same influential national study by the National
Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy and Cosmogirl.com
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 41
2008 ) suggest that – in the early years of smart cellular phone technology –
7

already one-fifth of teenagers had “sent or posted online nude or partially nude
photos or videos of themselves” and approximately one-third of young adults
(20–26 years old) had, thus pointing to the potential development of new norms
amongst younger generations. Of course, in order to partake in this practice at
this time, one has to be able to afford this new technology, and thus must have
access to certain privileges; as Amy Adele Hasinoff (2015) astutely notes in her
book Sexting Panic, the debates over who and how one is using technology are
usually centered around longstanding concerns about the sexual purity of young,
heterosexual white women. This is why the non-consensual sharing of the photos
(usually by young men) is not the target of punishment, as those who are sharing
the photos are doing their white patriarchal “duty” of surveiling and containing
transgressive female sexuality.
This leap in logic is made obvious via the awkward discursive maneuvers
that journalists go through in order to describe these instances of violation.
For instance, when describing the suspension of two young girls for sexting in
Seattle, Philadelphia Daily News Reporter Jenice Armstrong constructs what,
at the very least, sticks out as an awkward, imbalanced sentence: “two high-
school cheerleaders were suspended after nude photos of them were texted all
over high school” (Armstrong 2008a*). Whereas one expects the first clause
of the sentence “two high-school cheerleaders were suspended after…” to be
followed by a description of their actions (e.g. “after they pulled a prank…”;
“after they took pictures of themselves…”), the switch to the passive voice in
the second half betrays the irrationality of punishing them, not for taking the
photos, but for the actions of someone else upon them. This discursive exer-
cise, seemingly innocuous, performs important ideological work, naturalizing
the punishment of certain segments of the population for taking photos,
rather than those who share those photos without permission.
Indeed, the effort to erase the agency of those who non-consensually share
photos was widespread in the news reporting at the time. The reporting on
Hudgens’ stolen photos reflected this trend and, in many cases, reporters even
ascribed agency to the photos themselves to propagate the notion of an uncon-
tainable “leaking” sexuality. Some examples are listed in Table 2.1, below.
“Surfaced” appeared to be the most popular term for journalists reporting
on the scandal, used 23 times out of 156 articles. This term not only con-
stitutes passive language (photos do not “surface” onto the Internet the way
something can, without intervention, float up from a body of water) but also
alludes to wetness, much in the same way that “leaking” and “slipping” onto
the Internet do. Wetness, of course, has connotations with female sexuality,
but also texturally makes something hard to hold onto, to contain, to protect.
While these phrasings were passive, other descriptors of the photos “making
their way” or “finding their way” online ascribe agency to the photos them-
selves, as though they are little explorers hiking through the World Wide Web.
Again, this suggests that the sexuality of women must be actively held onto
and protected, and cannot be contained: even if sexual expression is intended
42 Old Media, Girl Power
Table 2.1 Journalists describe the non-consensual release of Hudgens’ photo
Description of Photo Journalist Newspaper/Source
“slipped out onto the Bauder 2007a* Associated Press
Internet” Newswire
“surfaced” Keating and Zeidler Reuters; Globe and Mail,
2007*; No author 2007*
“had been taken from her No author WENN 2007a*
possession”
“leaked” No author New York Post, 2007a*
“made its way into Steinberg 2007* New York Times
cyberspace”
“found their way to the Garron 2007* Hollywood Reporter
Internet”
“ended up on the Internet” Hinckley 2007* New York Daily News
“showed up online” Rubinoff 2008* Waterloo Region Record

to be private, it is normal and logical that it will slip away, surface some-
where, or set out (on its own) to conquer cyberspace. Technology, particularly
in the hands of women (and not the men who receive the images, nor the
hackers who steal and post them), is inherently dangerous: for, again, it is not
the men who receive, share, or gaze at the images, nor the hackers, whose
image is sullied (for I still cannot find any reports – if they exist – on who
targeted Hudgens’ and or the investigations around this incident).
Again, disappearing the perpetrator in these violations is not a feature
exclusive to celebrity reporting. The reports from that time (2007–2008) about
teen sexting used similar discursive practices, removing agency from those
non-consensually sharing and viewing photos, and instead ascribing it onto
girls taking photos and the photos themselves. For instance, in his feature
news story on sexting, Buffalo News reporter Stephen T. Watson (2008*)
describes a specific incident that occurred at Pioneer High School where a
young girl sent nude photos of herself to her boyfriend. They were shared
without her consent, but Pioneer High School Principal Mark Schultz describes
that event as follows: “That picture was then forwarded somehow from that
phone to another phone and was distributed from there” (Watson 2008*, my
emphasis). Asserting that the photo “was forwarded” and “was distributed,”
again erases the agency of the students who were forwarding and distributing the
photos. In addition, the use of the term “somehow” which is echoed in Watson’s
reporting in other sections of this piece, mystifies the process of violation, as
though cell phone technology is so complex that neither journalists, nor high
school principals – let alone high school students – can figure out how, when, or
why it will be used (or decide to use itself, as the lack of user agency framing
above suggests). Even the headline of the story – “Using cell phones badly:
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 43
School district finds nude photos” – reinforces the policing of proper uses of
technology and erases the agency of perpetrators. School districts do not just
“find” nude photos; they have to be shared and circulated for school officials –
not districts – to “find” them.
In these articles, which reinforce moral panics via the obfuscation of targeted,
gendered harassment and the mystification of technology, Hudgens’ case is
brought up as an example to reinforce the idea that, even for celebrities, such a
practice is dangerous. However, as I have discussed elsewhere (Patrick, 2021), the
specific targeting of female celebrities inflects these so-called scandals (crimes,
really) in important ways: the practice of targeting celebrity women across all
realms of the public sphere increased over the next several years (e.g., the repe-
ated violations of Hudgens across the years; also Scarlett Johanssen in 2011, the
2014 iCloud hack, the targeting of U.S. Representative Katie Hill and actress
Bella Thorne in 2019, etcetera) and continues to be a way to ensure that women
police themselves, and potentially even lose their livelihoods as a result of their
“shameful” bodies and sexualities.
Not only was Hudgens, in 2007, a famous and successful young woman –
who had reached a level of success that those who targeted her had not – but
she was also, at this time, a Disney star. Sharing private nude images of her,
then, is not only a way to punish sexual transgression or to humiliate a suc-
cessful young woman. It also ensures that her livelihood is threatened, thus
containing the potential and growing symbolic and economic capital that she
was building. In the next section I examine this event more specifically in
relation to discourses about “role models”: firstly, I discuss Disney and their
response to the violation, as well as parents’ reactions to the photo, as repor-
ted in the media. I discuss issues around privacy, youth, and the rhetoric of
the “mistake.” Finally, I examine the journalists’ own response, with a focus
on the pedophilic gaze that emerges in their reporting on this event.

The Disney Gaze and the Media Gaze: Whose Role Model Is This?
Scholar Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen notes that, because of its high school-focused
content and characters in relation to its younger, tween audience (approxi-
mately ages eight to 12), the HSM franchise “configures its audiences as
aspiring teenagers” (2018, 219). In other words, the show provides pre-ado-
lescent children with social scripts regarding what to expect and what it is like
to be a teenager in (white, middle-class, sub-urban) America. Further,
Sørenssen notes, these scripts suggest that growing up is difficult and compli-
cated, and also a site of implied loss (although this loss is more obviously
Disney’s than it is their young clients’ as they grow up): “when examining the
three [HSM] movies, one can find several references to becoming older as
something uncertain and scary, which then results in a nostalgic longing for
younger childhood when life supposedly was easier” (2018, 219). Of course,
childhood nostalgia functions for Disney as a consumer-anchor: adolescents
and, eventually, adults with their own children, can always return to their
44 Old Media, Girl Power
beloved Disney texts when they long to re-live that stage of their lives. How-
ever, nostalgia is also mobilized in a broader ideological sense (and I do
explore this affect further in the next chapter in relation to post-feminism) to
help contain the potential sexual agency that women gain as they grow up.
The notion that young childhood is an easier time is central to many of the
moral panics that emerge both around technology and around celebrity, with
both realms being imagined, for children, to be innocent and more authentic.
One example that Sørenssen uses to illustrate this point is an exchange
between Troy and Gabriella from the first HSM film, where Gabriella (again,
the character played by Vanessa Hudgens) wistfully reminisces: “Do you
remember in kindergarten how you’d meet a kid and know nothing about
them, then 10 seconds later you’re playing like you’re best friends because you
didn’t have to be anything but yourself ?” (2018, 219). This question alludes to
the pressures that Gabriella faces, as a “nerd,” and Troy, as a “jock,” to conform
to their stereotypical roles and remain socially tied to their respective cliques (as
opposed to joining the drama club). Of course, this exchange refers back to the
larger ideologies celebrated by the film: namely, individualism and authenticity.
However, it also highlights the pressures that Gabriella feels (and, in Disney’s
vision, young women more broadly) to “be anything” other than herself as she
gets older. In this case, the unspecified “anything” tied to growing up also
implies a sexual self, and this kind of discourse – that the “sexual” girl/young
woman is not an “authentic” self – continually resurfaces when young women
transgress the social boundaries set out for them (and I return to this idea in the
discussion of Miley Cyrus’ Vanity Fair photos later in this chapter).
It is important to consider the implications of the “innocence” that sur-
rounds the character for which Hudgens was most known when examining
the public response to her violation, as much of the reporting on this event
conflated actress and character. Gabriella Montez, as noted earlier, in many
ways reads as Latina. However, because of Hudgens’ own racialized status,
the character can also be read in relation to the “model minority” stereotype
commonly surrounding Asian American identity. As noted by Paloma Miya
Larson (2016) in her study on mixed race representation across Disney texts,
the model minority stereotype often figures Asian American characters as
hyper-intelligent, hard-working, and willing/able to assimilate into American
culture. Not only does Gabriella share these characteristics, but, further, her
narrative arc in the first film is centrally concerned with issues of “belonging”
(as she is the new girl) and employs the white-knight rescue scenario when
Troy steps in to save a stage-fright-stricken Gabriella who freezes mid-audi-
tion (Larson 2016, 29–30). Via her coupling up with the handsome jock lead,
as well as her apparent ability to navigate the in-betweens of various high
school cliques, succeeding in every way that she desires (despite her apparent
longing for an easier childhood), Gabriella, too, is positioned as an aspira-
tional character within this aspirational text.
Many reporters’ image of Hudgens was so intimately tied to Gabriella that
they discursively erased the differences between the two, emphasizing how
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 45
“squeaky-clean” Hudgens was up until that point (Calgary Herald 2007*),
how “sweet” and “innocent” her HSM character is (Keating and Zeidler
2007*), and even imagining the fictional Gabriella’s mortified reaction to the
Hudgens scandal (Bauder 2007a*). Reporting also emphasized the targeting
of the series toward younger children and adolescents, without significant
consideration of the fact that it is both a fictional text and that its actors are
real life teenagers who are significantly older than their target audience (see
Bauder 2007a*; Bauder 2007b*; Galarneau 2007*; Keating and Zeidler
2007*; Steinberg 2007*). Such framing is noteworthy in the reporting on
Hudgens who, at the time of the “scandal” was of legal age of consent yet
expected – by adults – to embody the same chaste femininity that she per-
forms onscreen (and it is worth noting that this expectation was challenged by
parents who refused the logic of the role model discourse). Disney affirms this
framing in their public statement about the issue, which blames Hudgens,
rather than those who violated her: “Vanessa has apologized for what was
obviously a lapse in judgment. We hope she’s learned a valuable lesson” (see
Bauder 2007a*). The media, then, is the site wherein an “aspirational” rela-
tionship to young audiences is constructed across the fictional text (HSM),
the fictional character (Gabriella) and the real-life star (Hudgens). This
framing thus already sets up young female stars to fail, as they can never
embody/perform the “proper,” idealized, and fictional version of American
femininity created and sold by Disney.
Of course, the actual “lapse in judgment,” in this case, was on the part of
those who chose to violate a young woman, but either the media were too
naïve around technologies to yet recognize this as sexual violence or were too
misogynistic in their treatment of young women to care. The framing of this
incident by the majority of the media, by Disney, and by Hudgens (even-
tually) was that it was her “mistake” for taking the picture in the first place,
despite it being created and shared privately as part of a romantic/sexual
relationship. In other words, the transgression is the sexuality – the doc-
umenting of it, the agency in expressing/sharing it, and the pleasure of it –
rather than how that sexuality was wielded against her. In this way, the
framing of the issue takes a paternalistic and condescending stance against
young women using technology in the wrong ways, part of the growing pains
of youth to learn if, when, and how the female body is acceptable: good when
channeled into the media machine in an acceptably chaste storyline, bad
when celebrated privately.
Indeed, the constant reminder to women that they cannot maintain auton-
omy over their own public–private divide is a central function of the female
celebrity in contemporary society. While the right to privacy is centered in
American ideology, it is not a right that is equally protected for all citizens.
Hudgens’ initial statement (before she publicly apologized, likely at the behest
of those around her) attempts, perhaps naively, to draw on these individual
rights discourses to challenge the public frenzy over her naked image: “‘This
was a photo which was taken privately,’ said Jill Fritzo, Hudgens’ publicist. ‘It
46 Old Media, Girl Power
is a personal matter and it is unfortunate that this has become public’”
(Bauder 2007b*). In his book on Internet and reputation, Daniel J. Solove
(2007) notes that privacy is key to a person’s sense of autonomy, freedom
(from social/institutional control) and therefore to not only their “psychic
survival” (Solove 2007, 72), but also their economic one (i.e. when people are
incarcerated and removed from the free market, they are often forced to give
up their privacy in that they lose autonomy over their actions/labor, but also
in the sense of being subject to constant surveillance). Privacy is also further
tied to juridical punishment, in that some people’s – particularly young peo-
ple’s – mistakes are conceived of as being part of the maturation process and
thus deserving of privacy: minors often have their criminal records expunged,
which “permits room to change, to define oneself and one’s future without
becoming a ‘prisoner of [one’s] recorded past’” (Solove 2007, 73). Using the
word “privacy” in her representative’s statement, then, Hudgens’ team is
drawing upon socially constituted norms that build empathy for her as a
human being with rights and recognize her immaturity in this transgression.
At the same time, accessing privacy is also dependent upon one’s relation to
privilege: the least privileged in society often find their access to privacy and the
ability to hide past transgressions quite limited. On the other hand, those who
are most privileged and visible in contemporary American culture – celebrities –
are also less able to erase their mistakes or have them expunged from public
memory. This is further complicated in the case of the child (or, here, teenaged)
star, as the discourses surrounding them often obfuscate their labor and conflate
character/actor into one singular, impossibly idealized image. That is, young
actors are often imagined to just be “playing themselves” more so than adult
actors, blurring the line between performer and role and thus erasing claims to a
public–private distinction. While this may seem to be flattering to the young star
(i.e., a celebration of their inherent charisma), it also works to undermine the
skill, talent, and work they put into each role and production (again, by the time
they are cast they have usually been to numerous auditions, have invested in
acting/dance/singing lessons, and have perhaps even supplanted their parents as
the breadwinners of their family, working long hours on set often for a lower
wage than adult stars).
The collapse of young performer into character is particularly important to
consider in the context of mediated “scandal,” as it is outside of the realm of
their onscreen personas – and, in this case, outside of the world created by
Disney – that these scandals come to exist. In other words, the naked photo of
Hudgens does not exist in the HSM/Disney world: the scandal is discursively
constructed via its circulation through the news media and it is via this broader
circulation that it reaches the younger, tween audience of Disney. As has been
noted by celebrity scholars, this fascination with sexual scandal – which, of
course, is rooted in the drive to sell newspapers – is central to the star system:

The secret of sexuality, then, is required of the star. For the child star, of
course, there must be at least a surface distrust of sexuality. Thus, again,
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 47
simply the fact that she is a star—and therefore by definition has a sex-
ualized private self that must be pursued—is itself the scandal. The
scandal for the girl star is intensified because she is a child, sexualized too
early. The girl star, then, is the quintessential star—a hyper-white, highly
sexualized, and highly scandalous individual in conflict.
(Projansky 2014, 56)

The reporting on celebrity, and young female celebrity, in particular, con-

sistently reproduces this framing. Although Hudgens is not “hyper-white,”
her specifically racialized status is disappeared in the reporting on this event,
much like it is in HSM, and she becomes the site wherein the “sexualized
private self” must be pursued.
Nowhere is this pursuit more obvious – and more disconcerting – than in
reporters’ efforts to seek out the photo for themselves and report on what it
reveals about Hudgens’ private sexual self. The photo, which was later
revealed to have been taken when Hudgens was 16 years old, was technically
child pornography and would have been illegal to distribute.8 However, that
truth (whether known to reporters at the time, or not), as well as Hudgens’
connections to Disney and children/tweens, seemed to pose no issue to jour-
nalists whose reporting clearly indicated that they either searched for the
photos themselves and/or “examined” them closely, as though they had to
fact-check this incident like any other.
More specifically, when describing the photo, at least three separate jour-
nalists provided their own interpretations of the site of the photoshoot. All
three of them use wording that suggests first-hand reporting on the contents
of the photo: the photo “shows her” naked, rather than “is reported to show
her naked.” Table 2.2 below summarizes these phrasings, and their sources,

Table 2.2 Phrasing suggests direct examination of naked photo

Phrasing (my emphasis throughout) Journalist Newspaper/Source
“Hudgens apologized Friday for the Bauder 2007c* Associated Press
photos, which show her smiling as she Newswire
posed naked and in underwear in a bed-
room with a red curtain behind her”
“[The photo] shows a coquettishly smiling Bauder 2007b* Associated Press
Hudgens posing naked in a bedroom with Newswire
a red curtain behind her”
“The photo shows the 18-year-old actress No author Winnipeg Free
standing naked in what appears to be a Press 2007*
bathroom, with a red shower curtain
behind her”
“The photo features Hudgens in the nude No author WENN 2007a*
standing beside a bed in either a bedroom
or film set”
48 Old Media, Girl Power
which include the venerable Associated Press, whose reporter, David Bauder,
wrote several stories dedicated to this (apparently) newsworthy event.
One source (the tabloid-like New York Post) articulates outright that its
journalists “studied” the photo, although this is done in an attempt to
potentially downplay the scandal or to flatter the young star, showing
approval of Hudgens’ private sexual self: “Having studied the relatively inno-
cent photo, we’d say she has nothing to be embarrassed about” (New York
Post 2007a*, my emphasis).
Once it was publicly revealed that the photo was from an earlier relation-
ship (and thus from when Hudgens was under-age), there were no more
similar descriptions in mainstream news reporting.9 Journalists shifted away
from their fact-checking framework (an “objective” description of the photo)
toward a moral-panic framework by interviewing concerned parents and/or
invoking the notion of role modelhood. Speaking to Reuters reporters Gina
Keating and Sue Zeidler (2007*), mother of two Renee Rollins-Greenberg
called Hudgens “damaged,” and added, “She’s got this teeny-bop audience,
young preteens and younger, who are admiring her and thinking she’s this
wonderful, pure innocent person. Eighteen is awfully young for this kind of
display.” Such comments reinforce a binary between a woman’s private sexu-
ality and being a “wonderful, pure innocent person.” They affirm that this
“kind of display” on the part of young women is to be expected, perhaps is
even inevitable, but that it is their job to know when exactly the time is right
for that display. The same article quotes another mother, Rosie Konkel,
expressing concern about how to explain the photos to her eight-year-old
daughter (how did the daughter obtain these photos?) who “always looked at
this character as a very smart and proper young lady.” Both quotes, again,
conflate character and actor, a heavy responsibility placed upon Disney’s
young female actors to embody and perform ideal, hegemonic femininity.
They also demonstrate how tied these actresses are to the Disney brand and
franchise they are selling, and thus the danger their transgressions pose (to
profits and/or young female audiences).
It is worth noting that not all parents unproblematically reproduced the
moral panic framework. Michele Smith of Westborough, Massachusetts, was
the mother of an eight-year-old fan of HSM. Smith expressed hope that her
daughter does not even find out about the photos, and, if she does,
“[Michele’s] prepared to talk about it. She’ll say it’s something private for
Vanessa that shouldn’t have been shared” and that “[the] picture got leaked
by somebody who broke a trust with her.” Smith challenged the assumption
that this event will inevitably penetrate the idealized world created by Disney
(whereas the media takes that assumption as given), while also pushing back
against rape culture’s assumption that women’s violation is a natural and
inevitable outcome of their sexual agency. Smith added, notably, that her
daughter was a big enough fan of Hudgens to pose a threat to Disney’s
bottom-line if the HSM formula were changed: “If Vanessa is not in the
movie, my daughter would not be so excited to see it” (Bauder 2007a*). Not
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 49
only was Hudgens not dropped from the film, reports later emphasized that
she received a “substantial” pay raise for reprising her role (New York Post
2007b*).
While mothers differed in their views on the scandal, the overall absence of
father reactions to this so-called scandal suggests an implicit awareness, on
the media’s part, of the taboos of invoking what Studlar (2013) identifies as a
pedophilic gaze: the “eroticization of sexual innocence and vulnerability”
(cited in Barrett 2017, 41). This does not, however, mean that such a gaze is
absent. As noted earlier, many journalists themselves took on this gaze,
examining the photos and “reporting back” to their readers about what their
gaze revealed about underaged sexuality. In an article that particularly stood
out to me, this gaze emerges in the form of a critic, rather than a reporter.
Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr’s (2008*) seemingly innocuous review of the
third HSM film, in which he notes that he accompanies his daughter and her
friend to the screening, underlines this pedophilic gaze by demonstrating that
young female stars – even when performing in texts specifically intended for
tween audiences – will always be read through an adult lens. The girls’ reac-
tions to the film, something that a review of a Disney film may want to
actually highlight, are sidelined in favour of Burr’s, mentioned only as an off-
handed remark: “On the drive home, the girls even said they liked ‘HSM3’
better than the first two.” Burr then delves into a treatise on how “innocent”
a world is imagined in and by HSM (why wouldn’t it be?) and contrasts that
“innocence” to the “real world” scandals that young stars face.
Burr jokes that “in the real world… Gabriella would be sending nude cell-
phone pictures to her boyfriend that would end up on the Internet. (Oh,
wait…).” While Burr does imagine a distance between this “real world” ver-
sion of Hudgens and the innocent character she plays – a character whose
own father is notably absent in the HSM world – the reviewer undoes that
distance by discursively connecting them and collapsing character into actor
for her alone (whereas his imagined “real world” scandals for the other
characters are fabricated and not connected to their portrayers). While no
mention is made of either Gabriella’s or Hudgens’ race, the positioning of her
as “different” from the rest of the cast marks her sexuality out as transgres-
sive. Although his tone is facetious, Burr’s insistence on connecting Hudgens
back to her private (and stolen) sexuality, in a professional context that does
not require it, while accompanying his young daughter and her friend to
watch the film, is a remarkable public example of the merging – and nor-
malization – of a male, pedophilic gaze in and by the mainstream media vis-
à-vis young, female celebrities. It is further remarkable to note, as will be
discussed in the next section, how much more anxiety emerges around these
gazes when their object is younger and whiter, even if she – and her parents –
consent to these viewing relations.
Although Hudgens’ visibility and privilege as a Disney star mark her out as
being much more immune to certain forms of punishment than “everyday”
marginalized groups, her teenage status at this time ties into the moral panics
50 Old Media, Girl Power
circulating more broadly around stolen nude photos. The use of the passive
voice by adult school officials and journalists, whether discussing teens in high
school, or teens in High School Musical, highlights a naivety toward new
technologies – adults being unable to explain how photos “somehow” end up
online; young users’ inability to conceive of long-term consequences of their
technology use – while paternalistically foreclosing new technology as a site
of (sexual) expression and pleasure. The emphasis on and even agency ascri-
bed to the technologies being used to harm girls and women reinforces the
message that girls’ and women’s use of technology must be policed, rather
than the uses of those who violate others’ privacy. It is worth considering the
consequences of the internalization of such messages for women – as tech-
nology being a dangerous tool, and the Internet/networked connections as
being dangerous places for women – and their sense of belonging in techno-
logical spaces as well as what that might mean for their personal and profes-
sional lives in contemporary society. Much like how the threat of sexual
violence is turned into an internal policing of one’s behaviour and dress, the
threat of online sexual violence produces an internal policing of one’s use of
technology. Yet, as noted throughout the chapter, Hudgens is not just any
young woman engaging with technology. She is an aspirational text, onto
which are inscribed numerous ideals about innocence and idealized feminin-
ity. Her subjection to the gaze – whether Disney’s capitalist gaze or the
media’s pedophilic gaze – is only a “mistake” when it is mobilized on her own
terms for her own pleasure. In fact, as will be shown in the next section, any
time a young Disney girl mobilizes these gazes for herself or her own pleasure,
the media step in, producing paternalistic panics around female sexuality and
erasing any meaningful distinction between consent and violation.

“Exploiting” Sexuality: Miley Cyrus’ Vanity Fair Photos

In early 2008 another moral panic erupted when a then 15-year-old Disney star
Miley Cyrus posed for renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz and Vanity Fair
magazine. The consensual photo shoot and release, which includes a shot of
Cyrus from behind where she appears to be nude, covered strategically in a bed
sheet with tousled hair, outraged many commentators and incited much specula-
tion as to whether Cyrus, in her transition from girl star to woman, was headed
down a path similar to other Disney “Girls Gone Bad” (Deveny et al. 2007*) like
Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Vanessa Hudgens. Unlike Hudgens, Miley
Cyrus’ stardom – although nourished and magnified through the Disney Chan-
nel’s Hannah Montana (2006–2011) – was not entirely sutured to the Disney
brand when the “scandal” erupted over her Vanity Fair photo. In addition to the
massively successful show, Cyrus is also the daughter of American country music
singer Billy Ray Cyrus (who also plays Hannah Montana’s father), and thus her
stardom straddles both the child and adult entertainment worlds.
Cyrus’ ties to the country music world, as embodied through her parental
lineage as well as her close relationship to godmother Dolly Parton, marks
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 51
her as belonging to a particular class of American society that is often figured
as “down home” and authentic. Her image across both these sites – her
immense privilege as a Disney star as well as a homegrown, All-American girl
as connoted by country music – inflect this scandal in interesting ways. As
noted by Melanie Kennedy (2014), Cyrus and her father perform a specific
kind of “hillbilly” Americanness in Hannah Montana. The repeated reliance
upon low-class white identity within the show for humor seemingly informs
how her family’s “real life” economic motivations are read into narratives of
class mobility by the media in their framing of this story: it was her rela-
tionship with her parents, rather than that with Disney, that was often framed
as exploitative in news media.
Despite such framing, Cyrus’ parents need not have agreed to the Vanity
Fair shoot for economic survival. In 2008, Hannah Montana was already
generating millions of dollars for Disney and likely a significant portion of
that money (i.e., a wage) was also going to the Cyrus family. The 2008 con-
cert film Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds Con-
cert grossed $65 million while her tour reportedly was generating $1 million
per week (Fralic 2008*). At this time, the 15-year-old had also signed an
agreement – with Disney – to write her own autobiography and was estimated
by several analysts, to be on track to be worth $1 billion by the time she
turned 18 years old (Fralic 2008*; Hodges 2008*; Kronfeld 2008*), a number
that is specifically mentioned in the Vanity Fair article about Cyrus that
accompanied the photos (Handy 2008).
Compared to Vanessa Hudgens and High School Musical, both Miley Cyrus
and Hannah Montana have received much more public (and academic) scrutiny.
Thus, I will not be delving too deeply into the discussions around Cyrus’ chan-
ging public image and the massively popular Disney Channel franchise. How-
ever, I do want to touch on a few pertinent issues that illustrate many of the
tensions relevant to the larger argument of the book: namely, the sexual capital
built and wielded by a young Cyrus and the media’s attempts to undermine and
contain it. The “scandal” of Cyrus’ burgeoning sexuality – no matter where or
by whom it was captured – was an inevitability that she would have to navigate
as she transitioned from child star to adult one. Although she has, apparently,
successfully navigated this transition (her 2020 album Plastic Hearts, for exam-
ple, topped the Billboard rock charts and received generally positive reviews), I
would argue that Cyrus has much less symbolic and cultural capital than she did
in her Hannah Montana days and that this is exactly how the system is designed
to function: to ensure that young, popular, beloved female child stars do not
enter into the mainstream media system with the same level of popularity and
power that they had in their Disney days. In order to illustrate this point, I
examine the Vanity Fair “scandal” in relation to Cyrus’ star text both within and
beyond the Hannah Montana franchise (hereafter HM). I focus on two key ten-
sions underlying Miley Cyrus’ star text – celebrity versus authenticity and proper
versus improper sexuality – as well as the implications of these tensions on the
tween girl audience who comprised Cyrus’ fan base at the time.
52 Old Media, Girl Power
Hannah versus Miley: Celebrity and Authenticity
Hannah Montana (2006–2011*) is a Disney text that teaches girls not to trust
female celebrity. The central tension of the show – unbeknownst to those
around her (save her father, Robby Ray and brother Jackson), young and
“ordinary” Miley Stewart (played by Cyrus) is secretly the beloved superstar
singer Hannah Montana (also Cyrus) – suggests that female celebrities are
not who they appear to be. Despite being a family-oriented sitcom, with
many jokes and references added in to appease the adult and even teenage
audience who may have to watch with their young daughters or sisters, HM is
a text that is coded as being for and about girls: the main characters are girls
(Miley and her best friend Lilly), and their main interests are boys, fashion,
socializing, and celebrity culture (see Pugh 2018). It is, therefore, particularly
critical to examine the messages about female celebrity being sent to the
tween girl audience by one of contemporary culture’s biggest producers of girl
stars.
In her work on both the star and the series, Kennedy (2014; 2017) considers
authenticity to be a central theme in Cyrus’ star text. The character and world
of the “backstage” version of Hannah Montana, Miley Stewart, is con-
structed via the “authenticity” markers communicated via Miley Cyrus’ and
Billy Ray Cyrus’ star personas: their white and Southern roots, their true-to-
life accents and familial relations (with “Aunt Dolly” even making several
appearances on the show), as well as the physical demarcations between their
“real” selves and faked personas, including the wigs and glamorous clothes
donned also by Billy/Robby Ray, who plays a disguised manager/bodyguard/
songwriter to Miley’s Hannah (see Kennedy 2017). So, while, on the show,
Miley Stewart is presented to audiences as an “authentic” person who can be
trusted (thus arguably building a parasocial relationship between young fans
and Cyrus), the series’ continued emphasis on the backstage-frontstage
dichotomy inherent to celebrity culture presents the “frontstage” area of
celebrity culture – the one that is normally accessed via mainstream media
and thus outside of the Disney world/text – as manufactured and inauthentic.
Indeed, these tensions between the “authentic” self and the performed or
public self are recurring motifs in representations of girlhood across the early
aughts. As noted earlier, High School Musical presented this tension as one
between authentic childhood and “performed” teenage persona as it aligns
with a clique or stereotype. Other tween-targeted shows airing near this era,
as noted by Morgan Genevieve Blue (2013) were also preoccupied with the
secret lives of girls and their hidden identities: secret wizards in Disney’s The
Wizards of Waverley Place (2007–2012) whose title song reiterates that
“Everything is Not What it Seems”; ABC’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996–
2003) about a witch trying to live a normal high school life; and The Secret
World of Alex Mack (1994–1998) on Nickelodeon, about a girl who gains
new and secret powers after exposure to an experimental chemical. Unlike
these other girls’ secret identities, however, Miley Stewart’s secret power is not
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 53
magical or fantastical, but, instead, is a very real one: celebrity. Further,
Stewart’s celebrity is rooted in an authentic talent and hard work (Blue 2013),
and therefore is understood to be a legitimate form of celebrity, even if
celebrity itself, according to Disney, is tied to an inauthentic and illusory
world.
As Blue (2013) notes in her analysis, celebrity is frequently presented in
contemporary, post-feminist culture as an aspirational status for young girls:
one of the few avenues that enable women to publicly “succeed” on par with
men. Girls are therefore imagined to want to be – and often also encouraged
to want to be – celebrities, while also, paradoxically, being aware of the
cynicism and disdain directed toward female celebrity in our culture (see also
Allen 2011; Jackson, Goddard and Cossens 2016; Lowe 2003; Vares and
Jackson 2015). While tweens’ critical reactions to specific celebrities are often
welcomed by critics and parents, affording girls an agency and distance from
the supposed “role models” they are imagined to want to emulate, Tina Vares
and Sue Jackson (2015, 556) suggest that this critical distance often draws
upon prescriptive gender norms around sexuality and “reproduce[s] the
binary of good, innocent girl and bad, ‘sexual’ girl.” If sexuality is “bad,” and
sexuality is a necessary component of female stardom, the logical deduction is
that female celebrity is “bad” (again, a message that underlies the HM text
itself).
These contradictions thus complicate a reading of the female celebrity as
role model. HM picks up on these contradictions: Miley Stewart may live a
glamourous, enviable life as Hannah Montana, but her “ordinariness” is
something to which she desperately clings, afraid of how people would judge
her if they had to do so by her (earned and legitimate) celebrity alone. This is
not to say that the show is not an aspirational one – the emphasis on gla-
mour, fashion, adoring fans, etc. within the show and the HM consumer
products available for purchase outside of the show belie its aspirational
positioning10 – but, rather, that the contradictory messages surrounding
Hannah Montana and Miley Stewart complicate the argument that she is
someone to be emulated by audiences. Of course, Disney casts “relatable” and
“authentic” stars like Miley Cyrus in hopes that young fans will look up to
them (and their expectations around these young stars serving as “role
models” seem fairly clear from their public statements), but the ways in which
celebrity is undermined and presented as inauthentic throughout the series
also suggests to young audiences that they ought to approach public figures –
including Miley Cyrus – with skepticism, particularly as her star text moves
beyond Disney into the broader media realm.
This skepticism is mirrored in the news media’s framing of the Vanity Fair
photos. In contemplating the numerous possible motives for participating
(why would Cyrus not participate in a story and photoshoot by one of
America’s most revered and non-gendered magazines?), many commentators
could not help but remark on Cyrus’ parents’ greed, re-framing the story from
a potentially powerful critique of the ways that young women’s sexuality is
54 Old Media, Girl Power
mobilized toward corporate profits to an individualist, classist narrative about
the dangers of female/parental ambition and teenaged sexuality. In a blog for
the Huffington Post (quoted in Serjeant 2008*), actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who
is described by Reuters’ reporter as “a former child star,”11 places blame
somewhat vaguely on the adults in the situation: “[Cyrus] is a young girl. She
shouldn’t have to deal with any of this. I don’t feel that she was duped… there
were people at the shoot that should have been looking out to make sure this
didn’t happen.”
Curtis, who has herself been very outspoken about Hollywood’s treatment
of the female body, removes agency from Cyrus but is careful not to present
her as “innocent” in this transgression. However, it is still the people around
young Miley – here unnamed – that “should have been looking out.”
Although Curtis, whose own fame can be tied to that of her famous parents,
refuses to name Billy Ray and Tish, other journalists were quicker to present
the Cyruses as greedy and exploitative stage parents. Writing for the Salt
Lake City Tribune, Corey Hodges (2008*) suggests that Miley’s parents knew
what they were doing but did not care: “[p]erhaps [Miley’s] parents have
adopted an equivocal attitude so as not to jeopardize what has become a lucra-
tive cash cow for them” (my emphasis). Again, this reading ties back to Disney’s
imaging of how celebrity works within the show HM. As is noted by Blue (2013),
Hannah Montana’s own success seemingly supports the comfortable California
lifestyle of her father (who is not shown working in or beyond Hannah’s team or
career12) and her brother Jackson (who is repeatedly shown asking his father –
and thus, by implication, Hannah/Miley – for money).
Despite Disney’s ongoing critique of this media system, few reporters were
willing to critique the exploitation of child stars by the corporation. One
article stood out for almost going there. While still blaming Cyrus’ parents
for the scandal, The Deseret News at least also extends some suspicion
towards the Disney Channel’s public response wherein they claimed that “a
situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell
magazines” (Kronfeld 2008*, my emphasis). In turn, Deseret News reporter
Marjorie Cortez (2008*) argues that: “It’s a bit of a stretch for Disney
Channel to claim Miley was somehow manipulated [by Vanity Fair’s staff]
when her own parents and handlers were with her the entire time.” This
stretch is not as big as it would seem, however, if one views Disney’s claims in
the context of Hannah Montana’s portrayal of female celebrity and the media.
Although the article does suggest that Disney Channel’s outrage is perfor-
mative (a rare instance of suspicion directed at Disney during these scandals),
the story ultimately concludes that, while her parents need not be concerned
over the way Disney uses Miley’s image, they should be concerned over the
way Vanity Fair/Annie Leibovitz does.
Again, these issues tie back to Disney’s portrayal of the celebrity system as
one that is inauthentic, exploitative, and untrustworthy. The tensions set up in
the show between an authentic self and an inauthentic celebrity/media system
are important to consider because, whether or not they were able to access the
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 55
Vanity Fair photos themselves, young girls are already encouraged to read the
ensuing scandal through the lens offered by Hannah Montana. Further, this
emphasis on “authenticity” allows any part of the celebrity’s private life that
remains hidden or private to be vulnerable to an “exposure” that would
undermine the parasocial relationship they have built with fans and/or their
claims to authenticity – a claim that is particularly important for musicians/
pop stars, the kind of stardom that Cyrus would eventually lean into as an
adult. While fans may not necessarily question Miley Cyrus’ own authenti-
city, Disney has ensured – via the messaging in HM – that either her agency
is erased (she is victim of a corrupt system) or that her motives, as well as
those of her handlers and/or family, will be viewed with skepticism and
cynicism.

Disney versus Miley: Whose Sexuality Is It Anyway?

In one of the first scenes depicted in the HM pilot, Miley Stewart fawns over
how “hot” schoolmate Johnny is to her best friend Lilly. In the second epi-
sode of the show, Miley’s friend Oliver reveals his romantic obsession with
Hannah Montana and proceeds to stalk the young starlet. Unlike High
School Musical, which disguises its love story as a G-rated “friendship,”
Hannah Montana does not shy away from teen crushes, dating, boyfriends
and girlfriends, and even protective white fathers guarding the sexual inno-
cence of their daughters. However, the media’s reaction to Cyrus’ sexuality as
channelled through the Vanity Fair photoshoot – and, as will be discussed,
the early reporting did suggest that the panic was media induced, not parent
induced – delineates the “rules” around appropriate uses and inappropriate
uses of female sexuality.
Despite, or perhaps because of their connection to Disney, there is clearly a
struggle to contain the sexualized imagery of these young stars as they tran-
sition from girls into women. Several elements of the 2008 Cyrus scandal
paralleled what happened to Hudgens just a few months prior. The photo –
once again, of an underage/teenage girl – was simultaneously read (by adults)
as signalling an immature young woman’s desire to be perceived as mature/
sexual and shed her Disney image, as though that transition is of concern
more than the context in which a photo is produced. Other than the media’s
attempts to connect Hudgens to a wider moral panic about sexting, little
effort was made to distinguish the key differences in these scandals in that one
was a privately produced photo and the other, a public image intended to
circulate in the economy of visibility (see Banet-Weiser 2018). Despite the
differences, Disney took similar steps in each case: a public statement/inter-
vention that framed the photo (and, by implication, the sexuality) as a “mis-
take,” and (re-)asserted the girl’s association with the company/their
ownership of her. Cyrus’ own discourse also shifted from challenging the
scandal to accepting it and apologizing for her actions. In reacting similarly
to both the stolen and the consensual photos, Disney reveals that the problem
56 Old Media, Girl Power
with girls’ sexuality is their agency, not the sexuality itself (which, again, is
acceptable when channelled into a Disney text), placing the onus on the
individual to properly contain herself.
There was, however, one significant difference in Disney’s response to
Cyrus’ case. Unlike their public shaming of Hudgens, Disney blamed adults,
rather than Miley, for the “lapse” in judgement. Again, their public statement
insisted that “a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old
in order to sell magazines” (Kronfeld 2008*, my emphasis). In these cases, the
bad judgment adheres to the racialized star while the younger, white star is
innocent and manipulated. In contrast, Miley’s own public discourses, which
shifted from an artistic defense of the shoot to a full-blown apology, affirm
her own agency and take responsibility for the ensuing firestorm:

“I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic,’ and now,
seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed […] I
never intended for any of this to happen, and I apologize to my fans, who
I care so deeply about.”
(Kronfeld 2008*)

This apology echoes the sentiments of Hudgens’ apology, demonstrating that

the transgression is in posing (nude) for photos, not how those photos are
taken up into a broader sexualization of girls (Cyrus) or violations of women’s
privacy (Hudgens).
Again, such statements reinforce the message that Disney’s use of these
girls’ images is the correct one, and other uses – either by the media or the
stars themselves – are less legitimate. Yet perhaps it is the broader audience
whom Disney ought to have reprimanded: the Cyrus issue of Vanity Fair sold
over 400,000 copies and elicited a “record number” of letters from readers
(Lewis 2008*). Disney’s motives are no less sales-based, but they do rely upon
Cyrus to maintain a “wholesome” innocence for their bottom-line. The sales
figures of the Vanity Fair issue, on the other hand, point to a whole new
potential audience for a sexual(ized) Miley Cyrus, one that she would neces-
sarily have to tap into – and, I would argue, did tap into – if she wishes to
remain a star (see Fairclough 2008).13
In fact, this potential audience haunts the portrayals of burgeoning sexu-
ality within the Hanna Montana text. The sexuality might be toned down
visually to keep parents happy – most of the show’s depictions of teen sexu-
ality are reduced to holding hands or chaste kisses (Pugh 2018) – but there
remain numerous narrative references to “hot” guys, crushes, and boyfriends,
both in Miley’s world and Hannah’s. While Tyson Pugh (2018, 135) reads
these innocently sexual narratives as “allegoriz[ing] Cyrus’s controversial
transition into a sexual provocateur, [and] thus preparing young viewers to
accompany the protagonist/actor as she segues out of the show and into her
career as a solo artist,” I argue that, because of its emphasis on the inau-
thentic–authentic (or frontstage–backstage) dichotomy, the show is instead
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 57
preparing viewers not to accompany Cyrus’ transition beyond the show into
solo artist. In this reading, any “public” sexuality that extends beyond the
Disney narrative, such as that appearing in Vanity Fair, for instance, is viewed
with cynicism and suspicion – as a marketing “tool” exploited by a capitalist
media system – rather than an “authentic” extension of the female star’s pri-
vate sexuality and/or a legitimate basis upon which she builds sexual capital.
This dichotomy is further underlined by the series’ depictions of Miley’s
struggles with sexuality in her off-stage, authentic life. As is argued by Pugh
(2018), numerous plots across the series re-visit the “protective father” trope
where we see Robby Ray try to channel his daughter’s maturing interests
toward shopping and consumption rather than boys and sexuality. Further,
there is an episode early in the series where the reverse protective scenario
plays out: Miley is upset when she discovers that her widowed father has
started dating again behind her back. At the end of the episode, Robby Ray
concedes that no one could replace Miley’s mother and the father and
daughter embrace, thus affirming “the primacy of familial bonds over
romantic attractions” (Pugh 2018, 151). Although ultimately unsuccessful in
this endeavor, as Miley eventually pursues serious romantic relationships,
Robby Ray is constantly hovering in the background of their interactions,
keeping a watchful eye on his daughter.
These tensions around girlhood sexuality and protective fathers are further
inflected by the Cyruses’ real-life, Southern, “authentic” whiteness. As is
noted by Matthew W. Hughey (2012, 128–129), the paternalistic and protec-
tive attitude over young white women’s sexuality is rooted in white suprema-
cist concerns over racial purity and the “cult of true womanhood” that
positions white women as innocent and virginal. White women’s sexual purity
is connected to their status within patriarchal capitalism, a system wherein
women’s sexual agency and sexual capital can provide them with further
opportunities in the public and economic spheres. However, this purity is also
connected to white supremacy: a way to ensure the “purity” of familial racial
lineage and, in turn, the nation. In these interlocked systems of power, white
men become the “protectors of this cult, and white women [are] encouraged
to be thankful for, and deferential toward, their male benefactors” (Hughey
2012, 129). Although these ideologies are, according to Hughey (2012, 131),
widespread and enacted via numerous forms of relationships, they are epito-
mized in the father-daughter protective bond that is depicted in HM.
Although not openly white supremacist, Robby Ray’s disapproval of Miley’s
growing interest in boys signals the anxieties and dangers surrounding female
sexual agency and sexual capital endemic to patriarchal systems.
This perhaps explains why the Vanity Fair story also included a much less
remarked upon photo of father and daughter posing together. By including
Billy Ray in this “provocative” spread, the photo reasserts the father’s pro-
tection of the young girl’s purity and thus challenges a sexual reading of the
photos. Yet, as argued astutely by Projansky (2014) in relation to Tatum and
Ryan O’Neal, the appearance of real-life father-daughter combinations
58 Old Media, Girl Power
onscreen together invoke numerous anxieties on the part of a media system
conditioned to view young women through a male gaze. In particular, Pro-
jansky notes a slippage – as evidenced in much of the reporting discussed in
the previous section – between the father star and the exploitative mainstream
media system such that he is viewed as being “responsible” for the child star’s
(in this case, Tatum O’Neal’s) lost innocence and provocative sexuality:

This theme in the press, then, works to diminish the girl star, to represent
her as “less than” women, actors, and regular girls. The authors [in the
press] love to watch Paper Moon, but they distrust Tatum herself for
having the capacity to make the film. And they distrust her father for
putting her in the situation, as well as the audience for making her a star
by adoring her and thereby stealing her childhood.
(Projansky 2014, 53)

It is difficult not to trace parallels in the press’s treatment of Miley and Billy
Ray Cyrus over three decades later. The media loves Hannah Montana, but
they distrust Miley, and this distrust is encouraged by the Hannah Montana
text itself. Instead of blaming Disney for “stealing” her childhood, her father
gets blamed for an image that, for many in the public, was not as provocative
or outrageous as the media viewed it.
Indeed, there is evidence in the panicked news reporting that the images of
Miley (and her father) in Vanity Fair were not read by all as sexual (see, for
instance, Brodesser-Akner 2008*, Hodges 2008*, and Rollins, 2008*) and, fur-
ther, that it was the media – and not parents – who were most outraged by this
event. Unlike the reporting on Hudgens’ nude stolen photo, which included sev-
eral quotes from upset parents, journalists in Cyrus’ case apparently struggled to
find parents who would mirror their own moral panics. In her article for the
Charleston Gazette, Jennifer Winkler (2008*) claims that “parents and fans” had
mixed reactions to the photo, but interviews none. Palm Beach Post staff writer
Rhonda Swan (2008*) was able to get quotes from relatives of Hannah Montana
fans. Although the mother she interviewed did not exactly demonstrate outrage
(“to each his [sic] own,” the mother stated), Swan was able to track down two
scandalized grandmothers: “I just think it [the photo] sends a poor message to
young girls”; “It makes them wanna [sic] be too grown-up at their young age”
said Barbara and Betsey, respectively, whose granddaughters were “huge”
Hannah Montana fans (Swan 2008*). The story also quotes an older sister who,
at 18, was worried about her little sister thinking “it’s OK for all young girls to
pose semi-nude” and, on the other hand, an uncle to a young fan who thought
the photo revealed nothing more than a swimsuit would, adding that, “It’s not the
responsibility of Hannah Montana to instill values in children, it’s the responsi-
bility of the parents” (Swan 2008*). A poll conducted by the Vancouver Sun
found that 60% of respondents thought that Cyrus need not apologize for the
photo (Fralic 2008*), perhaps suggesting that the public recognizes (and accepts)
the rules of female celebrity more easily than those whose role is to undermine it.
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 59
A helpful example of this role enactment by the media can be found in an
article by Jenice Armstrong (2008*) for The Philadelphia Daily News, which
argues that the photo shoot was part of the “pornification of Miley Cyrus.”
Although Armstrong is quick to acknowledge that the Vanity Fair photo
“can hardly be considered sexually graphic,” she reads it in broader con-
versation with two other controversial “leaked” private photos of Cyrus cir-
culating at the time (one where she and a friend pass a candy from one mouth
to another, and another where she is lifting her shirt to reveal her bra).
Armstrong also reads the Vanity Fair photo and “pornification” of Cyrus as
a repeat of what happened to Lohan and Spears, drawing upon frames of
calculated ambition: “When they were ready to broaden their appeal, Britney
Spears, Lindsay Lohan and others knew that they had to show more skin and
turn up the heat, so to speak” (2008b*, my emphasis); “It was a calculated
move that, no doubt, will begin to transfer Miley’s appeal onto a more
mature audience. In the process, she’ll have to leave her loyal tween fan base
behind. But hopefully not herself as well” (my emphasis). The notion that a
sexualized Miley Cyrus is not part of “herself” not only reaffirms the
authenticity-inauthenticity binary highlighted in HM, but also denies the
ways that Cyrus’ continued success beyond her tween/Disney audience will, as
it does for most women in Hollywood, rely upon conveying and selling an
image of hegemonically beautiful, sexy (and sexual) femininity. The sugges-
tion that this was a “calculated” move on the part of Cyrus (and Lohan and
Spears) connotes an unnatural, illegitimate form of publicity engineered to
maintain fame and success. It minimizes the work and talent of all of them,
the tastes of the tween audiences that will grow up alongside them and com-
prise their adult audiences, as well as the “calculation” of producers, studio
heads, news editors, investors, advertisers, and male celebrities who also
ambitiously make decisions that will further their public profile and profit.
The difficulties that female celebrities have in navigating these transitions is a
feature, not a bug, of the celebrity system, designed to ensure that the power –
symbolic, economic, and cultural – they wield as children or teenagers is
incompatible with the sexual capital they wield as grown, famous women.
While girl stars are ongoing sites of anxiety and contradiction – sexuality
versus purity; authenticity versus inauthenticity – these anxieties do not “go
away” as they mature into adults. The adult female celebrity woman is also a
site of anxiety in the media, although the source of this anxiety shifts. No
longer is the concern her budding sexual capital, but, rather, how that capital
is wielded and, perhaps more importantly, its loss. The danger of the woman
celebrity is no longer in looking at her, but, rather, in her losing her “to-be-
looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 1989): the loss of that sexuality, whether she ages,
gains weight, or becomes too overtly sexual (a white, “trashy” spectacle). In
the next chapter I explore this loss and the nostalgic affect implied by this
potential loss, via the text of the Playmate or nude female celebrity, whose
relation to the media system (as exemplified via Playboy) is striking similar to
the girl’s (as exemplified via Disney).
60 Old Media, Girl Power
Notes
1 In the eyes of producers. Of course, children can be adopted, of mixed race, etc.
2 This number may soon be of less interest than the number of subscribers to Disney
Plus, Disney’s streaming service that launched in 2019, which contains all of
Disney Channel’s old programs.
3 A reminder to readers that the asterisk denotes that this source is a primary source,
and thus listed in reference list 2 at the end of this chapter.
4 The article is unclear on the definition of this term, though I interpret the phrase
as suggesting that it was the most-viewed cable TV program that aired only once
(“individual”), that is, not a series or mini-series. Other articles simply say it was
the “largest audience in history for a basic cable broadcast” (Galarneau 2007*).
5 The same incident also included a photo of her posing in lingerie. It remains
unclear how these photos were obtained and by whom.
6 Disney has long been perfecting this kind of star packaging with singing-actresses
dating back to the days of Annette Funicello, whose career was launched on The
Mickey Mouse Club and who subsequently released several pop records in 1959
through the Disney label Buena Vista Records.
7 The survey demonstrates that this phenomenon is pretty evenly spread across
gender (22% of girls aged 13–19 having admitted to sending nude photos of
themselves, versus 18% of boys of the same age), despite the panics centering on
young girls (National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy and
Cosmogirl.com 2008). The survey only provides overall statistics on race, with 73%
of respondents identifying as white or Caucasian, and no breakdown of racialized
groups’ answers to questions about sexting practices.
8 The US Department of Justice defines child pornography as “as any visual
depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (someone under 18 years
of age). Visual depictions include photographs, videos, digital or computer gen-
erated images indistinguishable from an actual minor, and images created, adap-
ted, or modified, but appear to depict an identifiable, actual minor” (Citizen’s
Guide to U.S. Federal Law on Child Pornography 2018). The regulation notes
that sexually explicit conduct can include nude photos that are “sufficiently
sexually suggestive.” However, the fact that the photo was reportedly taken by
Hudgens with the intention of sharing with her boyfriend at the time (another
minor) complicates its legal status as child pornography (for a thorough discus-
sion of this issue, see Hasinoff 2015).
9 Only one source in my dataset explicitly mentioned looking at the photos after this
report surfaced on September 13, 2007: a college newspaper editorial wrote
extensively about searching for the photos, noting that “everywhere [they] sear-
ched, Hudgens’ legal team had been there first, removing the offensive pictures”
(Reveille Editor, The Daily Reveille*). The reasons behind the removal of the
photos are unclear here (the lawyers may have invoked copyright law over child
pornography law), but I imagine that because of its status as a student-run news-
paper – and therefore not likely to employ legal counsel – the editors were not
aware of the potential liabilities in admitting to searching for (and finding) these
images (whereas all other newspapers immediately stopped using this language in
reports).
10 Another example of this distinction might be found in reality television – The Real
Housewives series, I would argue, present an aspirational lifestyle to audiences
while not necessarily positioning the participants as “role models.”
11 This is a puzzling description of Jamie Lee Curtis, as the earliest roles I can find
for her are in 1977, when she was 19 years old. Under standard frameworks, this
would not qualify her as a child star (maybe a teen star?), but perhaps the need to
equate her with Cyrus in this piece outweighed the need for accuracy. Curtis was,
 Disney Girl… Interrupted 61
however, famous as a child (a child celebrity), as the daughter of actors Tony
Curtis and Janet Leigh. The conflation of childhood fame and childhood labor/
work is worth noting.
12 There are, however, references to Robby Ray’s past as a singer/artist. This, again,
highlights the authenticity of its stars, as it mirrors the real-life Miley–Billy Ray
relationship (Billy Ray’s time in the spotlight had faded, but is now connected to,
and dependent upon, the stardom of his daughter).
13 This transition is often navigated by young male stars as well, and the emergence
of the men’s Calvin Klein underwear spread as a rite of passage for male teen idols
is noteworthy for the lack of scandal it instigates (Ramani 2019). Even Cyrus
alluded to this herself, juxtaposing a photo of herself, posing topless with Calvin
Klein underwear to a photo of teen idol Shawn Mendes posing similarly for the
company, with a caption warning parents not to let their children hang out with
her (@MileyCyrus February 18, 2019).

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3 Playmates and Centerfolds
Nostalgic White Femininity and Post-
feminist “Success”

Prologue
In early 2014, I, like millions of others around the world, went to my local
cineplex to take in a screening of Martin Scorsese’s latest film The Wolf of
Wall Street. The showing was packed. I remember the people around me
laughing, clapping, hooting, and hollering in pleasure throughout. I did not
share in their delight. All I could concentrate on was the nude women in the
background – set dressings for this story about men’s ambitions, men’s weak-
nesses, and men’s downfalls – and could not stop thinking about how horrible
and challenging it would have been to cast the extras on this film (with all due
respect to the seven people credited with background casting on the film).
This happens to me a lot. Whenever I watch a film or television show with a
strip club scene (a ridiculously common occurrence), all I can think of is the
nightmare of casting them and the relief that I don’t have to do that anymore.
Casting extras is not an easy, or glamorous job. It is rare that the casting
director or main casting team, responsible for casting all the speaking roles,
will also cast the silent, background performers who “fill in” a set to make it
look like a real space and place. The extras must “fit” whatever the scene is,
so if it is a film set in a high school, for instance, most of the extras will need
to be teenage looking. If the film is set in the 1970s disco era, the extras will
need to have long hair, sideburns/beards, and most likely a costume fitting.
The union requirements can make this a difficult balance to strike, as there is
usually a quota to be filled. Non-unionized extras, or “cash” extras, are often
easier to recruit because they are less likely to already be booked that day,
and there is, of course, a bigger pool to choose from, as many people are
eager and/or curious to try it out. However, non-union extras are also more
likely to change their minds about the gig, drop out at the last moment (or
just not show up), be less professional on set and, once the reality of early call
times and hours of waiting sets in, less likely to ever want to do it again.
However, at least several times a shoot there is a need for some sort of
“special” extra: sometimes they are called special skilled extras, or featured
extras, and they will need to do more than stand, sit, or walk. Sometimes they
have to perform stunts like running away from an explosion or a gunman.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268659-4
68 Old Media, Girl Power
Sometimes they have to be circus performers: acrobats, jugglers, fire breathers.
Most often, however, they have to be “hot women” willing to wear a bikini or,
sometimes, nothing at all: for a non-speaking role.
It must have helped the Wolf of Wall Street casting team immensely to say:
“you’re going to be in a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio.” Or to throw out the
name “Scorsese,” which automatically legitimizes the “artistic” vision of a
bunch of naked ladies. Still, I am sure it was no simple task. Convincing
young women to be naked on a film set where they may or may not get
thrown a line (which could always be cut from the final film) is not an easy
feat. And, to be honest, the so-called prettiest women, who are usually what
the production team wants, are much less likely to say yes to such roles.
One of these kinds of days sticks out in my memory. We needed to cast a
nightclub scene for an independent film. They wanted about 50 extras (which
is a lot!) and my junior colleague and I were left alone to book them for the
next day. We were in a rush, stressed out, and using our supervisor’s preferred
method of distributing the job to the local agents who had extras on their
roster (the “bigger” agencies in town only represented actors for speaking
roles). After a long harrowing day of booking the extras and simultaneously
giving them their call times and information, we realized that we had not
focused on the three “bikini girl” roles that were requested. We thought it was
not a big deal and that we could just choose from our pool of extras already
booked (because it was a party scene, they were all young adults who
seemed – from their pictures – fairly attractive) so my co-worker and I picked
out three girls and let them know they had to bring bikinis for the shoot.
They didn’t seem to mind so we put their names into those roles in the Excel
spread sheet before printing it off and faxing it to production for the next day.
We left the office that night at around midnight, exhausted, but pleased that
we had found everyone we needed.
Early the next day my phone rang, and it was my supervisor. My heart
dropped, as him calling me before work was not a good sign. I answered and
he ripped into me about the “ugly girls” that we had chosen to be featured in
bikinis. He picked me up (my co-booker was already in the car) and as we
inched through heavy traffic on our way to set, he continued to chastise us for
the job we had done. Apparently, the girls did not look like their photos (this
happens a LOT in casting) and the production team was – luckily for us –
able to switch out for some of the prettier extras on set. I felt kind of bad, but
I also felt a bit angry: not for the girls on set but for myself at being in trou-
ble – it wasn’t my fault that they were doing everything last minute and got
sloppy results! I didn’t dare say that to my boss.
Looking back on it now, however, I feel anger for the young women who
were on set that day. Certainly, I feel anger for the ones who were likely
coerced into an uncomfortable and half-naked situation that they did not sign
up for (I cannot overstate how intimidating a film set is: if the director stops
everything and asks you to do something, you probably are going to do it).
But I’m more angry for the so-called “ugly girls” and for the situation that I
 Playmates and Centerfolds 69
put them in. I play the scene over in my mind as I’m guessing it unfolded. I
can’t imagine these young women’s humiliation, so I try to imagine it a dif-
ferent way. They were sent onset as “bikini girls” but maybe they didn’t notice
that once the director looked at them he got angry. Maybe they didn’t over-
hear anything being said about them and their bodies and how they looked.
Maybe the third assistant director made up a lie about why the director was
looking so closely at them and why they ended up “hidden” in the final scene.
Maybe they didn’t get a good look at who replaced them; that they didn’t see
the new set of young women in bikinis and that those girls happened to be
prettier. Maybe they were relieved because they were cold and nervous and
didn’t want to dance seductively up against the male lead or whatever else the
“bikini girls” had to do… Maybe they got fed up and never walked back onto
a film set again in their lives.

Introduction
As with the girl celebrity, the woman celebrity’s body is the site of numerous
contradictions and anxieties about gender, class, race, and labor in con-
temporary society. Although this has long been the case (e.g., Dyer 1979 on
Jane Fonda; Dyer 2003 on Marilyn Monroe; Pullen 2014 on Jane Russell, Zsa
Zsa Gabor, Lena Horne, Carmen Miranda, and Esther Williams), the pro-
liferation of surveillance technologies – paparazzi in the latter half of the
twentieth century and new media in the early aughts – has heightened both
the visibility and the stakes of the debates around women’s public successes
and failures. While Disney and other companies like it might depend on
female celebrities to maintain an aspirational public image, there is a billion-
dollar news and gossip industry that is fueled by women’s inability to main-
tain that public self. As seen in the last chapter, this failure is often tied to an
out-of-control sexuality. For young girls, that can mean a “leaking” of their
sexuality into the public sphere before it is “appropriate.” As the female
celebrity ages, these anxieties around her sexuality do not go away. Indeed,
the paradox of her sexuality is often made all the more visible as it becomes
central to her public image and her success, while also always threatening to
become too visible, thus displacing the discourses of “talent” that hide
women’s value in the media system. Further, the anxiety around this sexuality
is also centered in its potential (inevitable) loss. The female celebrity is always
in danger of losing her to-be-looked-at-ness: from gaining weight, aging, or
from becoming a spectacle (drawing attention to her to-be-looked-at-ness,
thus shifting from object to subject of the gaze).
The media panics around young female stars often present themselves as
being demonstrative of a concern about their wellbeing, while doing the work
of undermining that wellbeing: e.g., prying into their private lives, using their
words, images and actions against them, and unquestioningly presenting them
as “role models” to their young fans, despite their immaturity and privilege.
The “aftermath” of girl stardom increasingly seems to involve an inevitable
70 Old Media, Girl Power
decline, as evidenced by the numerous trips to rehab and/or treatment by
young former Disney starlets such as Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and,
more recently, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez. The apparent difficulty that
some young female celebrities have in navigating the transition from child
superstar into proper, successful woman is a feature, rather than a bug, of the
system. Perhaps the anger and derision directed toward these stars is not as
much informed by a moral panic about girls’ wellbeing in contemporary
society as it is by the potential weaknesses in post-feminist capitalist ideology
that their “successes” – and “failures” – expose.
Post-feminism, as defined by both Rosalind Gill (2007) and Angela
McRobbie (2009) is a sensibility that takes hold within popular culture in the
late 1990s and early 2000s. It is not a repudiation of feminism, but, rather, a
positioning of feminism as in the past and no longer necessary, particularly
now that young, middle-class, white women are “succeeding” – in popular
culture at least. Of course, as noted by scholars of post-feminism (Gill 2007;
McRobbie 2004; 2009; Projansky 2001), this “evidence” is a fantasy created
and sold by the media which celebrates a very individualistic (and neoliberal)
sense of gender equality that is only accessible to those with the most privi-
lege. Even further, however, I would argue that this fantasy falters when
examining how the supposed beneficiaries of feminism (the most privileged,
beautiful, and successful women, who are not fictional characters, but actual
human beings) are treated by the media and the public at large. It is their
failures, as much as or perhaps even more than their successes, that are
anticipated, encouraged, and marketed by the media to a public conditioned
to hate these women without ever acknowledging that it is because of their
gender that we hate (or are supposed to) hate them.
This chapter examines these contradictions through two women who
invoked a sort of Hollywood nostalgia by posing as and invoking the iconic
image of Marilyn Monroe. I first examine former child/Disney star Lindsay
Lohan, who “recreated” an infamous nude Monroe photo shoot in 2008 at
the height of her own very public battles with substance abuse, the American
legal system, and a promising career in decline. I examine the anxieties pro-
duced by the paradoxical tensions of post-feminism and nostalgia (where one
is a progress-oriented ideology and the other is an affective tie to the past). I
then turn to the figure of Playmate and model Anna Nicole Smith, whose
tragic and untimely death in 2007 served as yet another parallel to the public
trajectory of her own idol Monroe. I look at how both Lohan and Smith’s
excessive bodies (too white, too fat, too sexual, too addicted) become overly
visible, thus exposing, rather than hiding or displacing (via “acting” or
“modeling”) the economic value of white women’s bodies to the media (their
passive, to-be-looked-at-ness). I examine how attempts to frame them as
having agency in their careers also simultaneously undermine their public
legitimacy, thus setting up the ideal public woman as one who is unable to
consent, but safely contained in the past, no longer able to profit from or
enjoy her body and her sexuality.
 Playmates and Centerfolds 71
Post-feminist “Trainwrecks”, Transgressive Sexuality, and
Female Failure
As I have argued elsewhere in relation to Snooki from Jersey Shore (Patrick
2017), the years 2007–2008 mark somewhat of a decline in post-feminist
hegemony in American popular culture. I assert that this decline is signified
through MTV’s youth-targeted programming shift away from aspirational
shows like Laguna Beach, The Hills and The City, which are docudrama
reality programs following the lives of privileged white, “successful”1 women
in their teens and early twenties, to programs centering on young women’s
failures (such as Jersey Shore and Teen Mom, both premiering on MTV in
2009). Yet the narratives of feminine failure, as seen in the reporting at this
time on the lives of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears, extend
beyond the confines of MTV and send critical messages to young women
about how they should and should not behave in an era wherein the so-called
promises of a post-feminist world – wherein gender equality has been
achieved, women are now economically successful and sexually empowered
(McRobbie 2009) – failed to materialize.
As noted throughout this book, one key function of the celebrity system in
Western capitalist democracies is to legitimize the concept of meritocracy:
that no matter where one is born, or what one’s identity is, the capitalist
system allows “the best” to rise to the top of the socio-economic ladder (Dyer
1979; Littler 2013; 2017; Marshall 1997; Meeuf 2014). This ethos is central to
post-feminist and post-racial worldviews, which insist that structural barriers
like sexism and racism have been eradicated due to legal and political gains
made by women and racialized groups in the United States. However, the
failure of this meritocracy to materialize in everyday life – particularly in the
era of globalization and neoliberal capitalism (Littler 2013; 2017) – has made
this idea, for most people, a relation of cruel optimism (Berlant 2011). Cruel
optimism, as outlined by Lauren Berlant (2011, 24 emphasis in original), is a
“relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose rea-
lization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible,
and toxic.” Berlant conceives of neoliberal capitalist society as one in which
relations of cruel optimism abound – particularly to the “lost” values of
capitalism inherent in fantasies of “the good life”: those capitalist principles
which never emerged such as “upward mobility, job security, political and
social equality, and lively, durable intimacy” (3). As noted by Jessalynn Keller
and Maureen E. Ryan (2018, 10–11), the global recession of 2007–2008 made
such relations of cruel optimism at the least more visible in popular culture, if
not always more scrutinized.
While neoliberal policies were taking hold in the United States and further
eroding the possibilities of upward mobility, post-feminist ideologies, as out-
lined by such theorists as Angela McRobbie (2004; 2009), were helping to
perpetuate the notion that – for white, middle-class women at least – gender
was no longer a barrier to meritocratic success. Post-feminist narratives
72 Old Media, Girl Power
circulating in popular culture simultaneously celebrated women’s economic
successes while also exhibiting the anxieties still underpinning women’s sexu-
ality, particularly in an age of supposed “sexual empowerment” (McRobbie
2009). These anxieties, I suggest, solidify at this moment in popular culture,
reflected in the news media’s apparent concern that women are now “using”
their sexuality to gain fame and success and that this is a new development in
Western societies that itself is contributing to the erosion of capitalist mer-
itocracy (as opposed to, say, the amassing of wealth or deregulation and pri-
vatization). I read this as a moment of post-feminist rupture, wherein a
cynicism toward young women’s economic motivations crystalizes in the news
reporting: instead of a post-feminist embrace of feminism that temporally
displaces gender inequality as a bygone issue, this cultural moment reframes
female (sexual) “empowerment” and economic freedom as being achieved,
but now revealing itself to be the real threat to women’s and girls’ wellbeing.
In this reading, the media’s common-sensical framing of young famous
women as role models – and the judgement of them in their ability to perform
this role – makes more sense. We are supposed to look up to them because, in
theory, they did everything citizens are encouraged to do in capitalist society:
they amassed wealth and fame through a recognized merit (e.g., acting, sing-
ing or even – as this chapter will explore – modeling). Additionally, and more
specifically, they did everything that women are supposed to: they were
“sexy,” successful, and economically independent. Young women like Britney
Spears and Lindsay Lohan embody the promise of post-feminist, meritocratic
success, as well as its cruelly optimistic failures. They become “trainwrecks,” a
gendered moniker that, as outlined by Kirsty Fairclough (2008, para. 13)
“has become a catch-all term for young female celebrities deemed to be ‘out
of control.’” The term also connotes a specific trajectory: they are women
who were, at some point “on track” somewhere, but have gone off the rails.
Their “trainwreck” narratives of falling off the track toward the “good life”
prompt us to ask, what if success is not enough? What if the “good life” that
we have been conditioned to want and to work for is itself toxic? Such ques-
tions are refused by the gendered frameworks that insist on pathologizing
these women and refiguring them as individual failure(s), as opposed to
representing the failure of a system.
While certainly it is the case that some young girls look to these stars as
people whom they should emulate, the prevalent discourses in the media
suggest that these women are not viewed as “proper” versions of femininity
and/or success and, what’s more, that they are or ought to be objects of scorn,
disgust, and even vitriol. Paradoxically, these “bad” girls are positioned by
the media as “trainwrecks” while also, as seen in the last chapter, held up as
examples of how young women “use” their public failures (and, in particular,
an “out of control” sexuality) to maintain media success. The question here,
then, is not whether these women are successful or failures (they are both),
but what kinds of political, economic, and social work is being done by their
simultaneous success/failure (Succure? Failess?). In the previous chapter, I
 Playmates and Centerfolds 73
argued that the media-induced panics around young Disney stars’ sexuality
was a way to ensure that they would inevitably lose some of their symbolic
capital as their sexual capital grew. In this chapter, I argue that the former
Disney-star-turned-woman-star, having made it through this transition (albeit,
not smoothly) now poses a new danger to the media: her excessive appetite
(for food, for drink, for drugs, for sex, for fame) demonstrates the failings of
capitalist success to bring fulfillment and satisfaction, particularly for women
(who trade off bodily autonomy and privacy for that success). Further, I
examine the sexual star via the figure of the Playboy Playmate, whose value
to the media is visibly and normatively (acceptably) tied to her sexuality. I
examine the public trajectory of Anna Nicole Smith, whose own narrative of
class mobility produced controversy and anxiety in a media system deter-
mined not to acknowledge class inequality. Her inability – or refusal – to
embody proper feminine, middle-class, white, capitalist citizenship provides
another example of the impossibilities for and of women’s success.
While in Chapter 4 of this book, I examine the ways that the media react
when the so-called meritocracy of celebrity fails (as evidenced by the emer-
gence of the sex-tape/reality star/heiress), the remainder of this chapter aims
to examine the failures of “success”: the aftermath of female celebrity, as
embodied by Lindsay Lohan and Anna Nicole Smith. These women’s tales
are demonstrative of both the promise of the American dream of class
mobility that is built on and through the traditional media system – be that
Disney or Playboy – and the supposed toxicity of that promise realized. They
are held up as allegorical figures to demonstrate to all women what happens
when a woman (as opposed to, say, Hugh Hefner, discussed in this chapter, or
Donald Trump, in the final one) leans too heavily on their sexuality in build-
ing their success, thus revealing rather than masking the value of women’s
bodies to the capitalist media system.

Lindsay’s Longing: Postfeminist Nostalgia and White Femininity

Unlike Vanessa Hudgens and Miley Cyrus who are still working and, at
times, outraging people today (although, again, I would argue that they have
much less symbolic capital than they did during the height of their Disney
fame), former Disney star Lindsay Lohan’s stardom has, for the most part,
burned out over the past decade. However, in 2007 and 2008, Lohan’s public
antics were major tabloid fodder (the televised version of the TMZ tabloid
launched in 2007) and she was often invoked by the media, along with fellow
former Disney star Britney Spears, as an example of girl celebrity gone
wrong: the exemplar “trainwreck” to which all other young female celebrities
were compared. On the other hand, the media’s ideal of girl celebrity gone
right at this time was former Lizzie McGuire (Disney Channel 2001–2004)
star Hilary Duff.
Lindsay Lohan came of age alongside Hilary Duff as part of an earlier,
post-feminist Disney generation than Vanessa Hudgens and Miley Cyrus.
74 Old Media, Girl Power
This generational contrast is apparent when examining the outrage directed
toward Cyrus’ photo in 2008 versus Britney Spears’ breakout video for her
song “…Baby One More Time” released ten years earlier (Dick 1998) in
which the 17-year-old pop star is dressed as a “sexy schoolgirl” and dances
provocatively, a concept that she is credited with devising (Goldstein 2018).
Spears, like Cyrus at the time of her Vanity Fair photo spread, was underage,
but consented to – indeed, initiated – this sexualized presentation of herself.
While there may have been upset parents and/or media coverage of Spears’
provocative video at the time, it inarguably launched her into superstardom,
playing in heavy rotation on MTV without ever being pulled or re-shot, sug-
gesting that the video was culturally sanctioned. However, as became evident
in the reporting on Cyrus’ public transition into “provocative” womanhood,
discussed in Chapter 2, by 2008 there is a strong cynicism in the news towards
young women’s sexual “empowerment,” yet another sign that the post-fem-
inist turn of the late 1990s to early 2000s was waning in favor of a renewed
concern about girls’ exposure to sexualized media and celebrity culture.
In this context, it would make sense that the media positioned Hilary Duff
as an example of “good” female celebrity who was able to successfully tran-
sition to adult celebrity, despite her comparative lack of visibility at the time.
After her run as the beloved Disney Channel character Lizzie McGuire, Duff
starred in several moderate box office successes. Her most profitable films –
Cheaper by the Dozen (Levy 2003) and its 2005 sequel – featured Duff in
supporting roles, rather than starring ones (Box Office Mojo 2018a). After
several box office disappointments across 2005–2006, she transitioned to
independent films and back to television, where her career, to date, has
remained fairly steady yet modest. Writing about Duff’s career for the Deseret
News in 2008*, Margorie Cortez asserts that Duff “maintained her dignity as
she’s moved from the small screen to the big screen, not to mention a
respectable recording career” (my emphasis). Joel Rubinoff (2008*) of the
Waterloo Region Record also contrasts Duff against her “whack job” con-
temporaries (e.g., Hilton, Spears, and Lohan), noting that she has “settled for
a low-key recording career and a slew of Razzie-nominated2 film roles” (my
emphasis). Rubinoff’s suggestion here – and throughout the article – is that
Duff’s modest lifestyle has barred her from having the same career as her
scandalous peers, who use that scandal to their professional advantage. While
Duff’s lacklustre post-Disney career could equally be attributed to either a
poor choice of films or not being able to land more serious, respected, and
challenging roles, Rubinoff ascribes it specifically to her lack of scandal. The
reporting on the contrast between Duff and her “out of control” peers reveals
that the definition of success, for women, is contingent upon, not their ability
to generate box office returns or sustain a high-profile and critically acclaimed
acting career, but, rather, how and when they “use” their sexuality. For many
in the media, then, Lindsay Lohan served as an example of what not to do:
the dangers posed by female sexuality, rather than capitalism, corporate
exploitation, or misogynist media systems.
 Playmates and Centerfolds 75
A Star is Lost: Lohan’s Public Decline
Lindsay Lohan started off her acting career in 1996 as a 10-year-old child on
the soap opera As the World Turns (1956–2010) but became a household face
and name when she was cast as the lead twins (playing both roles) in Disney’s
1998 remake of The Parent Trap (Meyers). After this, several major film roles
followed, including other Disney projects Freaky Friday (Waters) in 2003 and
Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (Sugarman) in 2004. Her first project
away from Disney – and one that marked her turn from G-rated child star
into PG-rated adolescent – was the hit comedy Mean Girls (Waters 2004).
Despite the ongoing popularity of Mean Girls, Freaky Friday (co-starring
Jamie Lee Curtis) remains Lohan’s top grossing film (Box Office Mojo
2018b). At this time, Lohan was also pursuing a music career, recording sev-
eral songs for Disney (including songs for her own films), as well as releasing
two solo albums in 2004 and 2005, which spawned several singles that charted
on the Billboard 100.
By 2006, her professional trajectory began to stall when the disappointing
performance of romantic comedy Just My Luck “broke [her] winning streak”
at the box office (Gray 2006). She began starring in smaller, independently
produced (i.e. non-Disney) productions, while her personal life increasingly
became the focus of public discourse, as she had several violent encounters
with paparazzi (usually involving her car) and entered rehab for the first time
in 2006. Rumors of “unprofessionalism”3 additionally plagued the star in
2006 as she shot the comedy Georgia Rule (Marshall 2007) with Jane Fonda.
By 2007, at the age of 21, Lohan’s early successes with Disney were over-
shadowed by her personal and professional troubles, with the reporting on her
often conflating these two domains (as they did when she was shooting
Georgia Rule).
There were several major narratives in the news coverage surrounding
Lindsay Lohan across 2007–2008, many of which center her as a site of con-
cern over young female celebrity in crisis. Across this period, Lohan was
arrested for drunk driving, sent to rehabilitation, recreated a nude Marilyn
Monroe photoshoot in one magazine while turning down another nude pho-
toshoot for Playboy magazine (she would change her mind on this a few
years later), and was labeled a lesbian/bisexual by the press after pursuing a
relationship with Samantha Ronson (I could not find evidence of her claiming
this label herself). A few stories focused on her film releases and upcoming
projects, often speculating on her ability to manage her addiction and recov-
ery with her workload. During this time Lohan was also victim of a photo
hack wherein nude photos of the actress were stolen and posted online.
Although these narratives all work together in important ways to construct an
overall negative image, Lohan’s consensual, Monroe-inspired nude photo
shoot received a significant portion of the media’s attention (including cover-
age in venerated publications like the New York Times), despite the far more
serious – and concerning – issues that Lohan was facing with regards to her
76 Old Media, Girl Power
increasingly public drug use (and related brushes with the legal system). In
focusing on this event, the news media reveal their preoccupation with the
threat of women’s sexuality, particularly in relation to the failure/crisis narra-
tive circulating around Lohan at the time. In other words, the media was
ringing the alarm over Lohan’s excessive and visible sexuality and connecting
this sexuality, rather than, say, her substance abuse, to their performative
“concern” about her declining success.4 A causal relation is set up, therefore,
where the danger to Lohan (and young women more broadly) is her sexuality,
rather than how that sexuality is exploited and responded to by the media
and society more broadly.
I examine this specific event in depth here, as it is not only Lohan’s sexu-
ality that seems to produce a significant media panic, but also the invocation
of the apparently sacred image of Marilyn Monroe, which connects Lohan’s
star image to broader concerns over female celebrity, sexuality, and nostalgic
white femininity. In the New York Magazine spread, photographer Bert Stern
and Lohan recreate the nude photoshoot that Stern originally conducted of
Marilyn Monroe just six weeks before her death in 1962. The original photos
of Monroe were released posthumously in a book by the photographer called
The Complete Last Sitting. According to a spokesperson for New York
Magazine, Stern was paid “the normal fee” for the recreation, while Lohan
received no payment (Collett-White 2008*). None of the reports in my ana-
lysis indicated if and how much Monroe was paid for the original shoot with
Stern, nor how much money he made from his photos/book published after
her death. Although Stern’s exploitation of the female body remains unre-
marked upon, media analysts did offer some insight into the boost in New
York Magazine’s profile, as evidenced by their website crashing in response to
the heavy traffic seeking Lohan’s portraits. The daily website traffic for the
month of the Lohan shoot (January 2008) was up from an average of 1.2
million visits to 20 million, a jump in traffic worth roughly $500,000 (Collett-
White 2008*). As noted earlier, the photoshoot also generated significant
news coverage which, in turn, likely generated more clicks and sales for New
York Magazine as people who might not otherwise subscribe to the magazine
sought it out because of the “scandal.”
Lohan’s 2008 nude New York Magazine Monroe photo shoot was dis-
cussed at length by 15 different journalists.5 For comparison’s sake, her stolen
nude photo was addressed in only 5 articles (compared to Hudgens’ stolen
photo discussed in 156 articles across the same period). The transgression on
Lohan’s part, as suggested by the comparatively little reporting on her stolen
nude photos, was not in posing nude, as her image was already tarnished by
scandal. In fact, in contrast to the earlier reporting on Hudgens’ and Cyrus’
nude photo “scandals,” the NY magazine photoshoot should not have insti-
gated as strong a reaction among journalists for several reasons: Lohan was
no longer a Disney property6; she did not take the photos as part of her own
(private) engagement with sexuality and technology (à la Hudgens); nor was
she underage when posing for her renowned photographer (à la Cyrus).
 Playmates and Centerfolds 77
Furthermore, Lohan’s career was in decline, rather than on the rise when she
posed for the Stern shoot. As noted by Cal State-Fullerton’s Daily Titan
writer Dawn Pettit (2008*), the photos, in which Pettit describes Lohan as
looking “healthy” and “sexy,” might have even served to “boost her career”:
Pettit cites a survey done by eonline.com suggesting that respondents saw the
photos of Lohan in a positive light and thought it “could help get her career
back on track.”
What seems to be the main transgression, then, for many journalists, is the
hubris demonstrated by Lohan in situating herself alongside Marilyn Monroe
(and not the editors or photographer who helped place her there), reflecting a
broader nostalgia for a romanticized vision of Hollywood sex symbols –
Make Hollywood Great Again? – that ignores the similarities of these two
women’s public trajectories. While both Lindsay Lohan and Marilyn Monroe
were publicly known for acting in films, it is dubious to claim that they both
were famous because of this, or to locate the origin point of their fame in one
particular location (their first film appearance, for instance, because both
women started their careers as models). Actresses do not just appear one day
in media, and the changes to, for instance, Monroe’s appearance and name
(from brunette Norma Jeane Mortenson to the platinum blonde Monroe we
think of today), or the young age at which Lohan began her career (she began
modelling at the age of three years) point to agency on someone’s part to
build a career.7 However, both were successful (and here I mean not only
working actresses, but also and especially publicly visible and recognizable
ones) in an industry that values young, buxom, white women for their
appearance, yet often disguises that value using discourses of talent.
In studying the news narratives around Monroe and Lohan, I became
increasingly drawn to the comparisons between the two young stars: heavily
favoring one as being “more talented” than the other, or at times even aban-
doning the discursive disguise of “talent” in favor of an outright comparison
of their physical beauty. While I do not specifically investigate whether the
discourses around the stardom of Lohan in 2008 are distinct from those sur-
rounding Monroe at the height of her fame and substance abuse (for that
would require comparing the reporting on Marilyn Monroe at the height of
her own successes and scandals), I was driven by the question of if and how
the stardom of Lohan was contemporaneously framed by the news media as
being different than that of Monroe. What nostalgias are these frames draw-
ing upon? And what might such frames suggest about the anxieties around
work, talent, sexuality, and merit circulated through contemporary narratives
of celebrity and gender?
A sampling of headlines demonstrates some of the media’s perceived dif-
ferences between Monroe and Lohan: the Daytona Beach News Journal writes
“Lindsay, you’re pretty, but you’re no Marilyn Monroe” (de Yampert 2008*).
“Don’t flatter yourself, Lindsay” urges the Associated Press (2008*), while
The Philadelphia Inquirer does not name Lohan in their headline, writing “Of
Marilyn and a Pretender” (Derakhshani 2008*). In her Globe and Mail
78 Old Media, Girl Power
column, headlined “Lohan does Monroe: Some Like it Cynical,” Lynn
Crosbie (2008*) starts off by teasing her reader: “Marilyn Monroe is alive.
There she is, on the cover of this week’s New York magazine, wearing only a
length of pink chiffon, held between her pale pink lips.” Crosbie’s reveal then
points out the myriad ways in which the facsimile falls short: “Oh no. It’s
[actually] Lindsay Lohan – there are the horse teeth, the freckle masses, the
cheap, yellow wig,” immediately conjuring a classed and racial comparison to
Monroe’s (imagined/remembered) perfect teeth, smooth (i.e. white) complex-
ion, and more sophisticated (yet still inauthentic) platinum blonde hair.
While through the very act of posing nude, Lohan seems to be opening
herself up to such a critique of her body and her looks, I posit that something
more meaningful is taking place, beyond a mere physical comparison of two
famous women (whose careers, in many ways, relied upon embodying an
unthreatening, attractive femininity). Invoking Lohan as a “wannabe” Monroe
not only diminishes Lohan’s acting accomplishments (and in her early career,
Lohan was celebrated by critics and audiences), it also contains the threat that
Monroe’s unruly sexuality posed to the mainstream media in her day, while
minimizing the late star’s own struggles in balancing the expectations of Holly-
wood for a sex symbol and her own reported ambitions to be seen as more than
that. The disproportionate amount of news coverage of this event in publications
like The New York Times and The Globe and Mail hints at the anxieties stirred
when a young starlet (wittingly or not) makes obvious such continuities – parti-
cularly at the height of a post-feminist culture that wants to imagine the con-
temporary woman as more “equal” and “free.”
Indeed, the majority of the reporting imposes a paternalistic reverence onto
Monroe’s image and struggles that is not accorded to most of today’s young
female celebrities, especially those that might dare publicly identify with her. The
reporting draws upon post-feminist frameworks that imagine Monroe as being
more oppressed by her beauty than actresses today, despite the evidence sug-
gesting that Monroe herself was also viewed quite cynically by the media at the
time (Crosbie 2008*; Dyer 2003). To counter these similarities, New York Times
reporter Ginia Bellafante (2008*) for instance, insists on re-framing Lohan’s
image in line with Madonna, who emerged as a sexually “liberated” celebrity in
the 1980s: “Ms. Lohan has spoken freely about her obsession with Monroe over
the years, but it is Madonna’s strategy of managing the image of her own sexu-
ality that perhaps Ms. Lohan hopes to reproduce.” Bellafante does not note that
Lohan’s failure in this endeavor to “manage the image of her own sexuality”
(and her descriptor of Lohan’s photos as “macabre” underlines this failure)
already aligns her with Monroe’s out-of-control sexuality more so than Madon-
na’s highly strategic and carefully managed one.

Some Like it Silent: Monroe as Nostalgic Icon

Marilyn Monroe is often held up as an example of idealized, sexual, white
femininity and, consequently, has been the subject of much discussion, both
 Playmates and Centerfolds 79
in academia and beyond (see, for instance, Banner 2008; Cohan 2017; Dyer
2003; Handyside 2010; Scheibel 2013). She embodies the central paradox of
female celebrity – innocence and sexuality – while also exhibiting numerous
other tensions central to celebrity discourses, including nature and artifice,
public and private, talent and beauty, and, notably, life and death (which, in
this chapter, mirrors onto success and failure). While celebrity scholars such
as Richard Dyer (2003) have examined Monroe’s stardom in the context of
the 1950s’ apparent embrace of sexuality – exemplified, according to Dyer, by
the buzz around the Kinsey report on female sexuality as well as the launch
of Playboy magazine (for which Monroe served as the first cover girl and
centerfold), both of which were released in 1953 – I examine here how her
star text is mobilized over five decades later to discredit, shame, and degrade
Lindsay Lohan as she tried to navigate what was left of her public career. As
Dyer (2003, 62) astutely notes of Monroe: “The further we get from Monroe
and the fifties, the more it seems that her image is so malleable that it can
mean almost anything.”
Indeed, the image of Monroe has been consistently revived and recirculated
so much so that it has, as is argued by Will Scheibel (2013), become a floating
signifier onto which journalists (and audiences) project their own under-
standings of female celebrity, success, and identity. Because the image of
Monroe itself is devoid of specific meaning and, for the most part, lacking
any acknowledgement of the structural misogyny of capitalist media systems,
it is often posthumously invoked (without, of course, her express permission,
but also without allowing her to resist this invocation) as a soothing reminder
of better times in Hollywood (i.e., when women’s successes were clearly and
safely demarcated from their sexuality, despite this not being the case). Whe-
ther it is the now infamous silk screen Monroe portraits by Andy Warhol
(themselves appropriated into the capitalist system they were critiquing) or
the countless biographies (too many to name), biopics [Goodbye Norma Jean,
(Buchanan 1976), Marilyn & Me (Patterson 1991), Blonde (2001) My Week
With Marilyn (Curtis 2011), and another upcoming Blonde (Dominik 2022,
to name just a few], or posters, t-shirts and other collectable memorabilia,
Monroe’s physical image is repeatedly resurrected for financial gain, with little
reflection as to the ways in which today’s female celebrities are mistreated,
objectified, humiliated, and mentally and emotionally tormented in a similar
fashion. This willful ignorance allows Monroe, despite or, perhaps more
accurately, because of her tragic death (the ultimate silencer), to become an
object/site of nostalgic longing, imposing a reverence onto her image that
mirrors other nostalgic longings for a different (earlier) era when white male
privilege was a natural and accepted reality in America and the objectifica-
tion of women was done by others, rather than themselves, for monetary gain.
Publicly, of course, Monroe played along in this game. Without having full
knowledge of who created and maintained Monroe’s public image (as noted
by Dyer 2003, her image could have been the result of a team of image-craf-
ters across the studio system), there is at the very least, an indication, in and
80 Old Media, Girl Power
through her work, that Monroe consciously crafted the “Marilyn” persona,
which she would put on and off at will (Banner 2008; see also Scheibel 2013).
Lois Banner (2008) notes that, in her early career years, Monroe objected to
the bleach-blonde pinup look, but eventually embraced both it and the
“dumb blonde” persona that enabled her to reach a heightened level of suc-
cess (and therefore, very much, “using” her sexuality to forward her ambi-
tions). Further, and notably, Monroe was careful to construct a public
discourse that attributed this success to her fans, rather than the studio that
may have influenced her publicly constructed self (Banner 2008, 15), therefore
demonstrating – at least on some level – a resistance to potential attempts
made by the media to control her, take credit for her success, and deny her
(and the public) agency in her own celebrity.
Of course, these issues are further complicated by her treatment as a sexual
object. Monroe’s own discourses and actions demonstrate an ambivalence
toward this treatment: despite her continual invocation of “Marilyn,” she
eventually established her own production company so as to be able to play
different kinds of characters, saying she was “tired of sex roles” and that she
“didn’t like” a lot of her own pictures, wherein, notably, her character some-
times did not even have a name beyond “the girl” (see Dyer 2003, 19 & 57).
However, Monroe came of age and fame in a time before the so-called second
wave of feminism gave language to the media’s mistreatment of women as
well as men’s entitlement to female sexuality (see Banner 2008; Dyer 2003).
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) – often credited as one of the
books to help launch second-wave feminism – did not theorize the so-called
“problem that has no name” until one year after the untimely death of
Monroe at the age of 36. Her death, and her struggles leading up to it, sug-
gest that she may have indeed had this nameless problem, but this lack of
vocabulary to name it, as well as her death as the ultimate silencer, allows
Monroe’s image to be read as absent of that problem and, therefore, a sign of
a “simpler” time when traditional gender roles were embraced, and women’s
sexuality was entertaining (innocent and vulnerable) rather than dangerous
(consciously wielded and/or too visible).
This kind of longing for a pre-feminist time (as evoked by the symbol of
Monroe) mirrors another kind of nostalgic longing for a pre-civil rights era
where white masculinity was the unquestioned center of power and secure
majority in Western democratic nations like the United States. In her work
tracing the history and functions of nostalgia, scholar Svetlana Boym (2018)
argues that there are two main kinds of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia and
reflective nostalgia. And while both kinds of nostalgia center on fantasies of
the past – fantasies that, as we see with Monroe, elevate “more pleasurable
experiences and [screen] out more painful ones” (Maly, Dalmage, and
Michaels 2013, 757) – they have different relations to the imagined commu-
nity, the home and one’s self-identity. The nostalgic longing that emerges
amongst privileged groups feeling threatened by increasing immigration,
equal rights movements, and, what is now referred to as “cancel culture” (or
 Playmates and Centerfolds 81
used to be “political correctness”), is a restorative longing for a secure sense
of nation and identity, something that numerous marginalized groups have
never had and, therefore, do not experience as a loss. Restorative nostalgia is
amplified in times of social, political, and economic upheaval (Boym 2018;
Maly, Dalmage and Michaels 2013). In 2007 and 2008, the global recession,
combined with the election of the first African American president in the U.S.
produces a moment of disruption for white Americans; a disruption that is
placated by a reorientation toward a collective white past and identity.
Ewa A. Adamkiewicz (2016, 17) identifies white nostalgia as “a mode of
remembrance celebrating a specific time and place in history by erasing nar-
ratives of racism and by whitewashing memories.” White people, as is shown
in Michael Maly, Heather Dalmage, and Nancy Michaels’ (2013, 762) study
of Chicago’s displaced whites of the 1960s and 1970s, use nostalgic and color-
blind discourses about the good old days as a “culturally sanctioned strategy
to regain white ownership and provide a common sense understanding of the
way to achieve a good life and validate a social hierarchy of white as good
and justifiably dominant.” In these discourses, whiteness is associated with
stability, strong family values (and gender roles), and a strong sense of com-
munity, all of which is destabilized by the “Other” who enters into the
neighborhood and threatens – not these values, as the more publicly accep-
table “color blind” discourses would suggest – but, rather, the value of white-
ness itself: “That is to say, as long as whiteness holds value tied to housing,
education, and income (Lipsitz, 1995), whites have reasons to work to main-
tain the boundaries of whiteness” (Maly, Dalmage, and Michaels 2013, 775).
Similarly, gender equality is often discursively presented as a “threat” to
family values and sense of community but is more often a “threat” to the
privileges of masculinity.8 Monroe’s white feminine sexuality, safely contained
in the past, invokes restorative nostalgic longings for a stable white, masculine
identity. She represents white femininity at its apex, not only through her
platinum blondeness [as Dyer notes, the “most unambiguously white you can
get” (2003, 40)] but also, her continual use of white props, settings, and cos-
tumes in her films (Handyside 2010, 292), thus tying her to Christian symbols
of light, purity, and chastity, and, therefore, symbolizing the “most prized
possession of white patriarchy” (Dyer 2003, 42). While political feminism
might not yet have presented an overt threat to masculinity in Monroe’s
1950s’ America, the increasing discussions around women’s sexuality and
female orgasm disrupted the prevailing male-oriented understanding of sexu-
ality that structured – and continues to structure – the media’s understanding
of and representation of women (see Dyer 2003; Scheibel 2013).
While mainstream media in America continue to sideline and tokenize
many racialized groups, white women have emerged at the forefront of pop-
ular culture as symbols of a privileged form of liberal feminism that seeks
systemic inclusion rather than revolution and liberation for all (see hooks
2013; Lorde 1984; Nash, 2019;). The post-feminist sentiment in the media of
the 1990s and 2000s, which embraces this form of inclusion for privileged
82 Old Media, Girl Power
white women, was much less of an outright backlash against feminist politics
than much of the popular culture in the 1980s (see Faludi 1991). However, the
increasing visibility of female sexuality in mainstream culture at that time – a
sexuality that became tied to a feminist politics of “empowerment” and,
therefore, female subjectivity and agency, rather than merely the result of a
determining and objectifying male gaze9 – itself became a site of feminist cri-
tique over the pornification and sexualization of culture (see Attwood 2009;
Dines 2010; Levy 2005; McNair 2002). Mainstream media tapped into this cri-
tique, but also, I would argue, effectively transposed it onto individual female
celebrities – using the bad role model framework – such that female celebrities
themselves, while embodying the possibilities of liberal feminism, also became a
moral and social “threat” to feminist gains. In this way, the nostalgia for Mon-
roe’s white female celebrity reflects, not an actual change in how female celebrity
operates, but a restorative nostalgia for a different time when traditional gender
roles were imagined to be accepted (even when they were not) and, thus, the
value (social, symbolic, and economic) of masculinity secured.
The female celebrity is therefore able to embody yet another paradox that
few celebrities could before the 2000s – namely, feminism and anti-feminism.
Of course, this is not to say that celebrity feminism did not exist prior to the
early aughts. Jane Fonda, Nina Simone, and Elizabeth Taylor (to name just a
few) all used their public platforms to draw attention to gender, racial, and
homophobic oppressions long before “girl power”-driven pop culture was
able to commodify and appropriate feminism to serve corporate interests.
Naturally, an intersectional feminist movement invested in social justice for
all, rather than a liberal politics of inclusion for few, would oppose the asso-
ciation of highly sexualized and privileged white women with the “gains” of
past feminist movements, making them easy scapegoats for a broader media
looking to foreclose female agency and symbolic power.10
This is not to say that sexuality or self-sexualization is inherently empow-
ering. But, in accepting these as the key terms of the debate, much feminist
critique of celebrity culture falls into line with, rather than problematizes, the
mainstream media’s individualistic framing of feminism and success. While,
again, I am not interested here in adjudicating whether specific female celeb-
rities are talented or are overly sexual(ized), I am interested in what those
discourses are doing. In the broader context of Lohan’s life such frameworks
(and panics) could seem quite commonsensical, as her “downfall” seemingly
correlated to her sexual maturity, yet the news media’s outrage on behalf of
young audiences – audiences who seem to be, on the contrary, viewing these
celebrities quite critically – point to a potentially larger transgression being
contained. Perhaps the threat that is posed by Lindsay Lohan’s narrative of
failure is, not that girls will emulate her, but, rather, that girls will not want to:
they will not believe that fame, fortune and, even “being sexy” are key to
happiness, empowerment, and fulfillment.
If this is the role that young female (former Disney) stars are supposed to
be filling – culturally sanctioned examples of how media embraces inclusion
 Playmates and Centerfolds 83
for certain women – then the panics produced by their failure to properly
embody success are about more than changing gender roles in contemporary
society. Such failures pose an existential threat to the “promise” of capitalism
to provide a way for young women to succeed – on its terms, of course – and
to invest themselves emotionally, mentally, and physically into this system.
The cynical readings of young female celebrities’ sexuality scapegoats them
for their own inevitable downfall, signaling a broader shift away from post-
feminist discourses celebrating the supposed achievements of gender equality,
to a skeptical post-post-feminist thinking that blames women’s achievements
and sexual freedom for their ongoing oppression.

Playboy’s Cruel Optimism: Toxic and Tragic Female Sexuality

I turn now to Anna Nicole Smith – and Playboy – to examine what might be
called the conditions of impossibility surrounding the model/Playmate celeb-
rity: a fame that is fully determined, yet also delimited by her body’s desir-
ability. I start off with a brief discussion of the labor and skills involved in
acting and modeling, drawing on the existing scholarship around Marilyn
Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith. I connect the anxieties embodied by these
women to broader concerns over success, consent, and female sexuality in
America. I then discuss Playboy’s opportunistic wielding of a new media
format – reality television – to sanitize and legitimize Hugh Hefner’s exploi-
tation of women. I compare the Playboy reality television hit The Girls Next
Door (2005–2009*), which ran for six seasons on the E! television network, to
The Anna Nicole Show (2002–2004*), which also ran on E!, but was cancelled
after two seasons. Both shows center on and are targeted to women, but were
received quite differently because, I argue, they take very different approaches
to the subject of female celebrity and sexuality. I examine, once again, how
the patriarchal, corporate exploitation of women’s bodies is sanctioned and
encouraged, while women’s own use of their body for success, fame, and for-
tune is derided and contained, even within media that center them. Those
women who are able and willing to play by patriarchal capitalism’s rules are
not safe from violation and humiliation, despite – but also because of – the
immense profits they generate. Much like the other “trainwrecks” that came
before her, Anna Nicole Smith’s death in 2007 was understood to be evidence
of her own pathology rather than the cruel optimism of a capitalist system
that promises success to women in exchange for their sexuality, privacy,
agency, and being treated with basic human decency.

All about Anna

Anna Nicole Smith is often invoked as the epitome of the “famous for being
famous” celebrity (i.e., being famous for no reason) that has proliferated in
the digital age (Donovan and Neumann 2021). While certainly not the first
celebrity of her kind [see, for instance, Kirsten Pullen’s (2014) thorough
84 Old Media, Girl Power
discussion of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s “gold digging” image cultivated throughout
her decades long public career], Anna Nicole Smith’s public trajectory, for
many, symbolized the convergence of anxieties over female fame, beauty,
sexuality, and class (and, particularly, class mobility via marriage, for
women), in America in the 1990s and 2000s (Brown 2005; Donovan 2020;
Donovan and Neumann 2021).
Anna Nicole Smith, born Vickie Lynn Hogan, came from a modest Texas
upbringing to become one of the most-talked about – and derided – female
celebrities of the early aughts. Like her idol Monroe, Smith was not raised by
her mother, but instead by her aunt and the two reportedly survived on food
stamps and stolen toilet paper (Donovan and Neumann 2021, 653). She later
worked at a fried chicken restaurant, married and divorced at a young age,
and gave birth to her son Daniel at the age of 18. She then moved to Houston
and began working as a nude dancer, wherein she saved enough money to
purchase breast implants. In 1991, when dancing, she met oil tycoon and
billionaire J. Howard Marshall (who was 63 years her senior) and he lavished
her with attention and gifts for several years before she married him, as she
reportedly wanted to “make it” on her own first, in order to avoid being
labelled a gold digger (Donovan 2020, 175). In 1992 Smith made her first
nude appearance in Playboy as a centerfold, following in the footsteps of
Marilyn Monroe whose own nude photos were published as a cover and
centerfold by Playboy in 1953. Guess jeans’ founder George Marciano saw
Anna Nicole Smith’s Playboy photos and booked her as the Guess model for
an international ad campaign. Smith was celebrated by many in the media for
her voluptuous curves, breaking the stick-thin mold at the time embodied by
models like Kate Moss (see Brown 2005; Donovan and Neumann 2021).
Smith and Marshall married in 1994, when she was 26 and he 88, and he died
14 months later. Smith then became embroiled in a long legal battle with his
family over his estate, which would not be finally settled until years after her
own tragic and untimely death in 2007 at the age of 39, just five months after
the death of her son, Daniel. In the meantime, Smith’s own public “battles”
with her weight, “trainwreck” reality show, and “gold digging” court
appearances made her an easy target and punchline for mainstream media
and tabloids.
Smith’s tale is unique, however, not because she exemplified a “new” kind
of fame (for nothing), or married a wealthier man, or even because of her
very public unravelling. Indeed, to call her famous for nothing, but not to
apply that label to someone like Kate Moss whose path to fame also included
modeling, reveals that the anxieties surrounding Smith are not rooted in her
skillset (or lack thereof), but rather the ways in which she wielded the sym-
bolic capital that she gained from her “skills” (i.e. her body). To be certain,
Donovan and Neumann (2021) also question this framing of Smith as
“famous for being famous” (or, FFBF, as they term it), and Brown’s (2005)
work on Smith is centrally concerned with the ways in which her narrative of
class mobility disturbs rather than affirms the American dream of a classless,
 Playmates and Centerfolds 85
meritocratic society. Yet, I want to build on their discussions of Smith to
connect her particular case to my broader argument about sexual capital (as
“danger” to women and girls) and the acceptability of media companies’
exploitation of women versus their own. Smith is an example, not only of the
continuity of Hollywood’s treatment of women (across the 1950s to the
2000s), but also of the extreme impossibilities (and toxicity) faced by even
those who “play by the rules” of capitalist patriarchy, using their body and
sexuality to obtain success, but accessing this success through the “proper”
channels provided by mainstream media and its gatekeepers.

Actresses and Models

Much in the way that most labor under capitalism is exploitative, most of
women’s labor in the media is exploitative, and, more specifically, exploitative
of their bodies. Female celebrities – whether they are actresses, models, sing-
ers, etc. – are laborers for a more powerful and more wealthy class of media
owners. The value of the female celebrity is rooted in her physical appearance
and the few exceptions to this (female celebrities who are “unconventionally
beautiful”) serve to reinforce the norm. The promise that celebrity offers – a
form of class mobility for those who are “lucky” enough and have the requi-
site talent – allows one to rise to, certainly a privileged class, but, for the most
part, not the top tiers of the media industry. Numerous women are trying to
break, or have already broken, that barrier by becoming executive producers,
entrepreneurs, and owners (e.g., Reese Witherspoon, Beyoncé, Oprah Win-
frey) but most female celebrities, no matter how famous they become, will
still not enter the billionaire class that comprises media owners such as
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Advance Publications CEO Donald
Newhouse, and former Disney CEO Robert Iger.
As laborers, then, there is not a significant difference between an actress
and a model, both of whom must embody some form of hegemonic beauty.
They must be “chosen” by media gatekeepers, based upon their beauty (an
actor’s gateway into the audition room is their headshot), among hundreds, if
not thousands of other hopeful young women, and they are paid a small
portion of the profits that their images generate. Further, many actresses –
including both Marilyn Monroe and Lindsay Lohan – start out as models, as
modeling gigs are easier to book, more plentiful (particularly in the days of
local catalogues), and are often viewed as a way to get women “comfortable”
in front of the camera (i.e., getting used to presenting themselves as object of
a gaze, although this might be a more easily cultivated skill for young women
today). Oftentimes casting agents seeking to book “beautiful women,” parti-
cularly for small or background roles, will call modeling agencies rather than
acting ones.
As we see more and more in contemporary society, there are thousands, if
not millions, of conventionally beautiful women posing for and posting pic-
tures of themselves every day without being able to expand that either into a
86 Old Media, Girl Power
modeling career or broader public renown. Playboy itself featured at least 600
women over its 63 years in publication (assuming they only featured one nude
woman per issue over that time, which is an extremely conservative estimate),
yet very few of those women became household names on the level of Anna
Nicole Smith. While the magazine also featured already famous women over
the years as well, including actresses Drew Barrymore in 1995 and Farrah
Fawcett in 1995 and 1997, their use of images of the already famous Marilyn
Monroe for their 1953 debut issue demonstrates precisely how easily exploi-
table famous women’s bodies are, and how little autonomy women wield in
this system.
Playboy did not have Monroe’s consent when they used her already-famous
image to sell their first issue. The publication obtained old modelling photos
from 1948 in which Monroe had posed for art photographer Tom Kelly, years
before she was one of the most coveted movie stars of her day (Dyer 2003,
25–6). Of course, once the photos were obtained and published by Playboy –
for both the cover and centerfold – Monroe had little recourse, as, within the
capitalist media system, photos are the property of those who take the pic-
ture, rather than those whose images are being captured (this is one way to
ensure that celebrities have no autonomy or ownership over their image and
also, therefore, one of the threats posed by new media). Perhaps Monroe was
upset about this unauthorized use of her younger, naked self, although in an
interview Monroe refused to express shame for the photos, saying “I’ve done
nothing wrong” (Dyer 2003, 29). And, while Monroe certainly had not done
anything wrong, she had not consented to the use of these photos in this way
(the case is almost an amalgamation of Vanessa Hudgens’ private stolen
photo and Miley Cyrus’ provocative Vanity Fair shoot discussed in Chapter
2). At the same time, however, numerous factors would have constrained
Monroe’s ability to publicly contest the Playboy issue, including the terms of
her fame itself, which relied so heavily on her use of her body [Banner (2008)
calls her an “exhibitionist”], and the framing, by Playboy [which was see-
mingly accepted more broadly, see Dyer (2003)] of the magazine as a “cele-
bration” of sexuality marketed to a similar audience as her own (white,
suburban, middle-class men). If she denounced the photos, then, she would
also be denouncing the terms upon which she was successful.
Monroe’s lack of agency/consent is – in my view – central to understanding
how well the photos and the magazine were received. If Monroe had, in 1953,
consensually sat for a nude Playboy portrait, it would have been viewed as
crass, tacky, and excessive, much more fitting of the lowbrow publication
Hustler (or, perhaps, New York Magazine) than the image that Hugh Hefner
was peddling. She had too much symbolic power at that point to so blatantly
connect it to her body (sexual capital), but Playboy was able to non-con-
sensually extract that value for their own profit. These anxieties, over five
decades later, had not subsided, as evidenced when Lindsay Lohan tried to
connect herself to similar pinup iconography. As New York Times reporter
Ginia Bellafante (2008*) laments in response to Lohan’s Monroe-inspired
 Playmates and Centerfolds 87
nude photoshoot: “Monroe looked available in her Stern photos; Lohan looks
available for sale” (my emphasis). Monroe’s Stern shoot was, indeed, later in
her career, but the emphasis on availability and on vulnerability in Monroe’s
image more broadly (Dyer 2003), suggests that it is her inability to consent to
and profit off her image that makes it so pleasing (for even Stern’s “cele-
brated” photos of Monroe were circulated after her death). In other words,
photos of Marilyn Monroe – both back then and today – are coveted not
because they exist beyond the capitalist system (they do not), but, rather,
because she cannot and does not profit from them (while many companies
do). The implication, therefore, that Lohan “sells” her body to us/the media
versus Monroe, who “gave it” freely (or, more accurately, had it taken from
her) betrays the central concern to be not the naked female body itself, but
how and by whom it is wielded. In other words, the woman who willingly
profits off her image – monetarily, yes, but also symbolically, with intent and
consent – is the one who has stepped out of the norms of acceptability. Fur-
thermore, Monroe’s premature death means both that she cannot resist the
ongoing use of her image and that she personally cannot profit from it, while
also ensuring that her body never ages out of its prime, desirable state.
On the other hand, Anna Nicole Smith’s body became both an undesirable
spectacle and a site of overt self-commodification. Smith’s star image is
immensely complex as it brings together so many of the contradictions
around female celebrity and success in America. Smith’s Monroe-inspired,
retro styling, particularly in the Guess campaign, reflects the nostalgic longing
for a “simpler time” when gender roles were embraced, while her agency in
crafting that image connects to the dangers of a post-post-feminist world
wherein women’s sexuality is not empowering, but rather calculating and
manipulative.11 Again, where Monroe is “available”, Smith (or Lohan, or
whichever woman is posing nude) sells her availability. It is her profiting from
that body and image that is frowned upon, which transforms that body into
an undesirable spectacle: too available, too fake, too fat, too unhealthy. This,
in turn, feeds into an anti-post-feminist sentiment that suggests women’s
sexuality and economic gain – now apparently connected when before it was
not – is no longer cause for celebration, but rather, poses a danger to tradi-
tional notions of “talent,” “success,” and “beauty.” Once her sexuality has
been publicly wielded in such a way, anything negative that follows can be
blamed on that sexuality rather than the patriarchal, capitalist system that
circumscribes her success. A cruelly optimistic relationship is established:
success ends up not only being unfulfilling, but also, potentially toxic.
Similar failures of success are evident in the trajectory of numerous male
stars as well, yet they are often framed differently by the mainstream media.
In her discussion of the “pathology” of female fame, Emma Bell (2011) notes
the gendered distinctions between the trope of the “bad girl” celebrity and the
“bad boy” genius where, for women, rebellious behavior, including drug and
alcohol abuse, is seen to represent a broader pathology for which fame
(seeking) is symptomatic (and, eventually, catastrophic). Alternately, men’s
88 Old Media, Girl Power
rebellious behavior is not only accepted, but sanctioned as contributing to
their art (and fame) as well as a “natural” expression of their “essential mas-
culinity” (203). Such framing supports the notion that, for men, fame and
success are a natural state of affairs, in which self-destructive behavior is not
only understandable, but in many cases bolsters their credibility as artists
(Bell 2011, 203).
This is not to imply that men handle the vices of fame and success better.
Offhand I can name a handful of male stars whose self-destructive behavior
proved lethal: the infamous “27 Club,” referring to musicians who died at the
age of 27, features many more male musicians than female ones (Kurt
Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix). However, dissecting the psychological
pressures of fame and artistry is of less interest here than examining the con-
tinued propagation of the notion that women, in particular, are less equipped
to handle such pressures and, more particularly, the insidious ways that the
exploitation and abuses of famous women are not only recast as individual
pathology, but also marketed and sold back to us as cautionary tales about
the dangers of success (rather than capitalism), especially in an era wherein
female success is so often tied to sexuality.
Returning to Smith, however, her classic story of “rags-to-riches” is also
haunted by the figure of the gold digger. In his thorough history of the figure
of the gold digger, Brian Donovan (2020) notes that the modern-day concep-
tion emerges most notably in post-war America, as the war had a significant
impact on gender roles in relation to labor and the economy. The gold digger
becomes a middle-class threat (i.e., any woman can now secretly be a gold
digger, not just chorus girls and sex workers) in response both to a broader
challenge to the centrality of white masculinity but also to the pressures felt
by men to earn and spend money on their dates, wives, and families, as the
imperative to conspicuously consume became central to one’s class standing.
In other words, the gold digger became a scapegoat figure onto which men
could project their insecurities about both masculinity and capitalism. While
perhaps many heterosexual middle-class white women (and other kinds of
women) did and continue to seek out partnerships with men who can “pro-
vide” for them, this economically structured dependence has also long bene-
fited men who are then authorized to enter the public sphere and sell their
skills for a living wage (while reaping the social benefits of their wives’ sexual
capital, see Chapter 5 on Donald Trump). The scapegoating of women on the
receiving end of this transaction is epitomized by the differential treatment of
Anna Nicole Smith and her billionaire tycoon husband whose economic and
political priorities throughout his lifetime (neoliberal policies, Koch brothers
partnerships) proved to be much more catastrophic for the broader good of
society and the environment than anything Smith could do with her naked
body. As Donovan (2020, 192) notes: “While mass media and popular culture
turned Anna Nicole Smith into a butt of jokes as a white trash, gold-digging
monster, J. Howard Marshall was re-membered as a self-made man who
made poor choices in the name of love.”
 Playmates and Centerfolds 89
Despite her association with this figure of the gold digger, in many ways
Smith embodies the “self-made” dream of meritocracy suggested via the
Hollywood star system – a young woman from a modest background (no
normative family unit, lived in poverty) is able to “rise” to become the “face”
(and body) of an internationally known fashion label. But, at the same time,
this rise is based, not on an identifiable skillset (in a traditional sense), but,
rather, on her body/beauty, thus threatening the illusion that identity does not
matter in the capitalist system. The body has long been the terms on which
class mobility operates for white women in capitalist systems. Whether it is
the sex worker who sells herself, the celebrity who sells her image, or the
housewife who trades her domestic and reproductive labor for the provisions
provided via marriage, white women’s key to social mobility has long been
deeply rooted in their desirability. The figures of the famewhore and the gold
digger produce extreme anxiety because they destabilize the distinctions
among these categories of women, their levels of respectability, and their
relationships to the corporate media system.
Anna Nicole Smith, despite her aversion to the figure of the gold digger,
again, embodies numerous of its contradictions. Her surgically enhanced body
was the basis of her “success,” whether it was via her dancing, her photos, or
her marriage to Marshall. In certain instances (i.e., when exploited for media
profits as in the case of Playboy and Guess) this “use” of her body is accep-
ted, while in others (i.e., when “exposed” on reality television, when
“manipulating” an old man and his descendants out of his fortune), it is not.
Class is used to demarcate these norms, as her public image shifted across the
1990s into the 2000s from aspirational model of femininity to out-of-control
white trash gold digger and addict (Brown 2005). These shifts were less
informed by her behavior – Smith spoke openly, from her first interview with
Playboy that accompanied her 1992 cover shoot, about her life struggles,
invoking numerous tropes associated with “white trash,” including lack of
education, Southern roots, and excessive sexuality (Brown 2005, 76–7) – and
more by when and how the media encountered her. This was magnified even
further by the state of her physical body at the moment of encounter: because
she has once been able to embody the physical “ideal,” her inability to
maintain this ideal was framed by the classist, fatphobic media as an unwill-
ingness to self-discipline, and therefore further evidence of her white trashi-
ness and undeserved “success.”
When Smith threatened to destabilize the owner–laborer exploitative rela-
tionship – when she threatened to profit off her body directly rather than, say,
take a $20,000 paycheck from Playboy, or when she almost joined the billio-
naire class herself – the disciplinary apparatus of the media was able to step
in, reframe her image (as white trash) and ensure that any symbolic capital
she had would be depleted. Smith’s two season long reality show served all
these aims, while also demonstrating many of the problems in trying to claim
agency for (or by) famous women.
90 Old Media, Girl Power
Playboy Realities: The Anna Nicole Show and The Girls Next Door
The genre of reality television exploded in America in the early aughts. Pro-
grams like Survivor (2001–Present), American Idol (2002–Present) and Big
Brother (2000–Present) ushered in a wave of programming centered on “real
people” in unscripted situations, often competing for a cash prize, a potential
career, or even love. At the same time, a sub-genre of reality television
emerged that focused on “documenting” the lives of celebrities, starting with
MTV’s The Osbournes (2002–2005), which focused on rock and roll icon
Ozzy Osbourne, making household names out of his entire family, as well as
one of E! network’s first reality series, The Anna Nicole Show (2002–2004*),
which followed Smith as she navigated post-marriage, post-sex symbol life in
Hollywood. While both programs’ central character was a celebrity past their
prime, who often seemed inebriated or, at the very least, disoriented in their
surroundings, The Osbournes was embraced as a quirky family sitcom and
aired 50 episodes across its four-season run, while The Anna Nicole Show was
panned by critics and cancelled after 26 episodes. Another “family sitcom”
emerged in its place on the E! television network: following Hugh Hefner and
his polygamous playboy lifestyle, The Girls Next Door debuted in 2005(*) and
lasted six seasons (91 episodes), launching four different spin-off shows fea-
turing the most popular Playmates/former Hefner girlfriends, Kendra Wilk-
inson and Holly Madison.
The term “reality television” refers to a heterogeneous mix of programming
with numerous sub-genres, but most of them draw on discourses of truth and
authenticity in capturing their subject. This format can be helpful for a
celebrity, particularly those, like Ozzy Osbourne, whose path to fame lends
them credibility as a talented “artist,” and the intimate footage provided via
reality television can authenticate this image, despite the artists’ mental and
physical decline. However, for female stars, as discussed above, any mental or
physical decline is often attributed to their fame and the trappings of success,
rather than their artistry or talent, shifting the framework of viewing away
from narratives of authenticity toward the image of the “trainwreck.” The
Anna Nicole Show demonstrates this gendered dynamic by portraying its star
as an out-of-control, trashy spectacle. Although her sexuality is made extre-
mely visible in the text (she discusses sex freely and often), any threat it poses
is contained by what is to be read as her now-undesirable body, as well as her
contradictory status as both mother (to Daniel, who appeared in the show
regularly) and child (as she is clearly fully dependent upon her lawyer
Howard, her assistant Kim, and the show’s producers to tell her what to do
and how to behave).
This making of woman into spectacle is not unique to The Anna Nicole
Show (hereafter TAN show). No matter the sub-genre of reality television –
docuseries, competition, dating shows – it often falls upon women to do the
requisite affective labor. Television shows like The Bachelor (2002–Present)
encourage and produce what Rachel E. Dubrofsky (2009, 353), drawing on
 Playmates and Centerfolds 91
the work of Laura Grindstaff (2002), calls the “money shot” of reality TV: the
tearful breakdown of the heartbroken contestant, signaling the authenticity of
a female body “unable to contain intense bodily responses.” While TAN show
did not rely upon Smith to produce these same kinds of moments – she seems,
for the most part, too out of it (confused and delayed) to have intense emo-
tional responses to events unfolding around her – the show’s focus on her
body and her subjectivity echoes the exploitative use of women’s bodies and
emotions in other reality-based genres, while also hinting at the potential of
this new media format to undermine male-centered media and grand narra-
tives. Indeed, for scholars such as John Dovey (2000, 22), the postmodern
decline of “rationality and objectivity” has coincided with the rise in truth
claims that are “grounded in individual subjective experience,” such as those
highlighted on reality television. In this way, reality television continues the
tradition identified by Sujata Moorti (2002) of daytime talk shows publicly
tackling “women’s issues.” It is perhaps, then, no surprise that the reality
genre, with its focus on individualism, subjectivity, revelations, emotions, and
therapeutic language, is often gendered female (see Aslama and Pantti 2006;
Dubrofsky 2009; 2011).
Despite her clear reliance upon those around her, TAN show does attempt
to center Anna Nicole Smith’s subjectivity and experiences, while ascribing
her agency in her career. The show’s title depends on her being publicly
known enough not to include her last name. The initial popularity of the
show, with a reported four million viewers watching the premier episode
(Donovan and Neumann 2021, 656), suggests that initial interest in Smith
was very high. The opening credit sequence (which, was nominated for a
Primetime Emmy award in 2003), features a cartoon rendition of Anna
Nicole’s story of success, with the following lyrics: “Anna, Anna, glamorous
Anna, Anna Nicole. Born poor in Texas, strugglin’, savin’, tryin’ to get some
fame. Then you used what you got and that’s a lot, you became a household
name. […] You’re so outrageous” (The Anna Nicole Show, 2002–2004*).The
show celebrates Smith’s ambition and fame-seeking, noting that she “used
what [she] got” to become a household name before “marrying a billionaire”
and then losing everything (which could reference his billion-dollar estate, but
also her former level of fame and her body). Through it all, the lyrics insist,
Anna Nicole Smith remains glamorous, fabulous, and outrageous.
Despite these promises of glamor and outrageousness, however, the show is
underwhelming in its mundanity, perhaps explaining the steady decline in
ratings until its cancellation in 2004. The first episode of the series features
Anna Nicole Smith and her “team” (which includes, on the show, her teen-
aged son Daniel, her assistant Kim, and her lawyer and friend, Howard
Stern – not the shock jock deejay) looking for a new house for Smith (“House
Hunting”). Other early episodes feature her moving into and decorating the
house, going to the dentist, getting a tattoo, and challenging her team to an
eating contest. Celebrities engaging in banal everyday activities are not an
unusual feature in docudrama reality series (much of the humor of The
92 Old Media, Girl Power
Osbournes lies in watching a rock and roll legend trying to figure out how to,
for instance, operate his remote control). However, the seemingly opportu-
nistic relationship Smith has with everyone around her as potential billionaire
heiress and their employer (save for her teenage son) makes these “adven-
tures” more difficult to watch, as they are often clearly contrived situations set
up merely for the sake of the television program, rather than activities that
she seems to want to participate in and enjoys.
Further, her mental and emotional state is often confusing to follow,
despite the use of reality TV’s trademark “confessional” sequences where she
speaks candidly to the camera about what is going on (although she often
seems to be reading scripted lines). Smith seems, at times, extremely sensitive
to others’ comments, but does not have the energy or capacity to articulate
her emotions and will just shut down instead (as she does in “The Eating
Contest”). The show relies upon her to be interesting and engaging – and
there are, indeed, moments where her wit and vivacity do come through,
offering a glimpse of how and why she is famous – but she is unable to pro-
duce the kinds of affective moments that reality television expects (and
demands) of women. If and when she does react to things, it is dispropor-
tionate to the slight – Stern jokingly accusing her of cheating during the
eating contest, for instance – rather than a justified response to, say, the
ongoing treatment of her as a sex object and punchline. In “NYC Publicity
Tour,” Smith travels to New York to drum up media interest in the reality
show. This episode provides a bizarre look into the life of declining celebrity,
as it is up to Smith to “sell” the show and here we do see her putting in the
work as she travels from interview to interview. Smith wears tight, revealing
clothing during the interviews, yes, but we also are provided a backstage view
of how she is treated by those in the media (with visible disdain) and how she
is manhandled and objectified by the men working behind the scenes at these
programs. After putting in the requisite “work” – smiling, performing,
allowing herself to be leered at and grabbed – Smith goes shopping with her
assistant, only to have her credit cards declined. An obvious connection is
made between Smith’s ability to sell herself and the economic survival of
herself and those around her.
This early episode provides insight into the gendered dynamics at play for
women in the corporate media system. After her first round of interviews is
complete, we come to understand that Smith is upset about something (again,
it is often hard to follow the narrative of her emotions). During a scene back
at her hotel room we hear her talking to the producers of the reality show (a
notable moment, as producers are usually absent from the text), which is
intercut with confessional sequences, filmed at a later place and time, where
Anna Nicole explains what happened. The E! producer upsets Smith because
he wants her to go on the Howard Stern radio program and she does not
want to. In her hotel room, the producer explains that he needs Stern to “get
20 million people to watch this television show” and adds, “this is one I need
you to do for me,” as though she had not already been doing exactly what
 Playmates and Centerfolds 93
was asked of her: she clearly did not want to leave her son Daniel to go on a
publicity tour. There is a cut to her confessional where Smith says that she
couldn’t “get that guy to understand” – does she even know her producer’s
name? – and that she hates Stern for how he disparaged her late husband.
The show cuts back to the hotel room where Smith says flatly and finally that
she will not do the interview. We do not see how or why, but suddenly Smith’s
voiceover/confessional informs us: “I changed my mind” and the show cuts to
her arriving the next morning at Stern’s radio show. Afterward, she said it
was not as bad as she thought it would be and that Stern didn’t “throw pun-
ches” at her, noting that Benjy, a man that works with Howard on his show,
was both hitting on her and defending her the whole time. Benjy follows
Smith back to her hotel room where he proceeds to kiss her, but she refuses to
engage further with him on camera. Her professional “exploits” repeatedly
involve drumming up interest in herself based on her body, and then fighting
off leering and creepy men who see her work as an open invitation to kiss,
hug, and grab her.
Perhaps, then, this is the danger of Smith’s “true” story being told. Once
again, a woman rises to “success” to achieve exactly what the capitalist
system dangles as desirable, only to find that this world itself is unfulfilling,
lonely, and oftentimes even boring. Within TAN show, it is not the “work” of
being famous that gets to Smith: at times, she does seem happy to be working
again. She easily fulfills her professional obligations, even when it goes
against her own ethical judgment. But the incessant treatment of her as
stupid, emotional, and sex object (even though her status as object has shif-
ted – it is no longer the Howard Stern’s of the world she has to worry about,
but, rather, their lowly/lackey sidekicks), makes the show difficult to watch.
As viewers we are made complicit in this exploitative relationship that is even
more visible through the lens of reality television. Unable to hide behind dis-
courses of “talent” (particularly now that her body no longer holds up as her
talent) and surrounded by many – including the show’s producers – willing to
take advantage of her rather than help her, The Anna Nicole Show documents
first-hand the way that patriarchal capitalism will exploit women’s bodies,
their success, and their demise any way it can. Her tragic death in 2007 was
further treated by the media as a frivolous distraction from more “serious”
topics such as the Iraq war (see Donovan and Neumann 2021, 659), framing
news as a zero-sum game while profiting off of an outrage that they produce
by choosing who and what to cover (and this trend, which I refer to as meta-
coverage, will be unpacked further in Chapter 4).
Not incidentally, the E! network profited off celebrity immensely during the
2000s. While Smith lamented deejay Howard Stern’s treatment of her and her
late husband, E! provided him an extended and televised platform for his
radio program from 1994 to 2005. The long run of Howard Stern on the
network suggests that it was a hit, but the show ended once Stern signed a
deal to bring his radio talk show to Sirius XM. This departure left a large gap
in the E! programming schedule, as Howard Stern aired every weekday
94 Old Media, Girl Power
(Associated Press 2005), thus allowing the network to expand its slate of ori-
ginal programming and launch numerous other reality shows, including the
Playboy-themed polygamous domestic sitcom The Girls Next Door (herein
TGND). The show follows the adventures and day-to-day life in the Playboy
Mansion as lived out by Playboy founder Hugh Hefner (who was 79 years old
at the time) and his three Playmate live-in girlfriends: Holly Madison (53
years younger than “Hef” as he is known on the show), Bridget Marquardt
(47 years his junior), and Kendra Wilkinson, who was a mere 20 years old
when the show began and was not even old enough to legally drink alcohol
when she met Hefner in 2004, as one of the infamous painted nude girls fea-
tured at the Playboy mansion parties.
In her discussion of TGND, Moya Luckett (2014) notes how the show was
intended to be a showcase for Hefner and Playboy, both struggling with
declining public images at the time, but that its popularity among women and
the appeal of the three leading girlfriends allowed Playboy to expand its
target market to now include (post-feminist) young women ready to
“embrace” their sexuality and sexual objectification. In fact, Luckett argues,
Hefner’s authority over the series/company is undermined by his sidelining
from the narrative, his declining physical stature and age, as well as his dis-
tance from the day-to-day operations of the magazine, which is shown mostly
to be under the purview of Hefner’s long-time secretary Mary O’Connor.
Further, girlfriend Holly Madison’s growing drive to produce, promote and
oversee content production at Playboy (rather than merely be a featured
Playmate) transfers some of the structural power from Hef onto her (Luckett
2014). However, although relegated to the sidelines, I would argue that Hef-
ner’s continued presence – in the show, with the magazine, and in the women’s
lives (as, vitally, the figure that binds them and this all together) – structures
and contains any “threat” posed by Madison to this patriarchal institution
(and her inability to extend her fame significantly beyond the series and rela-
tionship with Playboy betrays this containment).
More insidiously, however, the Playboy career is held up as bait to lure in
young, beautiful, and ambitious women who know that their body is their
ticket to success. Despite the inability of very few Playmates to parlay their
nude features into a larger career – and here, Anna Nicole Smith, in fact,
bolsters Playboy’s credibility rather than the reverse – young women still flock
to its casting calls and parties in hopes of being “discovered.” But, in the
Playboy world, being “discovered” is often a sexual transaction: you are an
object there to be used by Hefner and his rich/powerful friends as they please.
The show elides the trade-offs for women, never addressing the girls’ curfew
and “rules” that contained their agency and disrupted any potential power
imbalance in their favor. Madison’s (2015) autobiographical book Down the
Rabbit Hole discusses Hefner’s reported propensity to drug the young women
that he wants to sleep with, thus hindering their agency and capacity for
consent. I would add that his use of the magazine/mansion parties to lure and
groom young women like Wilkinson, who later admitted to sneaking away to
 Playmates and Centerfolds 95
pursue other relationships (Luckett 2014, 571), further marks him out as a
predator. This view and treatment of women is a continuation of the non-
consensual use of nude photos of Monroe that launched the magazine five
decades earlier.
Yet within the show, these terms of success and sex are never questioned.
Unlike Anna Nicole Smith, Hef ’s “harem” – although interchangeable –
remain hegemonically beautiful, untainted by motherhood, and defined/con-
tained by a heterosexual relationship. The predatory relationship that Hefner
builds with these young women – who are also his employees – is presented,
perhaps not as normal (more of a fantasy/aspiration), but, indeed, endearing,
entertaining, and harmless. Playboy was able to use the new television format,
as well as these young female celebrities, to sanitize, modernize and (post-)
feminize their public image moving into the twenty-first century. When young
women try to use this format and celebrity for themselves, on the other hand,
the pushback by the mainstream media is intense, targeted, and extremely
gendered, as will be discussed further in the next chapter.
In conclusion, the mix of post-feminism and nostalgia at this cultural
moment may seem, on the surface, to be contradictory. One is an ideological
acknowledgement, if not a celebration of so-called social progress (for white
women) and its benefits; the other, an affective yearning for a “before” that
progress, when times were simpler and certain identity and community
boundaries more distinct. Yet both are backward-looking: if cruel optimism
defines white women’s relation to present circumstances turning out to not be
what they promised, such an affect orients us toward the past. Where did it
go wrong? How do we get back to that time of promise and hope?
Post-feminism answers the first question (blaming feminist empowerment,
rather than capitalism, for women’s “out-of-control” sexuality), while nos-
talgia offers potential for the second. Marilyn Monroe, rather than herself
being a result of both the increased visibility of women (and sex) in American
culture as well as the misogynist impulses of the media and society more
broadly, becomes an antidote for the contemporary cruel, post-feminist con-
dition (look how much we revere her image and adore her – surely this shows
that we value the right kind of female celebrity?). Monroe’s iconography
immortalizes her as her young, sexual self, never asking us to reckon with her
getting fat, going to jail, or growing old, the way that contemporary celeb-
rities so often do. But it also ensures that she still has no capacity to consent
to, resist, or profit from her image and her body which continues to produce
profits for others.
Threats to the idealization of success in America need to be contained. If
young people – and young women more specifically – do not buy into these
myths, the media have no models to exploit, no naked girls to use on their
film sets as window dressings, no customers to sell jeans and diet products to,
and no “disgusting” women to fill the hours and hours of cheap and quick
reality television slots. The trainwreck narratives that emerged at this time
around Lindsay Lohan and Anna Nicole Smith demonstrate the fallacies of a
96 Old Media, Girl Power
meritocracy promising that the “best and brightest” will get what they
deserve. Because Lohan and Smith, in my view, did not at all get what they
deserve, their public image needs to be re-framed and re-contextualized within a
broader patriarchal capitalist project that has long been using and continues to use
women up and spit them out. The story of Marilyn Monroe represents the con-
tinuity of this treatment, not a nostalgically simpler time when being a woman was
easier because success was earned, and men could control and contain it.

Notes
1 As I employ it throughout this book, I follow Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of success
as meaning being able, not just to sustain a comfortable standard of living, but to
pursue “the art of consuming, spending and enjoying” (311). There is thus also an
element of visibility (through material products, “lifestyle,” and imaging) to this
idea of success and therefore an aspirational connection to the imagery circulating
in and through celebrity culture (see also Dyer 1979; Hearn 2013).
2 The “Razzie” awards are a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the worst in film each
year.
3 At the time, the Associated Press obtained and published a letter to Lohan from a
Morgan Creek Productions studio executive where he calls her “discourteous,
irresponsible and unprofessional” adding that, during the shoot for Georgia Rule
Lohan acted “like a spoiled child” (Associated Press 2006).
4 I label this concern performative in order to acknowledge that this ritualized per-
formance of concern (that repeats itself for numerous celebrity women) is itself
doing important cultural work by publicly policing women’s behavior more so
than it is a reflection of genuine concern over Lohan’s wellbeing.
5 This is not to assert that only 15 articles addressed this scandal, but rather to show
that it received triple the coverage of her stolen nude photos in my corpus, which
comprised of 171 articles across 2007–2008 that mentioned both “Lindsay Lohan”
and “nude,” as sourced via Factiva.
6 However, it is worth noting that, as argued by Kirsten Pullen (2014, 20) Lohan’s
increasingly public “private life” had, as early as 2005, threatened Lohan’s Disney
image, with producers on the Disney movie Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) reportedly
expressing concern over her growing link to partying and sexuality.
7 I am not trying to be vague with this claim, just to suggest that multiple people
could be the site of agency in these scenarios – Monroe herself, for the changes,
but also studio executives, talent agents, directors, etc. Or, in the case of Lohan
who at the age of three was too young to attribute agency to over her career, her
parents as well as talent/modelling agents, casting directors, photographers, etc.
8 It is worth mentioning that in 2007 AMC launched the popular and critically
acclaimed program Mad Men, set in the 1950s male-dominated world of advertis-
ing and, although its protagonist Don Draper is considered to be an anti-hero, the
“complexity” of such characters, as well as the rendering of their stories as the
most important on the show, complicate critical readings of the masculinity being
portrayed (see Joy 2019 on Breaking Bad), while the aesthetics of the show belie its
nostalgic leanings.
9 Of course, numerous feminist scholars have argued that this objectifying gaze has,
in sexualized culture, been transformed into an internalized, surveillant gaze (see,
for instance, Attwood 2009; Gill 2007).
10 It remains rare to this day to see an extended feminist defense of female celebrity:
so much so that every few years when a documentary such as Framing Britney
Spears (Stark 2021) is released, a “cultural reckoning” occurs where we reflect on
 Playmates and Centerfolds 97
our treatment of celebrity women in the past, while continuing to mock, disparage
and torment celebrity women of today.
11 Although, as will be discussed further in the next section, Smith’s level of agency
cannot be fully known, she had repeatedly and publicly professed her love of
classic Hollywood blonde bombshells like Monroe, therefore asserting some level
of agency over her own image when she draws on that iconography to, for instance,
color and style her hair.

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News, April 29. Factiva. Accessed July 13, 2018. https://www.deseretnews.com/a
rticle/695274629/What-was-dad-doing-during-Mileys-photo-shoot.html.
Crosbie, Lynn. 2008. “Lohan Does Monroe: Some Like It Cynical.” Globe and Mail.
February 26, sec. POP ROCKS: CULTURE: CELEBRITY PHOTO SHOOTS
The Globe Review Column. Factiva.
Derakhshani, Tirdad. 2008. “Sideshow: Of Marilyn and a Pretender.” The Philadelphia
Inquirer. February 20, sec. FEATURES MAGAZINE; P-com Ent. Celebrities. Factiva.
Pettit, Dawn. 2008. “COLUMN: Lohan’s Boobs Will Boost Career.” Cal State-Full-
erton Daily Titan. February 27. Factiva. Accessed June 15, 2018. https://dailytitan.
com/2008/02/lohansboobswillboostcareer/.
Rubinoff, Joel. 2008. “Miley Stunt Gets Best of Both Worlds in the End.” Waterloo
Region Record. May 2. Factiva.
The Anna Nicole Show. 2002–2004, on E! Entertainment Television.
The Girls Next Door. 2005–2009, on E! Entertainment Television.
Yampert, Rick de. 2008. “Lindsay, You’re Pretty, but You’re No Marilyn Monroe.”
Daytona Beach News Journal. February 29, sec. VOX POP Section E. Factiva.
Part 2
New Media, Old Power

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268659-5
4 Celebrity in Crisis
Reality Television and Sex Tape Stardom

Prologue
If casting “bikini” girls was a challenge, it was always much worse to cast for
a nude female role. In most cases these roles were silent or very minimal.
Most working actresses and models felt empowered enough to turn down
such roles, so for one film we were working on, my team and I had to venture
out to the local “gentlemen’s” clubs to find and recruit women who, the logic
was, were more likely to be comfortable working nude. We headed out to one
“high end” club, known amongst the men I worked with for having a more
“beautiful” caliber of dancer than most other places in the city. My male boss
approached the bouncer outside to let him know why we were there, handing
him a business card and asking if we could talk to some of the dancers.
The bouncer led us to the manager inside, who had us sit at a table and
brought over employees who were interested in talking to us (we were not
allowed to just approach them at will, as they were working). We spoke to
several women who seemed (vaguely) interested – although they certainly
made clear that it was not for the money, as their rate of pay for the job
would be significantly less than what they might make in a typical dancing
shift. We collected their contact information and left the club.
The next step, however, was very unusual in my casting experience and was
the only time that I had to arrange an audition “session” outside of our
casting office. The director, who was from outside of the city, wanted to meet
with the women – along with myself and my boss – at his local hotel. The
optics of this certainly do not sit with me well now, knowing what we do
about how a predator like Harvey Weinstein (reportedly) operated by inviting
young actresses to his hotel room where he would corner them alone and
powerless, but my experience was somewhat different than that.
The women arrived mostly in groups together (they were friends and co-
workers), as their meetings were all scheduled back-to-back, and we met with
them in the lobby. We then took them up to one of the boardrooms at the
conference level of the hotel, rather than the director’s private room. Someone
(I’m not sure who) decided that they would be more comfortable (or that it
would just be easier) to meet with the director and the casting director (my

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268659-6
104 New Media, Old Power
boss) together in the room, rather than one by one. I went in and out of the
room freely, making sure that any late arrivals were not lost or waiting in the
lobby alone.
They did not read any lines or audition in any formal sense. It seemed to be
more of an interview, with the director telling them about his vision for the
scene: what would be shown, what not; what they would be asked to do; how
long it would take, etc. etc. While the women did not have talent agents in the
usual sense, their manager from the club who introduced them to us acted as
their “advocate” (and probably took a cut of what they made that day).
Everything seemed to go fine – better than expected, in fact, as the director
decided to hire not one but three women for the scene. As usual for such
characters, they were non-speaking roles, waking up naked with a cocaine-
ravaged main character to demonstrate how his “success” was getting to his
head.
I am not sure if those women ever appeared in another film again. I don’t
know that the experience was much better for them than their regular gig.
Not every experience of nudity for money is equally exploitative. But framing
certain jobs as more exploitative than “traditional” work – reality television
and sex work, say, as more exploitative than acting in films – does important
cultural and social work in relation to gender, feminism, and capitalism.

Introduction
I always wondered what would happen if women didn’t need casting agents to
be visibly “successful” anymore. Whose power might be threatened? Who
would lament not having access to ambitious young women, willing (and
unwilling) to do whatever it takes to succeed? What other ways might women
gain symbolic (and economic) power? In this chapter I move away from the
“successes” of the supposedly meritocratic, talent-based media system to
examine two women who posed a significant threat to myths of meritocracy,
bypassing the traditional gatekeeping system of the media and making very
visible the ways in which (certain) women are valued for their beauty and
sexual appeal. The socialite-turned-sex-tape-star-turned-reality-tv-personality
was, briefly, an abhorred public “archetype” that came to signify all the evils
of “democratized” fame, new media technologies, and female ambition. I say
briefly because, for all the horror they instigated, Paris Hilton and Kim Kar-
dashian actually proved to be unique, rather than pioneering figures, in this
media landscape. Although this is not to say that such anxieties have waned –
as they have now transferred over to a broader “influencer” culture – very few
women have been able to wield new media formats to their advantage in a
similar way. Hilton and Kardashian are fascinating case studies, not only
because they uniquely were able to parlay status and sex into a (for Hilton,
brief; for Kardashian, longstanding) public career, but also because their
derision in the media demonstrates the continuities between “old” forms of
celebrity and “new” ones.
 Celebrity in Crisis 105
Paris Hilton, who bears the name of the famous line of hotels founded by
her great grandfather Conrad Hilton (Newman 2007*), began venturing into
the media as a “socialite” photographed in and around Beverly Hills “hot
spots” in the early 2000s (sometimes with Britney Spears and Lindsay
Lohan). However, Hilton became a household name after her 2003 sex tape
preceded the launch of The Simple Life (2003–2007*) reality program on Fox’s
television network. The show followed Hilton and best friend Nicole Richie
(daughter of singer Lionel Richie) as they toured rural, working-class America,
living with numerous families and working various menial and hard-labor jobs
(which they often did with disdain). Hilton’s DUI arrest in 2007 signaled both
the height of her fame, and its decline, as she (seemingly) refused to exploit her
misfortunes for the sake of the media (an infamous interview with David Let-
terman after her release features her repeatedly trying to change the subject). In
recent years Hilton has spoken out about the abuse she endured at a youth resi-
dential school in Utah during her teens. A 2020 YouTube documentary This is
Paris, details her survival story, as well as her more recent transition from reality
star/socialite to deejay. The film highlights the difference between the public
persona cultivated by Hilton in the early aughts versus the “authentic,” intelli-
gent businesswoman behind the scenes, which seemed to surprise some viewers
and critics (see, for instance, Bentley 2020; Julian 2021; Vij 2021).
Similarly, Kim Kardashian’s recent turn to legal activism surprised many.
Indeed, the unexpected longevity and visibility of Kardashian continues to
produce ongoing panics over the media’s role in gatekeeping success and
celebrity. Kardashian is the daughter of the late Robert Kardashian, O.J.
Simpson’s former friend and attorney, and had a highly privileged upbringing
with her two sisters Khloe and Kourtney in Los Angeles. After briefly work-
ing for close friend and fellow “socialite” Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian was
similarly launched into the public spotlight in 2007 after a sex tape of her and
then-boyfriend, singer Ray J, was “leaked” online ahead of the debut of her
reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007–2021). The show lasted
on E! network for a remarkable 20 seasons and launched as many as five
spinoffs. The reality show portrayed life in the Kardashian family, initially
following Kim and her two sisters, “momager” Kris and her former partner,
and their children (Kim’s half-sisters). In addition to the show, Kim has an
extremely active social media presence and following. She has over 200 mil-
lion followers on Instagram, 70 million followers on Twitter, and is active on
Snapchat and Facebook. Experts estimate that Kim (and her sisters) earn
anywhere from $75,000 to $300,000 for one endorsement post across their
social media accounts (Evans 2016). Despite these statistics and her longevity,
many commentators even today still discursively link her fame to her sex tape
released 13 years ago, thus reinforcing an understanding of her as having “no
talent” and being illegitimately in the public eye (even when those reporters
are reinforcing her fame through their reporting).
There has been some scholarly investigation of both Hilton and the Kar-
dashians, although the latter – likely because of her unexpected longevity –
106 New Media, Old Power
has received the brunt of the attention (see, for instance, Callahan 2016;
Harvey 2018; Premaggiore and Negra 2014; Nudson 2021; Sastre 2014;
Scheiner McClain 2014). In this chapter, however, my focus is primarily on
Hilton, as she was most often brought up in the same sentences as Britney
Spears and Lindsay Lohan to signify an apparent turn for the worse in young
white female celebrity during the late aughts. This chapter first looks at why,
particularly considering that Kardashian and Hilton have much more in
common than Hilton, Spears, and Lohan. Yet Hilton often serves alongside
Spears and Lohan as a figure of tainted femininity whose “overexposure” (in
numerous senses) delimits the terms of public respectability for privileged white
women. I argue that Hilton, much more so than Kardashian, served as a liminal
figure both within and beyond the confines of patriarchal, mainstream media.
Unlike Kardashian, who more convincingly asserts a level of agency, and,
therefore, strategic calculation, in and over her fame, Hilton’s star image is, much
like the sexuality of women discussed in earlier chapters, more akin to a “leak-
ing” of female celebrity (rather than a Kardashian-esque invasion) into and
beyond fields in which it ought to appear. This is not, of course, to deny her
agency in her stardom, but, rather, to acknowledge the paradoxical way in which
Hilton embodies both “new” and “old” forms of celebrity simultaneously.
I first unpack these claims through a discussion of both women’s stolen sex
tapes (and the oft-questioned status of this text as stolen) in relation to their
racial and class privilege. Drawing on the work of critical whiteness studies of
femininity and beauty, I argue that their main transgression – for which they are
discursively punished – is to make too visible the ways in which women’s sexu-
ality is the basis of their media presence. This, in turn, leads into a discussion of a
practice that I call “success policing” wherein the media double-down on nar-
ratives of meritocracy and legitimacy to ensure that the gatekeeping mechanisms
of mainstream media remain secured. Finally, I discuss both Hilton’s and Kar-
dashian’s entrepreneurialization of self/sex – a practice that ought to be cele-
brated by post-feminist, neoliberal capitalist media that increasingly requires this
of its citizens. The fact that it is not celebrated, but rather, denigrated by the
media is considered in relation to the broader discussions and representations of
“feminist” cultural work, media profit structures, and institutional power.
Indeed, the failure of these female “successes” to be embraced by the media
signal the broader fallacy that participation, or “leaning into” these systems of
power offer reward and protection for white women while erasing the possibi-
lities of “leaning out” of, or destroying these systems. Destroying these women
instead allows other girls and young women to think that, for them at least, the
terms of success might operate differently and thus reinvest in their own self and
the hard work of “proper” femininity.

“Leaking” Celebrity Sex

In this section I want to take seriously the notion that Paris Hilton’s fame can
be traced to her sex tape, released in 2003, not because I believe this to be
 Celebrity in Crisis 107
true (as noted in the prior chapter, I believe it dubious to claim a moment or
specific text “caused” someone’s fame), but, rather, because I believe that this
claim does important cultural work (both in terms of celebrity/meritocracy
and, perhaps more importantly, rape culture). The celebrity sex tape or sex
video is not a phenomenon unique to the digital age: rock musician Tommy
Lee and actress Pamela Anderson had their own explicit video stolen and
circulated in 1995 by electrician Rand Gauthier. Interestingly, Gauthier later
claimed that this violation “made [Lee’s] career” (Lewis 2014) and the inci-
dent was immortalized in a Hulu miniseries about the event. On the other
hand, actor Rob Lowe’s career was (temporarily) unmade when a video cir-
culated of him having sex with a 16-year-old girl in 1988 (Lowe was 24 years
old at the time). After a decade out of the spotlight, he returned to television
in the late 1990s, starring in hit shows like West Wing (1999–2006) and Parks
and Recreation (2009–2015).
Yet Lowe’s status, as well as that of Lee and Anderson, was different than
Hilton’s – and, later, Kardashian’s – at the time of their sex tapes being
released. Paris Hilton was relatively unknown in 2003 and the coordinated
release of her sex tape with the launch of her reality show allowed it to be
framed repeatedly as the “cause” of her fame. Apparently, a new kind of star
was born; not one who is known for acting or modelling, but, rather, one who
is known for revealing everything (i.e., too much) about herself and her drive
to be famous. In this section I first examine the sex tape as a discursive con-
struction: how its public circulation as a “leaked” object (whether true or not,
the actual circumstances of its release can never be known to outsiders) con-
tributes to broader understandings about female celebrity, success, and sexual
violation. I then look more closely at the sex itself – not by analyzing the tape
itself as, again, I don’t think that the “work” is being done in the text, but
also because I take Hilton at her word that it was a violation and, thus, for
me to examine it is to participate in that violation. Instead, I want to ask
what it is about the way that Hilton’s sexuality circulates in the mediated
economy that proves to be so disruptive. I will argue that public displays of
female sexuality are not new, but that sex tapes violate longstanding
assumptions around (and commodifications of) white women’s beauty, purity,
and “authentic” non-sexual self. In particular, Hilton’s privileged class and
racial status position her as already successful, and thus the transgression of
calculating ambition, in combination with public sexuality, produces extre-
mely harsh pushback from a media system that needs white women and girls
to invest in such systems.

The Discursive Construction of the Sex Tape

While few people would likely take seriously the claim that Rand Gauthier
made Tommy Lee’s career by leaking his private video, such claims are often
taken as truth in the cases of Hilton and Kardashian, despite the launch of
their reality shows at almost the same time. The repeated invocation of the
108 New Media, Old Power
sex tape as causing Hilton’s (and Kardashian’s) fame is revealing in two
senses: firstly, it occludes the numerous other factors that lead to fame (i.e.,
not all women who film themselves having sex are famous; not all celebrities
have starred in sex tapes) and, secondly, it denies the violence of the act (by
framing it as beneficial to Hilton/Kardashian). In this section I specifically
address these omissions to argue that they produce sexual violation as eco-
nomically and symbolically beneficial to women, which, in turn, affects how
other victims/survivors of sexual violence are understood, thus demonstrating
that the stakes of these claims are higher than simply the legitimizing or
delegitimizing of women’s public careers.
It is impossible to know the true status of Hilton’s sex tape. Was it, as she
claims, released by her ex-boyfriend Rick Solomon, without her consent? Or
is this claim to non-consent part of an elaborate ruse used to drum up interest
in the sex tape and Hilton but to deny the reputational damage that embra-
cing the tape would cause? In my view, the distinction is not important; not
because issues of agency and consent do not matter, but, rather, because the
public status of the text as non-consensual (whether true or not) frames how
it is understood and viewed in relation to Hilton’s star image more broadly.
Put differently, the fact that it is not publicly embraced by Hilton (whether
she is lying, changed her mind, or was, indeed, violated) ought to frame how
we – as consumers, fans, scholars – engage with the text. Even if Hilton had
at some point agreed to the public circulation of the tape, she is allowed to
have changed her mind about it or to not have fully understood how it would
be taken up into her star image more broadly. Of course, once media images
are produced and circulated – both before and during the digital era – they
are very difficult to expunge or bury from public memory. Someone will find a
way to profit from the images, why not let this be Hilton herself ? How does
profit negate violation? In posing these questions, I want to draw a parallel to
the artistic nude photos that Monroe posed for, discussed in Chapter 3, which
were later used without her consent by Playboy magazine – the fact that
Hilton and Kardashian were able to make money from their violation (via the
lawsuit settlements which will be discussed shortly) does not negate the vio-
lation and, if Monroe had been able to do the same, she might be viewed
much more cynically, as these women are to this day.
Celebrity sexuality in general is susceptible to these binary frameworks that
pit profit against violation. As seen in Chapter 2 with regards to Vanessa
Hudgens’ stolen nude photo and Miley Cyrus’ almost nude photoshoot, the
notion of consent matters little in the public circulation of sexualized imagery.
What matters is who profits from sexualized imagery and how. Despite
important work being done to typify varying levels of consent across differing
genres of celebrity sex tapes (see, for instance, Hayward and Rahn 2014),
there remains in the discourse a sense that such tapes, particularly for female
stars, are inherently beneficial (Hillyer 2010; Sastre 2014), or, that the exis-
tence of a sexualized image in other texts/settings de-legitimizes claims to
sexual privacy (Hayward and Rahn 2014). In fact, much like in the case of
 Celebrity in Crisis 109
rape victims who come forward to find their own sexual histories adjudicated
(see Harding 2015), the veracity of claims that celebrity sex tapes were
“leaked” or “stolen” are often judged against other sexual images and per-
formances the celebrity has willingly circulated publicly [and here Hayward
and Rahn (2014) problematically reproduce this framework].
Even within these discussions, however, there is an attempt to distinguish
between consensual mediated expressions of sexuality and non-consensual
sexual imagery. For example, Hayward and Rahn (2014, 49–50) distinguish
between the “personal sex video” which is not intended for public circulation
and the “amateur porn production” which draws on the aesthetics of the perso-
nal sex video to suggest a more “authentic” sexual encounter than most depicted
in professional mainstream pornography (see also Hardy 2009; Hillyer 2010).
Crucially, this more intimate and authentic aesthetic can also suggest that the
footage is illicit even when it is consensually produced: whether or not the par-
ticipants knowingly and fully consented to being filmed, filming techniques (as
well as distribution channels) can generate a sense that they did not know or
consent (see also Longstaff 2017). In other words, these viewing relations are
relations of power; the viewer has the power to watch whether the subject
(object) agrees or not. If the subject of the film is a famous woman, the con-
sumer – who has much less systemic power than she does – can exert patriarchal,
sexually violent power over her by watching her without her consent.
Indeed, Hayward and Rahn (2014, 52) refer to this “double-appeal” of the
non-consensual sex video in that, firstly, they humiliate, and, secondly, that
humiliation creates an equalizing force. As Thomas Fahy (2007, 79) argues
with regards to Paris Hilton’s sex tape, these videos “erode” economic
boundaries through bodily consumption:

Paris Hilton – at her most glamorous, most erotic, and most embar-
rassed – provides her audience, particularly those who feel disen-
franchised by economic inequality, with an outlet for their fantasies and
frustrations. Her eroticized body promises intimate access to the world of
celebrity and upper-class privilege.

The fact that the celebrity body doesn’t need to be authentic supports such an
assertion. The popularity of the celebrity lookalike video suggests that a key
pleasure in consuming the celebrity body through the sex video (thus erasing
or undermining economic privilege, as well as the ability to consent) is the
humiliation. As noted by Hayward and Rahn (2014, 57), the pleasure for
these viewers in punishing and humiliating the celebrity body is less about
whether or not she truly is punished, but rather producing (either through a
lookalike or through the celebrity herself) a symbolic punishment: “enact[ing]
various forms of retribution on women who have achieved media prominence
and/or various positions of affluence or power by representing them in an
unambiguously sexual manner.” If the woman consents to this representation,
the thrill of retributive humiliation is lost.
110 New Media, Old Power
In this way, the public circulation of private sex videos operates similarly to
the circulation of private stolen nude photos. As I have argued elsewhere
(Patrick 2021), it is quite easy to find consensual nude or nearly nude images
of famous women, just as it is to find images of women willingly engaging in
sexual acts on camera. The power dynamics at work in the stolen sex tape,
then, are part of a broader system of rape culture that normalizes sexual
violence: the thrill is in the violation, the exertion of power over the to-be-
looked-at object (see Mulvey 2010 [1979]). Once the female object takes that
power back – by, say, commodifying that gaze – the thrill of humiliation and
domination is gone. As noted earlier, if Marilyn Monroe had willingly posed
nude for the inaugural issue of Playboy, it would have “sullied” the magazine:
it is a woman’s consent that makes something “dirty,” “tacky” and “despe-
rate.” “Class” becomes tied to notions of purity, innocence and, notably,
acceptance of violation.
Such norms have broader implications for victims of sexual violence, of
course. Certain women – usually those who are not white, middle-to-upper
class, cis/heteronormative, thin, able-bodied, white women – are perceived as
inviolable (see Crenshaw 1991; Harding 2008; Moorti 2002; Patrick and
Rajiva forthcoming). Yet, even if a woman fits the demographic mold of the
“ideal” victim, there are behaviors that invalidate her victimization, including
speaking out about it (much less profiting from it). The woman who publicly
accuses someone of “rape” is already understood by many to be a fame-
whore, much like Hilton and Kardashian (or Smith, Lohan, Cyrus). She
makes an accusation of violence in order to become famous or to benefit
financially in some way: the lawsuit against a former employer; the profile in
a news magazine; the invitation to a talk show. Each public appearance
delegitimizes her claim to victimhood because, in the contemporary attention
economy, any media coverage is beneficial to her. This is why, perhaps, for
many observers the #MeToo movement that centered the experiences of mostly
famous white female celebrities failed to live up to its revolutionary potential
(see Kay 2020; Phipps 2019; Rottenberg 2019)1: it was difficult to separate the
victimization of female celebrities from the system in which they supposedly
benefit from any and all media attention. Ironically, it is the evidence of their
victimization (their loss of cultural and symbolic capital after refusing to capi-
tulate to a predator’s demands) that undermines their victimization (as they are
framed as “has been” actresses, desperate to reclaim lost cultural and symbolic
capital). In such discussions, the ways that sexual violence benefits men – their
wielding of cultural and symbolic capital against women – are left unarticulated.
The gendered dynamics are clear: it is normal and expected for men to wield
their power and money to gain sex, but it is shocking and distasteful for women
to wield their sex to gain power and money (this relation will be explored in
more detail in Chapter 5 on Donald Trump).
Hilton, of course, was understood in similar terms, despite her not being
the only one that “benefitted” from her violation. While the details sur-
rounding its release remain sparse, the news reporting suggests that it was her
 Celebrity in Crisis 111
co-star and ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon who released the tape, and Kevin
Blatt [whose Wikipedia page describes him as a “sex tape broker” (Kevin
Blatt Wikipedia)] who distributed it. Yet it was Hilton who was considered
the beneficiary: “Instead of fighting to stop it coming out, [Hilton] allegedly
made a deal with [Salomon], which meant she could keep a cut of the profits
from the subsequent DVD release” (Hamilton Spectator 2007*). What “cut”
of the profits did Hilton receive? Was it less or more than Salomon or Blatt?
Does it matter in the end?
Similarly, the reporting on Kardashian’s sex tape implicitly frames her as
“benefitting” from it more than the pornographic entertainment company
that distributes (and thus profits from) it. The story of Kardashian’s sex tape
and lawsuit was much more prominent in my news corpus, as this event
occurred in 2007, several years after Hilton’s stardom had cycled through a
similar process. Indeed, the similarities between the two women’s trajectories
made it even more difficult for many to understand or accept Kardashian as a
“victim” of violation. Again, her public refusal to embrace the tape positions
it as a non-consensual text, whether she is lying about this or not. Like
Hilton, Kardashian’s 2007 settlement with Vivid Entertainment seemed to
prove to many that a violation did not occur. The reporting on this settle-
ment, for the most part, obscured the interests of anyone else involved,
including Vivid Entertainment founder Steven Hirsch [with whom Karda-
shian reportedly settled for $5 million (WENN 2007a*; WENN 2007b*)]. By
the time these settlements were made, the tapes had already been publicly
circulated. Hilton and Kardashian had the choice to either allow these men to
profit from their sexuality, or to take action to receive a share of the profit,
which, again, does not negate their violation. If they had been paid actresses,
participating in Hollywood love scenes willingly and consensually – yet not
benefiting nearly as much from this participation, symbolically or economic-
ally – they perhaps could have had a chance to be perceived as “legitimate”
stars. In bypassing these systems, however, both Hilton and Kardashian pro-
duced a flurry of anxiety over these new media formats, shifting power
dynamics, and white women’s sexual capital.

Transgressive Sex in the Celebrity Sex Tape

Before moving on to discuss how Hilton’s reality show contributed to her star
image, I want to first consider what it is about the sex tape that is so trans-
gressive, since little of the outrage appeared to involve its non-consensual
nature. As noted earlier, many (wannabe) celebrities have released sex tapes
without launching into stardom the way that Hilton and Kardashian did. At
the same time, however, few celebrities’ pasts (say, those who posed for nude
photos at some point) haunt their stardom the way the sex tapes haunt Hil-
ton’s and Kardashian’s. Why do these discursive connections remain so, as
Sara Ahmed (2012; 2020) would say, “sticky”? What do Hilton and Karda-
shian reveal about the terms of fame for women – or the shifting terms of
112 New Media, Old Power
fame for women – that must be repeatedly policed or contained by the invo-
cation of the sex tapes? In this section I draw on the work of Sarah Banet-
Weiser (1999) and Blaine Roberts (2014) to argue that the sex tapes do two
dangerous things: firstly, they destabilize the beauty–sexuality binary as well
as concepts of “authenticity” that structure norms around white liberal
American femininity, which, in turn, makes too visible the gendered sexual
economy that structures the terms of success for beautiful white women in
America, thus exposing the fallacy of post-feminist and meritocratic ideology.
The notion of the “beauty–sexuality” binary refers to the longstanding
connections between white female chastity and beauty/morality. In her thor-
ough history of beauty norms and practices in the American south, Blaine
Roberts (2014, 3) discusses centuries-long conceptions of beauty as inherent
to white femininity:

[M]ost white southerners in the antebellum era held that elite white
southern women were inherently beautiful because of their class status
and moral superiority. Their defining physical marker was their white-
ness, a trait secured by their privileged position atop the social and racial
hierarchy.

This beauty was conceived of as an inner beauty, tied to a woman’s sexual

and moral status, and invested in a project of white supremacy and nation-
hood (Roberts 2014, 10). However, as modern consumer culture took hold –
and, with it, the cosmetics industry – notions of beauty shifted toward the
surface of a woman’s body, as something that can be “adorned” or
“achieved” through the proper consumption methods (Roberts 2014). This
adornment included whiteness itself, as numerous face creams, powders,
bleaching products, etc. allowed women – even if they were not fully or
“properly” white (i.e., upper class) – to now access the status and privilege
that whiteness offered (Roberts 2014). Of course, moral panics developed
around such beautifying practices, as they simultaneously served to destabi-
lize notions of “authentic” whiteness while also being “perceived as danger-
ous instruments of female liberation,” adopted by young, independent,
increasingly public and urban women (Roberts 2014, 9). In this way, a threa-
tening tie also emerges between beauty and sexuality. No longer is beauty
clearly defined in opposition to sexuality (i.e., purity), but, rather, beauty
practices become associated with forms of “public” femininity that have long
been derided for their lack of respectability: namely performers (actresses) and
prostitutes, known by many as “painted ladies” (Roberts 2014).
These developments were important for several reasons: firstly, the shift in
understanding of beauty as a tool wielded by independent public women, as
noted by Roberts, stood in stark contrast to later, feminist framings of beauty
as subordination. This tension over the role of beauty in female oppression/
liberation echoes similar debates over sexuality – or, more specifically sex
work and pornography – that shape understandings of female celebrity today.
 Celebrity in Crisis 113
Is the woman who sells her sex in order to achieve independence, economic
freedom, or fame, merely a tool of patriarchal oppression or does she threaten
it? Does the conservative backlash against her signal a broader danger that
her sexual independence/success poses, or is it merely a misguided but correct
concern for her “influence” over other young women who might think that
sexual exploitation is the tool to success? I will return to these questions later
in the chapter, in the context of post-feminist culture of the early aughts, but I
first want to discuss the other important implication in the shifts around
conceptions of beauty from inner, inherent quality of whiteness to an outer,
physical attribute that can be altered: the concept of an “inauthentic” white
female self.
The concept of a discernable, “authentic” white womanhood is key to white
supremacist, patriarchal societies. If beauty/whiteness is no longer an inher-
ent, inner quality, but, rather, something that can be adorned at will (and,
here, as will be discussed shortly, the Kardashians serve as excellent examples
of this adornment), a beautiful white woman can no longer be trusted to be
who she appears to be. Not only does this threaten notions of racial purity,
but it also threatens the terms of sexual-economic exchange, particularly in
regard to domestic, heterosexual partnerships. Indeed, women of lower status
(or respectability) can now use their appearance to trick/trap a man into
marriage who might otherwise have not chosen her (and this, again, connects
back to the broader shifts toward consumerism in mid-century America that
gave rise to the modern figure of the gold digger as discussed in Chapter 3).
Beauty becomes less and less a sign of purity and virtue, and, increasingly, a
facade: a weapon that is wielded against men. As noted earlier, this connects
beauty to sex, rather than keeping them distinct, and positions beauty/sex as
conceptually outside of (or even opposed to) the woman’s “authentic” inner
self. Although beauty/sex and self may still align in the morally virtuous
woman (although in contemporary discourses “health,” which cannot be
adorned at will, is more likely to be correlated to morality than beauty), this
gap produces much anxiety over the role that both beauty and sexuality play
in (white) women’s success.
This anxiety is reflected, as noted by Sarah Banet-Weiser (1999), in the
contradictory discourses that surround such public spectacles as the female
beauty pageant. In particular, the Miss America pageant – a clear example of
rewarding women for their beauty – works extremely hard to set up a dis-
tinction between beauty and sexuality by invoking “inner” forms of beauty as
demonstrated and measured via the “other,” non-sex-based categories in the
pageant: specifically, the interview, the talent competition, and the charitable
cause measured against the swimsuit competition (Banet-Weiser 1999). Of
course, the pageant cannot fully abandon the focus on outer beauty, as
women who do not fit hegemonic beauty standards are not deemed worthy of
such extensive public attention. However, the pageant works hard to separate
beauty from economic reward. Firstly, women are awarded scholarships
rather than cash (unlike the less “classy” pageants such as Miss USA or
114 New Media, Old Power
bikini contests) to obfuscate, as argued by Banet-Weiser (1999, 10), the com-
modification of beauty and sexuality by the media industry (the pageant is,
after all, a mediated event). But perhaps even more importantly, rewarding
contestants with a scholarship limits their agency in this commodification
process, assuring that they cannot spend the money as they desire (Banet-
Weiser 1999, 10).
As Banet-Weiser (1999) notes, the bathing suit competition, which is often
framed by pageant contestants as “classier” than the bikini contest (not only
because of the reward system, but also because of what it does not reveal
about the woman’s body and sexuality), takes on extreme importance in these
contradictory spaces. The swimsuit competition recoups the “materiality of
femininity” and “the seemingly changeless female body, fixed in age and the
embodiment of heterosexual desire” (Banet-Weiser 1999, 74), while also
demonstrating the discipline of the body in a non-sexual way:

[B]reasts are not supposed to jiggle, butts and thighs are to remain firm.
Firm, rigid flesh represents and reflects the intense discipline of each
contestant – and, importantly, firm flesh does not merely reflect the phy-
sical discipline it takes to create such a body. Rather, tight and contained
flesh represent a tight and contained moral subjectivity.
(Banet-Weiser 1999, 68)

In other words, any suggestion of sex is removed or contained in this display,

thus re-affirming the established distinction between white women’s beauty
and their sexuality outlined above, which, in turn, “reaffirms the central dif-
ference between men and women—namely, that women ‘possess sex’” (Banet-
Weiser 1999, 75), they are visible as sex objects, but they do not desire, or
pursue sex (they are not sexual subjects).
Even more interesting, then, is that this disciplining of the female body
requires her to be silent. The bathing suit competition is the only part of the
pageant where the physical body is clearly demarcated from the subjective
self: the contestant does not speak during this portion of the pageant, thus
reducing her to “a body spoken for or on behalf of” (Banet-Weiser 1999, 76).
Reducing women to their “silent, sexualized, white bod[ies],” in Banet-Wei-
ser’s argument, powerfully and immutably fixes their gendered, homogenous
identities, while the other competitions – the interview and the talent show –
demonstrate malleable and heterogenous performances of the self, thus resol-
ving the “contradictions and tensions of femininity in late twentieth-century
consumer culture” (1999, 74). These performances of the self, in turn, reflect
an investment in American liberal individualism; a conception of a self that
“can be made and constantly improved upon—that there exists somehow a
best You out of the possible ‘Yous,’ and you can choose to be it, become it,
and have it, with work and discipline” (Banet-Weiser 1999, 92). This perfor-
mance of self is crucial to the logics of both reality television and celebrity
and are often used to undermine women who participate in these domains.
 Celebrity in Crisis 115
But they also, as noted by Banet-Weiser (1999), map gender and sexual “dif-
ference” onto the inner, authentic self so that, for women, there remains a
distance between “self” and “sexuality” – a distance that we see reinforced
discursively through films such as High School Musical which insist that
growing up (maturing into sexual adulthood) brings a loss of self (see Chapter
2). As will be discussed more in the last part of this chapter, this distinction
takes on extreme importance when it comes to female celebrity in particular,
a site of extreme anxiety over the authentic self–sexuality binary in con-
temporary media economies.
Yet, it is worth noting that all these practices (beautification, pageantry,
swimsuit wearing, modelling, acting, etc.), when first introduced, produced
extreme anxiety over traditional gender roles, meritocracy, and women’s
morality (see Banet-Weiser 1999; Pullen 2005; Roberts 2014). Indeed, the
organizers/owners who profited from each form of female commodification
worked hard to delineate their spectacles and participants from more licen-
tious forms of female display and behavior (such as actresses), much like most
media today use actresses as the ideal to which “lesser” forms of feminine
public display are contrasted (i.e., the sex tape/reality star). Celebrity women’s
sex tapes pose a threat to contemporary ideals around purity, authenticity, the
commodification of the female body, as well as liberal (feminist) discourses
about empowerment.
Firstly, the sex tape is a violation of the socialite’s class and racial status. A
white woman’s so-called purity is deeply intertwined with white supremacy
and patriarchy, such that her sexuality must always be fully known and con-
trolled by the (white) men around her. In this way, Kardashian’s sex tape is
particularly transgressive, as it featured her having sex with a Black man.
Indeed, the public responses to the sex tape with R&B singer Ray J demon-
strate that, for the two of them, the miscegenation was an outrageous and
deplorable act. The events surrounding the 2007 Christmas parade in Jack-
sonville illustrate the ways in which sexual mores outweigh other norms of
respectability, for it was Ray J – and not his sister singer Brandy (who,
admittedly, was much more famous and popular than him at the time) that
was pulled by parade officials, despite her concurrent legal troubles.
In many ways, Kardashian herself is often “racialized” (much more so than
Paris Hilton), via her family background, her personal aesthetic (which
usurps the practices mentioned earlier wherein women “whiten” themselves),
and her social/romantic associations. The Kardashians often make reference
to their Armenian heritage, including within my dataset (for example Lo
2007*; New York Post 2007*), particularly in explaining their physical
appearance. While that does not make them racialized (Armenia is in Eastern
Europe – the Caucasus region to be precise and, therefore, Caucasian), their
dark features and voluptuous curves represent an exoticized, although no less
unattainable form of mainstream beauty than that of the stick-thin, blonde-
haired, blue-eyed Hilton. As numerous scholars have noted, there has long
existed in America a hierarchy of whiteness, wherein certain European
116 New Media, Old Power
identities and ethnicities are (discursively) constructed as “whiter” because of
their invisibility (see also Deliovsky 2010; Dyer 1997; hooks 1992; Patrick
2017). Normative whiteness not only prioritizes the Northern/Western Eur-
opean physical features (blue eyes, blonde hair), but also insists on the erasure
of ethnic difference across categories of whiteness. In publicly celebrating their
Armenian heritage, then, the Kardashians “perform” non-whiteness in ways
that complicate their racial status as white women.2 They, therefore, compli-
cate centuries old notions of purity and authenticity tied to white female
beauty and sexuality, which are further destabilized via highly public inter-
racial romances.
One must take such racial relations into account when examining public
responses to and framing of Kardashian and Ray J’s sex tape. At the time of
the tape’s filming (reportedly in 2003) and release (in 2007), Ray J was the
more famous participant of the two, as both the younger brother of popular
singer Brandy, as well as a singer and actor in his own right. The ensuing
scandal affected Ray J quite differently than it did Kim, who, either despite or
because of the sex tape, transcended the text and built unanticipated media
longevity. While initially celebrating the tape, and saying it was good for his
career, Ray J’s stardom soon faded to the point that, ironically, he is now
most known for being Kardashian’s sex tape partner (although unlike Hilton’s
partner Rick Salomon, Ray J was not credited/blamed for the release). Ray
J’s fall from grace illustrates an interesting phenomenon wherein the concern
over the (d)evolution of American/celebrity culture is rooted in the increased
visibility of racialized sexuality. As noted above, Ray J made headlines in
2007 when the news reported that he was dropped from the Jacksonville
parade wherein he was originally slated to appear alongside his sister Brandy
(Associated Press 2007*). When news of Ray J’s attendance sparked public
outrage, city officials claimed that he was never booked alongside Brandy and
reassured everyone that it would only be her serving as grand marshal: “Our
goal wasn’t to offend anyone. It’s a Christmas parade. It’s about families, the
birth of Jesus Christ” (Associated Press 2007*). The Associated Press article
also notes, however, that Brandy had “also battled negative publicity” that
year, as she was potentially facing charges of vehicular manslaughter after her
Land Rover hit another car killing the driver, a 38-year-old wife and mother
(she was never charged in the accident). The sexual transgression by Ray J –
who, again, was a Black man having sex with a white woman on camera, a
relation that has inspired decades of racial anxiety and violence in America –
was, in city officials’ view, worse than Brandy’s fatal collision, even though
this incident could have sparked similar outrage as the arrests of Hilton and
Lohan for dangerous driving. The greater transgression, as created through
this discursive event, is miscegenous sexuality.
This is not to say, however, that Hilton’s tape – featuring a white man – was
not as scandalous, but rather, that the “scandal” of sexuality was inflected
differently by whiteness. In the case of Hilton, I would argue that her
increased proximity to “whiteness” (as opposed to Kardashian’s), signified by
 Celebrity in Crisis 117
blonde hair and blue eyes and associations with other white socialites (her
sister Nicky Hilton, her family), in combination with her superior class status
produced a different kind of “crisis” over female sexuality. The privileged
white woman, as noted earlier, is not only expected to remain sexually pure
and respectable (see Roberts 2014), but she also must hide or downplay her
own ambition. While this is true of women across varying class status, it is
particularly true of the born-rich white woman whose class privilege is
understood to be secured. The double-scandal produced by the “leaked” sex
tape, therefore, is not only the sex itself, but also the wielding of it in a
broader project of ambitious fame-seeking, evidenced by the subsequent par-
ticipation in a reality show.
Media critics responded to this transgressive, calculating sexuality by
reducing Hilton back to her sexuality, reminding readers that she is, at the
end of the day, a mere body (see Banet-Weiser discussion above) to be acted
upon by others at their will. This framing, in turn, deters potential empathy
that (female) readers might have with Hilton and undermines her position as
an aspirational figure (indeed, as will be discussed in the second section of
this chapter, Hilton is a “success” by media standards but is not framed that
way). In 2007 Hilton’s storage locker was broken into with many of her per-
sonal belongings being stolen. The news media, predictably, positioned her as
a “slut” whose privacy/sexuality cannot be violated because it was already
tainted: “How can one intrude upon Paris Hilton’s privacy?” asked Howard
Gensler, noting that Hilton walks red carpets, appears in reality shows, and,
of course, appeared in a sex tape (2007a*) and thus has no claim to privacy.
In their summary of Hilton’s response to the violation, the Kitchener-Water-
loo Record (2007*) asserts that “Nobody exploits Paris but Paris!” (my
emphasis), demonstrating precisely what I argue, is Hilton’s transgression in
the eyes of the news: profiting off her own sexuality.
As a privileged, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, young thin woman, Hilton ben-
efits from having an assumed purity to transgress. The double transgression
on Hilton’s part – not only being too sexual but also using it to her advantage
(and not disguising that use through a more traditionally acceptable pursuit
of, say, acting) – inspires extremely harsh pushback from reporters. Some
examples are included in Table 4.1, along with the news sources from which
they were culled.

Table 4.1 Descriptions of Hilton

Descriptor of Hilton Journalist Newspaper/Source
“bamboo-legged bimbo” Haskins 2007* Columbia Daily Tribune
“self-pimper” Sutherland 2007* Kitchener-Waterloo Record
“walking blow-up doll” No author Canwest News Service, 2007*
“[acts] like a drunken slut” Gensler 2007a* The Philadelphia Daily News
118 New Media, Old Power
Calling Hilton a slut, a bimbo, and a “walking blow up doll,” again, reduces
her to her sexuality. Yet one could also argue that these labels work to emphasize
how far below her elevated class position Hilton has fallen. The references to
self-exploitation and “pimping” suggest that the outrage is not only about sex,
but also about the ways in which Hilton’s visible, public sex exposes rich white
femininity to not be in itself enough for women (i.e., not enough to produce a
fulfilling life). In this way Hilton’s transgressive star text has much more in
common with Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears whose public struggles, as
argued in the previous chapter, demonstrate the disappointments – or cruel
optimism (Berlant 2011) – of reaching aspirational celebrity status.
Perhaps, however, the most significant transgression of both women’s sex tapes
is making these connections across varying forms of stardom too visible. The
celebrity sex tape reveals the ongoing (non-consensual) commodification of
women’s sexuality in a post-feminist era where women have supposedly moved
beyond such forms of exploitation, or, if they do participate in such exploitation,
they do so willingly and ironically. They are in on the “joke” because sexism is
no longer a threat to white women’s equal participation in the economic system
(McRobbie 2004; 2007; 2009). Here, again, the non-consensual nature of the
tapes (as discursively constructed by Hilton and Kardashian), takes on utmost
importance. Unlike the (often intoxicated3) women who expose their breasts for
Girls Gone Wild videos, thus partaking in the invitation to construct oneself as
object of the gaze, the stolen sex tape is not willingly and ironically circulated by
its participants, but, instead, is read and reframed that way by a (highly cynical)
post-feminist media culture. In the next section, I examine how the media pushes
back against forms of stardom that expose the fallacies of a supposedly equal,
meritocratic America.

Success Policing
If the previous section was interested in taking the sex tape seriously as a key
characteristic of contemporary female celebrity, this section examines more
closely the claim that this, in combination with the reality television show,
represents a significant development in early aughts’ celebrity culture: a time
wherein digital technologies were potentially shifting the terms of fame for
privileged white women, while post-feminist discourses insisted upon how far
such women have come. As in the previous section, I argue, somewhat para-
doxically, that the form of stardom inhabited by Paris Hilton and Kim Kar-
dashian (in different ways, notably) is not necessarily new. What is new is the
economic and, therefore, structural relations between their bodies, their labor,
and the media. I want to challenge the common (media) framing of them as
women that represent a decline in traditional American values around femi-
ninity such as modesty, purity, skill, and hard work by linking their stardom
to other forms of both female stardom and “success” (which, as seen
throughout this book, are not necessarily one and the same), but also to
acknowledge that the ways in which their celebrity circulates do represent a
 Celebrity in Crisis 119
challenge to traditional forms of media gatekeeping. I also want to unpack
the assumption that reality television production is more exploitative (parti-
cularly of women) than scripted production, thinking through the claims that
position reality participants as having less agency than models, actors, etce-
tera who participate in casting calls, audition sessions, and filmed love scenes.
In the first part of this section, then, I examine what I call the media’s
attempts to “success police” Paris Hilton, insisting that her public presence is
illegitimate. I examine the contradictory narratives around her – including the
shepherding of her into a reality format that underlines this illegitimacy – that
simultaneously produce her as a star, while denying or obfuscating their role
in that production. I also examine the show as a site of “work” and think
through this form of labor versus more traditional forms of media labor. I
look at how both the reality show The Simple Life and the news reporting on
Hilton produce “success,” for women, as distinct from celebrity (I call this
“non-success”), and what this distinction does, ideologically, in relation to the
narratives of meritocracy upon which all media workers rely for their own
security and legitimacy. In the second section I turn my attention to the whys
of this phenomenon: what does the media get out of using these women in
this way? What do the women get out of using the media in this way? In this
section I pay particular attention to the differences between Hilton and Kar-
dashian, noting that their different fame trajectories represent different chal-
lenges to post-feminist, corporate capitalist media in an era of precarity,
conglomeration, and neoliberal imperatives around the production of self.

Famous, But Not Successful Womanhood

Paris Hilton has been described, in recent scholarship as, the “ultimate
example of post-modern identity” (Fairclough 2008, para. 13) linking her to a
contemporary “post truth” era wherein “objective facts are less influential in
shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (“post-
truth” Oxford Dictionaries). This state of post-truth can be connected to a
confluence of cultural trends in America, including, notably, the rise of reality
television formats (which favor the affective realm over the rational/objective
one) and the rise of social media platforms, which mirror the broader frac-
turing of grand narratives into personal(ized) narratives and performances of
self (see, for instance, Hearn 2013; Marshall 2010; Marwick and Boyd 2011).
These related trends are both traceable via the public paths and discourses
around two of America’s most famous heir celebrities of the 2000s whose
similar narratives are fractured into dramatically different reality television
story arcs. Paris Hilton and Donald Trump (who is the focus of the next and
final chapter) are, indeed, much more similar to one another than their reality
programs – and the news reporting on them – would suggest. The differing
narratives around the success and celebrity of each, as will be shown in both
this chapter and the next, demonstrate that success is impossible for celebrity
women to embody or perform properly. I call this the paradox of “non-
120 New Media, Old Power
success,” in order to distinguish it from the public “failures” such as Lohan
and Smith, discussed in the previous chapter (as well as Hilton, once she was
arrested for driving under the influence). The non-successful celebrity is a
woman who is successful by media (and capitalist) standards – rich, visible,
talked about, sexually consumed – but is understood (and framed to be)
unsuccessful (too visible, too much, too ambitious, too sexual).
Much like Donald Trump, Paris Hilton was born into wealth. However,
Hilton vastly outperformed Trump in growing her fortune from a relatively
modest $5 million (compared to his $200 million) to approximately $100
million by the age of 34 (Cromwell 2015). As discussed in a 2007 feature-
length profile story on famous women’s mothers in Vanity Fair by Judith
Newman, Paris Hilton is the great granddaughter of hotelier Conrad N.
Hilton. Both Conrad and his son, Paris’ grandfather, Barron Hilton believed in a
“strong work ethic” (Newman 2007*) and, upon passing away, limited the
inheritances for their children, giving much of their wealth away to charity
instead. This left many – including profile writer Newman – skeptical of the net
worth of Paris Hilton’s immediate family, noting that her father, Rick, worked as
a real estate broker in the Los Angeles area and likely earned a mere $400,000
per year from the Hilton family fortune. Hilton’s mother Kathy’s own brief his-
tory of dabbling in acting and reality television was invoked in this same profile
to bolster the narrative of a money-hungry family willing to do whatever neces-
sary for fame and attention (Newman 2007*).
Despite this narrative, a few of the stories about Paris Hilton that appeared
across 2007–2008 did dedicate space to unpacking, and sometimes even
highlighting the many ways in which Hilton had grown her own fortune over
the years. These articles discussed Paris’ affiliated labels (including fashion
and fragrance lines) and her other ventures into non-reality television media,
including a few brief stints into modeling and singing. It is not all that unu-
sual for Americans who inherit wealth and/or fame to spin that publicity into
a personal brand and media career. What is more remarkable are the ways
that the framing of such a public career is shaped by gender, such that when
two heirs (Hilton and Trump) enter the domain of reality television they are
put into drastically diverging narratives. The white female heir is corralled
into a fish-out-of-water narrative where her privilege is cynically presented as
snobbery and, at times, even contempt for the less privileged (Fox’s The
Simple Life) while the white male heir’s privilege is legitimized and authorized
as host of his own “business” show where he – and only he – has the acumen
to adjudicate the skills and qualifications of people who are, for the most
part, much more educated and qualified for the job than he is (NBC’s The
Apprentice, see Chapter 5). The broader news media accept the gendered
terms set up by the reality show producers (until, of course, Trump’s pre-
sidency poses a larger threat to their corporate and political interests and
suddenly his actual economic worth and business practices become a con-
cern). Even Hilton plays along in this ruse: much like Marilyn Monroe she
dons the bimbo persona at will but, I would argue, her profiting from this
 Celebrity in Crisis 121
persona visibly and directly positions this as a much more dangerous practice
than it is for actresses who channel their performances into profits for studio
heads.
Fox’s The Simple Life (2003–2007*) is a rich site of analysis for its depic-
tions of female entitlement, success, work, and wealth. The show’s first season
is set up as a socio-economic experiment, wherein Paris Hilton and Nicole
Richie, two highly privileged young women – presented as no more than
shoppers and partyers, living off their inherited wealth – are removed from
the glamourous Los Angeles scene and sent to live in rural Arkansas for five
weeks. Their credit cards and phones are taken away, as are all the comforts
to which they have grown accustomed. The show premiered to a massive
audience of 13 million viewers and its second episode earned the highest rat-
ings for Fox network that season (Rogers cited in Ruth, Lundy, and Park
2005, 23), suggesting that audience response (and, potentially, media com-
mentary) drew even more viewers to the show than were originally interested.
The Simple Life dedicates much time, particularly in the first two episodes, to
showing how spoiled the girls are, how out of touch they are with “ordinary”
American life (Paris Hilton apparently thinks Wal-Mart is a store that sells
walls), and how difficult it is for them to have to work for a living.
Indeed, what differentiates The Simple Life from most reality television is
its emphasis on labor. While, as numerous scholars of reality television note,
most of the genre is invested in disappearing the labor of participants (see, for
instance, Hearn 2013; Littler and Williamson 2017; O’Connell 2020; Wood,
Kay, and Banks 2017; Wood 2021), The Simple Life is centrally focused on
work. The young women are informed by their host family (the Ledings) that
they will need to contribute both to the household and the local economy
during their stay. They not only have a list of (mostly neglected) chores to do,
but also are sent out each day to a different place of employment, such as a
local dairy farm or fast-food joint. They are woken before sunrise and ush-
ered out the door (although they always arrive late) to spend the day doing
“good, old-fashioned work” (Ep. 1) for a menial wage (usually about $50 for
the day). Obviously, Paris and Nicole often shirk their responsibilities, and
are shown cheating their way through a task and/or actively sabotaging the
business, thus producing either humor or horror in the viewer (depending on
how seriously one takes the show4). Yet, in between those antics, there are
often long montages of actual work being done, interspersed with their com-
mentary about how little they have ever had to work before. In other words,
the show depicts the women working in order to demonstrate that they do not
work. Yet, Paris and Nicole (and often, it seems, whatever unfortunate man-
ager has agreed to take them on for the day) are seemingly all in on the joke –
otherwise, they would be fired from the outset. Indeed, sometimes they suc-
ceed at working, as when Paris mentions she likes taking and delivering
orders at Sonic burger chain (Ep. 2). Here, we can see the post-truth emerge
via the reality television format: our feelings of disdain toward Hilton and
Richie (and their own disgust with having to work) are supposed to outweigh
122 New Media, Old Power
the visual evidence of them working hard (and sometimes liking it!), con-
structing them as useless and lazy brats.
Across 2007 and 2008 the news media mirrors this paradoxical framing but
with much less irony (and, notably, with much less participation on her part)
by producing Hilton as a celebrity, via reporting on her exploits, while con-
stantly undermining her celebrity. Much of this reporting follows two distinct
trends: the textual containment of Hilton (the minimizing of both her cultural
output and her cultural impact) and the production of Hilton as a non-suc-
cess. In making these arguments, I am not trying to recuperate Hilton as a
“hard working” and talented celebrity – indeed, I believe that would reinforce
the hegemony of meritocratic ideology – but, rather, to demonstrate the limits
of acceptance into these systems, even when one abides by their rules.

Textual Containment
One way in which the media police female success is through what I call
textual containment (see Patrick 2017) – a gendered pushback against or
negation of any efforts made by a reality star to legitimize or extend her
public presence by appearing in more reality shows (which entails, at the
least, an element of affective labor) or by launching other product lines
(which involves more traditionally recognizable labor). Textual containment is
not only about minimizing the exposure of audiences to the “work” produced
by Hilton, but it is also about minimizing the significance or impact of Hil-
ton’s celebrity on culture more broadly.
The crisis of containment crystalized in the news reporting about Hilton’s
DUI arrest and brief jail stint in 2007. Suddenly, it seemed, “serious” jour-
nalists were having very public moral reckoning with the effects of the cor-
poratization and conglomeration of news as they were seemingly forced to
cover frivolous, click bait celebrity stories such as Hilton’s arrest. I refer to
this commentary as meta-coverage, as journalists across America were pub-
licly critiquing their peers for covering Hilton with little acknowledgement as
to the incentive to do so (if she generates clicks for papers, which are
increasingly beholden to advertisers, that does suggest that there is public
interest in her), or their own role in this cycle (what does it mean to be cov-
ering coverage of Hilton?).
For example, in early 2007, right around the time of Hilton’s arrest, the
Associated Press announced in an article that they would not be running any
Paris Hilton stories for a week. Philadelphia Daily News reporter Howard
Gensler (2007b*) astutely noted that “no one noticed” until the announce-
ment was made, thus their attempt at denying Hilton the status of news-
worthiness instead brought her name (back) into a conversation that no one
was having. The Columbia Daily Tribune humor columnist Irene Haskins
(2007*) lambasts Fox, CNN and MSNBC for their nonstop coverage of Hil-
ton’s trip to prison, noting other important news of the day that was shelved
or minimally covered: “Everything else was put on hold to bring us a tear-by-
 Celebrity in Crisis 123
tear report of her impending and much anticipated breakdown.” Another
version of the same sentiment was echoed by Eugene Robinson (2007*) in his
editorial for the Washington Post, noting that Hilton’s life is reported on “not
only by the supermarket tabloids but also by cable networks and respectable
newspapers—which seem a bit embarrassed about the whole thing.” The
reporter apparently shares this embarrassment, writing:

“Warning: This is a column about Paris Hilton. Those who are trying to
ignore the travails of the famous-for-being-famous hotel heiress might
want to avert their eyes. The rest of you, join me in horrible surrender.
We have no choice but to pay attention.”
(Robinson, 2007*, my emphasis)

Notwithstanding the tongue-in-cheek tone of these articles, the suggestion

that those writing the news have “no choice” but to write about Hilton not
only falsely attributes institutional power to Hilton, but also minimizes the
role that actual institutions (i.e., news media) play in perpetuating Hilton’s
stardom.
The other way in which Hilton’s celebrity is both produced and denied by
the media is through the discursive framing of her simultaneously and para-
doxically as something new (in a bad way), but also something that has long
existed, and therefore not special or significant. The few defenses of Hilton in
the news media I found continued to frame her as “useless” and lacking
“talent” or “skill,” but pointed out that this phenomenon – in terms of female
celebrity at least – is not new or unusual. For instance, in a feature-length
report from The Washington Post, also carried in the Ottawa Citizen, Robin
Givhan (2007*) writes about the “It” girl throughout modern history as an
admired yet “wispily insubstantial” embodiment of her era. “It” girls have
long existed publicly, Givhan argues, to serve no purpose other than
embodying a “cultural mood.” They do this by being famous for no parti-
cular reason other than “pedigree” and by attending famous parties. What
Hilton has going against her, in the eyes of this reporter, is the bad timing of
her public partying ways (note that this is right around the time of the global
economic recession): “[Hilton] is the golden-haired embodiment of all that
seems to have gone wrong in the culture. She is an uncomfortable measure of
decadence, indifference and selfishness” (Givhan 2007*).
But why does Hilton, rather than, say, Donald Trump, come to be the
public measure of “decadence, indifference, and selfishness”? And why, in this
neoliberal moment, are these traits – which are indeed much valued when it
comes to rich men – so derided in public women? Why the insistence not to
frame Hilton is business terms, despite her public involvement in numerous
fashion lines, fragrances, and film and television appearances? The second
important feature of the reporting on Hilton is the insistence upon framing
her, despite these endeavors which have made her rich and famous, as non-
successful. Again, I do separate this conceptually from “failure” – which was
124 New Media, Old Power
signified by Hilton’s 2007 DUI arrest and will be addressed in the final section
of this chapter – to demonstrate the work being done by the media to frame
her this way.

Success and Non-Success

Hilton is a success by numerous metrics for American women: she is rich, she
is famous, she is beautiful, and she has close friendships and family (Nicole
Richie and her sister Nicky Hilton). Yet Hilton did not come by this success
in “traditional” ways that shore up narratives of American meritocracy.
While other female celebrities make their ways to similar levels of fame and/
or privilege through more culturally sanctioned media work (i.e. acting roles
or music videos), Hilton ended up in the same place without putting in the
requisite hard “work,” or at least the kind of labor that can be perceived as
working on a craft (see, for instance, Wood, Kay and Banks 2017, on reality
television as “illegitimate cultural work”). However, Hilton’s place in the
public eye is not entirely of her own (or Fox Network’s) making. If there were
no reporting on her, most people who do not watch the television series would
not encounter Hilton’s star text at all. Particularly in the early days of Hil-
ton’s fame – before social media became such prominent fixtures of the
celebrity ecosystem – there was little need for journalists to engage so exten-
sively with Hilton’s fame. So, why did they?
Hilton was held up in the news media, not as an object of aspiration, but as an
object of derision. She served as a figure to demonstrate the wrongs of ambi-
tious, visible, and “talentless” female celebrity. When she was arrested in 2007
news reporters repeatedly verbally berated her, calling her a “spoiled brat”
(Ridley 2007*), a “celebutard” (Peyser 2007*) and “bubblehead” (Li 2007*), as
well as a “useless, extravagant human being” who has “contributed nothing”
(Carroll 2007*). While this discursive policing of Hilton served important func-
tions beyond the media (which is the subject of the next section of this chapter),
it also served an important function within the media. It allowed journalists (and
other cultural workers) to position themselves as better than her: more legit-
imate, more hardworking, less privileged, and less corrupt (despite them equally
serving the same larger economic interests, i.e., media owners).
Journalists are just as immersed in narratives of meritocracy as others in
Western neoliberal capitalist societies. Like most career-driven people, jour-
nalists working for mainstream news organizations train for years, likely work
in unpaid internships somewhere along the way with long overtime hours, and
often rely on informal networks and hiring practices in order to secure jobs
and rise through the ranks in what is, in many ways, a creative industry (see
Conor, Gill and Taylor 2015). It is certainly possible that journalists like to
imagine themselves as having “earned” their job/security through hard work
and skill rather than privilege (privilege to be able to attend university, to be
able to work precariously for extended arduous hours when starting out, to be
able to “freelance” in the contemporary environment, thus foregoing
 Celebrity in Crisis 125
5
employer benefits/insurance ). Furthermore, as more and more citizens/audi-
ences are called on to participate in news production, feeding news organiza-
tions with footage and/or tips, journalists become less and less the gatekeepers
over content itself (Happer, Hoskins, and Merrin 2019; Higgins-Dobney and
Sussman 2015). Like other workers in the capitalist system, journalists likely
have either a conscious or unconscious investment in maintaining their own
legitimized status in the eyes of the general public. Sorting others into
“worthy” and “unworthy” celebrity categories helps to uphold this legitimacy.
In a particularly derisive piece for the New York Post, Andrea Peyser
(2007*) calls upon a long tradition of slut-shaming vocabulary and stereo-
types to denounce Hilton’s celebrity. Making no mention of her own role in
perpetuating Hilton’s stardom precisely through articles like this, Peyser calls
her a “useless, talentless, directionless and pantyless [sic] skank” who “con-
tributes nothing – except for disease and driving summonses” (2007*). Pey-
ser’s article is one of the few in my Hilton corpus that so blatantly relies upon
this abject and ableist figuration of Hilton as a wanton slut: “Her career was
launched by a starring role in a blurry sex tape, in which Paris engaged in
energetic, barely legal intercourse with a man, not her husband” (my empha-
sis). Hilton was not married at the time, so the inclusion of this qualifier –
“not her husband” – serves not to clarify the identity of her male partner (in
fact, Rick Solomon is not even once named in this piece) but rather to
underline a key element of her transgression in the eyes of Peyser: pro-
miscuous, public, unmarried sexuality.
This idea of a sexed-up heir having non-marital sex (here, I should perhaps
clarify I’m referring to Hilton and not Trump) and parlaying that into fame
and fortune inspired some reporters to ruminate on precisely how fame has
changed in recent years. In contrast to the earlier-discussed piece by Givhan
(which argued that famous-for-being-famous women have always existed), a
feature for The Toledo Blade in Ohio dedicates over 900 words to analyzing
why exactly Hilton, along with best-friend and co-star Nicole Richie, as well
as model Anna Nicole Smith are all famous. Ryan E. Smith (2007*) starts off
by speaking to industry experts to find out why fame has gone from being
“earned through your accomplishments” to now being “predicated on how
you look, how you act, and whether you’re an interesting story, regardless of
accomplishment” (my emphasis). Although he then contradictorily claims
that this is not new, and then goes on to juxtapose a history of “accom-
plished” people (namely men: Charles Lindbergh and John Glenn to be pre-
cise) to the “fame without particular achievement” of, for example, Zsa Zsa
Gabor and Farrah Fawcett (both women), no mention is made by Smith of
this gendered divide. Why is it that women are celebrated (or celebritized) for
how they look or act and whether they are “an interesting story”? Why does
the proliferation of media platforms – underlined by Smith as being a central
force behind this “new” era of fame – afford the opportunity for more women,
specifically, to become famous? These questions are not raised, let alone
answered by the writer of this story. Here it is possible again to trace a shift to
126 New Media, Old Power
“post-truth” news: a reporter’s sense that the terms of fame for women have
changed is favored over the facts provided in his own article suggesting
otherwise.
Yet it is not only journalists that are invested in these gatekeeping
mechanisms that delineate a supposedly new and less legitimate fame. Celeb-
rities, too, use these boundaries to distinguish themselves from stars like
Hilton, revealing even more the broader media investment in narratives of
meritocracy. For example, “media heiress” Lydia Hearst (who likely would
cringe at that descriptor used in the New York Post) admonishes those who
might compare her to Hilton: “I am a supermodel and have the award to
prove it, and [Hilton] is a celebrity. There’s no comparison” (New York Post
2008*). Here Hearst’s choice to invoke her “supermodel” career as exemplary
of her legitimacy instead of her family’s media dynasty demonstrates just how
aware the billionaire class of owners is of the importance of meritocratic
narratives. These narratives trickle down to all classes and levels of fame.
Former Miss USA winner Shanna Moakler laments the lessening of achieve-
ment (in apparent comparison to beauty pageants) embodied by Hilton:
“That’s not talent and it sure doesn’t deserve fame” (WENN 2008*). Again,
this ties back to Banet-Weiser’s (1999) discussion of the beauty pageant,
which convinces many of its participants – and members of the public – that
the scholarship structure somehow trumps the exploitation of women’s beauty
and sexual objecthood. Even the beauty pageant queen wants (or needs) to
believe in meritocracy for her own success to feel earned and legitimate.
This sentiment, I would argue, is particularly prominent across the cultural
sector. The modeling and acting industries are highly competitive environ-
ments in which most participants directly experience the “unfairness” of
nepotistic, racist, sexist, ageist, ableist, fatphobic, and classist casting prac-
tices on a daily basis. As I have written elsewhere (Patrick 2015), the casting
process is so dehumanizing and exploitative that one often has to be able to
mentally and emotionally (re)invest in meritocratic myths in order to keep
oneself invested in the system, despite repeated rejection and obvious struc-
tural privilege and oppression. Most media production practices are invisibi-
lized in mainstream media discourses, particularly those around casting, one
of the least transparent and “legitimate” spaces of decision making in the
industry. Casting decisions are so complex that they do not merit public
recognition the way that other sectors in the industry do: there are no casting
awards because no one knows, at the end of the day, whose decision it was to
cast whom in which role.
The actor, of course, is also extremely limited in the agency that they exercise
over their public career. Most actors never reach the kind of fame embodied by
Hilton (or Moakler or Hearst, quoted above) and are lucky to be able to find
steady work or gain access to an acting union. There are different tiers of success
in this profession where the most famous at the top get to choose their roles,
many in the middle are unionized, play speaking roles, and earn a living wage,
and many more are non-union, precariously employed, background workers
 Celebrity in Crisis 127
who are silent, exploited, underpaid, and uncredited. Indeed, it is the most
exploited in this industry who are repeatedly called upon to take off their clothes
and appear nude alongside the main character, but their silence ensures their
ongoing exploitation: without a line, most of these women will never make it
into the acting union and transition to speaking roles, better pay, and symbolic
power. In what ways is this less exploitative than joining a reality program where
they can at least speak on camera, promote their name and their “brand” (i.e.,
their non-reality “work”), and potentially earn a living from endorsements, “tell-
alls,” other reality appearances, etcetera?
Yet those at the top of the media hierarchy are quick to undermine women
who earn a living this way and are not seen as having paid their “proper”
professional dues. Writer and comedian Tina Fey, who likely has never had to
tell a director that she will not take off her clothes for a silent role, decided to
weigh in on Hilton’s fame in 2007. After berating Hilton in a radio interview
with Howard Stern, Fey apologized for her language but held onto her sen-
timent: “Paris Hilton is a terrible role model and a terrible young woman. She
needs to be ignored” (WENN 2007c*, my emphasis). Notwithstanding the
gendered hypocrisy in making such a statement to Howard Stern of all
people, the production of Hilton, again, as a topic of conversation that
simultaneously needs to be “ignored” works to re-frame her success as a non-
success: she is too talked about, so much so that when others in the media
(who, again, have much more symbolic power than she does) talk about her, it
is her own fault. She also does not successfully embody and perform success,
as evidenced by the framing here of her as a terrible role model. Who frames
her that way? Why? Are children, in fact, looking up to her?
A 2007 piece for the New York Times, would certainly suggest that this was
not the case. In the story, Stephanie Rosenbloom (2007*) interviewed several
young pre-teens and found that they do not hold such celebrities in as high
esteem as the news media assume (perhaps precisely because the news media
regularly call them “useless” “sluts” and “bimbos”). 10-year-old Jamie
Barton asserts that Hilton “spends all this time acting like everyone else
doesn’t mean anything” and that “It’s just me, me, me.” When asked about
Hilton, 12-year-old Diamond Martin says: “I don’t see her as a role model.
I’m not sure what she’s really ever done, actually” (Rosenbloom, 2007*). The
same story, however, contains many ominous quotes from adults contra-
dicting the kids’ claims, such as Dr. Richard Gallagher, director of the Par-
enting Institute at the Child Study Center of New York University, arguing
that despite the tweens’ apparently sensible judgment in relation to these
celebrities, “there may be a delayed effect” on them. CosmoGirl editor in
chief Susan Schulz says that “every kid is trying to have a Paris Hilton kind
of night at their prom” without qualifying what, exactly, a “Paris Hilton kind
of night” is (extravagant partying? Making a sex tape? Working on a farm in
rural America?) or reflecting on her magazine’s role in the contemporary
culture. Here, again, Hilton’s name is invoked where it need not be, to induce
a moral and protectionist panic, much like the news media did with Vanessa
128 New Media, Old Power
Hudgens and Miley Cyrus in Chapter 2. The news media insist that Hilton is
both successful (being emulated by adoring young fans) while simultaneously
producing her as non-successful (quoting young fans who mirror the media’s
negative discourses about her). In the next section, then, I examine the anxi-
ety that connects Hilton (and Kardashian) to larger moral panics about the
sexualization of young girls, their “failing” role models, and notions of female
empowerment within corporate media systems.

Post-feminist Authenticity: Sexual Exploitation and Entrepreneurship

The news media’s constant policing of women’s success demonstrates a strong
investment in narratives of meritocracy and gender equality (i.e., post-femin-
ism). The success of women like Hilton seems to pose a sort of threat to these
narratives, and this section examines why that might be. I want to return here
also to Kim Kardashian as a foil to Paris Hilton and to think through the
ways that Kardashian, in particular, was not only capitalizing on her sexuality
(as women have long been doing via acting, marriage, prostitution, etc.), but
was entrepreneurializing her sexuality in a much more agentic and calculating
way than Hilton. Before the age of social media “influencers,” Hilton and
Kardashian were both publicly profiting from their own stardom: “launched”
via private sex tapes and reality programs; propagated via news, blog, and
paparazzi coverage (and, for Kardashian, social media); and multiplied via
fragrance, cosmetics, and fashion lines (as well as nightclub appearances).
While Hilton’s celebrity, for the most part, faded, Kardashian’s has grown
stronger over the ensuing years, as she has managed to avoid embodying the
“trainwreck” figure, despite the media’s apparent thirst for such a downfall.
The difference between the two stars’ public trajectories, in many ways, par-
allels the differences between post-feminist and misogynist ideologies.
As noted throughout this book, the popular post-feminist sentiment of the
1990s and early 2000s was beginning to fade by the time of the global recession in
2007. Post-feminist logic suggested that the increased visibility of (thin, white,
heteronormative) women in media reflected a broader “empowerment” of women
that signaled the end of gender inequality (see Gill 2007; McRobbie 2007; 2009).
Although post-racial narratives also surged at this time – particularly with the
election of Barack Obama – the notion of an equal playing field in America dis-
sipated for most with the economic collapse and the rise of precarious forms of
labor (including and exemplified through reality television production). At the
same time, concerns were also mounting about the effects on young girls and
women of increased sexualization of culture and “bad” female celebrity role
models (discussed throughout this book). Post-feminist “empowerment” (via, for
instance, ironic sexism or visual displays of the female body) was increasingly
being framed not as aspirational but, rather, as threatening to young girls and
women (see, for instance, Dines 2010; Durham 2009; Levy 2005).
Indeed, a key characteristic of this time was the public scrutiny and anxiety
over the influences of sexually “empowered” young female celebrities like
 Celebrity in Crisis 129
Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan not performing success
properly. This improper success was made visible on and through mediated
representations of their “leaking” sexualized bodies: not only via upskirt
paparazzi shots of their genitals (see Schwartz 2011), but also via sexualized
performances that no longer appealed to (implicitly male) viewers, such as
Britney Spears’ lackluster 2007 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) perfor-
mance, or Lindsay Lohan’s Marilyn Monroe photo shoot discussed in the
previous chapter. Indeed, these performances served as pedagogical moments
for media commentators, amplifying the attention paid to them and produ-
cing outrage as an acceptable public response rather than apathy or even
empathy for these women (see also Watkins Fisher 2011 on Spears).
As discussed in the previous section, Hilton’s mere existence as a public
figure already marked her out as a non-success because she did not follow a
more traditional route to stardom, yet she also fit the mold of the so-called
“empowered” young beautiful female celebrity who cannot contain her leak-
ing sexuality. Hilton, Spears, and Lohan, because of their racial and class
privilege (the latter one applying to Hilton, particularly), should have com-
prised the “can-do” girls of the post-feminist generation (see Harris 2004),
reaping the rewards of a second wave feminist fight for choice, economic
equality, and sexual freedom. Yet, clearly, they each faltered – signified via
public “breakdowns” and arrests – demonstrating the difficulties for young,
privileged women to manage their newfound “freedom” or sexuality (see
Fairclough 2008; McRobbie 2007; 2009). As discussed in earlier chapters,
their failures are coded in the media reporting as individual limitations and
character flaws, rather than the results of ongoing systemic misogyny and
exploitation. However, it should be noted, that the concerns expressed for
young women in the media were rarely about these young women: they were
more often about the imagined effects of their behaviors on other young
women, comprising the audience. The concern over the effects of these young
women, rather than their experiences, suggests that there is much at stake in
their failures and successes. Perhaps the apparent lack of fulfillment found in
being a rich, famous, sexy young women will turn off others from striving to
attain a similar kind of success?
This is not to say that capitalist success offers no rewards for women, but
rather that the extremely limited terms of participation are structured so as to
contain any possible broader (symbolic) power they might wield. As noted in
Chapter 2, the threat posed to traditional mainstream media’s institutional
power by young women’s increasing symbolic, economic, and sexual capital
remains significant – particularly for former Disney stars who generate bil-
lions of dollars in profit before they come of age. The simultaneous celebra-
tion (via fame and economic reward) and discursive denigration of these
young women’s sexuality recycles and transforms longstanding moral panics
over the role of sexuality in young women’s lives for a modern, post-feminist
era. As noted by feminist scholars, the virgin–whore dichotomy has long
served as a disciplinary mechanism that sorts women into worthy and
130 New Media, Old Power
unworthy subjects for marriage and reproduction (and here, of course, the
racial and economic status of the idealized white girl take on extreme impor-
tance) (see Attwood 2007; Lerum and Dworkin 2015; Valenti 2008; 2009).
However, as is argued powerfully by Liana Y. Bay-Cheng (2015), neoliberal
and postfeminist understandings of female sexuality have mapped an addi-
tional imperative onto the virgin–whore dichotomy: the “neoliberal script of
sexual agency.” The neoliberal commodification of women’s empowerment
discourses around sex have resulted in an additional metric by which women’s
sexuality is policed and disciplined: their ability to demonstrate “agency” over
their sexual choices, whether in pursuit of sex or abstinence. In other words,
certain women’s sexual behaviors – whether sexually active or abstinent – are
acceptable if framed in terms of personal choice and responsibility. The “slut”
is, in contemporary discourse, the girl or woman who is acted upon or who
gives in to male desire, rather than the celebrated sexually agentic women
who “command[s] sexual attention, demand[s] sexual pleasure, and pursu[es]
sexual fun, all without apology” (Bay-Cheng 2015, 281–282).
While this apparent celebration of agency may externally structure or
police the sexual behaviors of non-celebrity girls and young women (and here,
it is important to note that Bay-Cheng is not claiming that girls necessarily
abide by these scripts), I would argue that this celebration of agency does not
operate similarly for celebrity women. Interestingly, Bay-Cheng (2015, 283)
uses Miley Cyrus’ provocative 2013 MTV VMA performance with Robin
Thicke as evidence of this new “celebration” of sexual agency, noting that
“many commentators used blogs and social media to support what was pre-
sumed to be agentic sexual self-expression.” I do not dispute that some blogs
and social media commentators supported this form of “sexual self-expres-
sion,” but to suggest that the performance was generally received this way is
misleading.6 Furthermore, Bay-Cheng’s (2015, 282) claim that popular dis-
courses now celebrate women who “present as unabashedly desiring and
initiating, apparently unbound from and unconcerned by gendered sexual
norms” does not ring true with the commentary circulating around Hilton
and even more so Kardashian (because of the “calculating” nature of her
stardom, launched by “copying” what happened to Hilton), and, therefore,
more unpacking of this claim needs to be done. To be sure, Bay-Cheng’s
(2015) work does attend to the racial and class dynamics of these scripts, but
her focus is on the under-privileged side, without a consideration of how they
operate differently for the most privileged, a gap I would like to address
briefly here, as I think it illuminates some of the important contradictions
around post-feminist and popular feminist thought.
While Bay-Cheng’s work does provide a helpful framework in which we
can understand the contradictory celebrations of certain women’s sexuality, I
would like to build on this model by adding a third dimension by which
public performances of female sexuality are judged: authentic versus strategic
sexuality. Thus, while the sexually active woman is framed along a scale of
highly agentic (“empowered,” choosing pleasure and seeking attention) to
 Celebrity in Crisis 131
non-agentic (“victimized,” pleasing others, seeking validation), she is also
framed along a scale of authentic (exercising agency for and on behalf of her
authentic sexual desires) versus strategic (performing sex/agency in order to
attain something else: fame, money, status). These relations are broken down
in Table 4.2.
This notion of a strategic or “inauthentic” sexuality – a female sexuality
that is wielded to gain a woman status, money, etc. – is not a new concept (see
earlier discussion of white women’s beautification practices) but takes on new
dimensions in the post-feminist era of “empowered” womanhood. As female
agency becomes increasingly equated with sexual display (as opposed to a
more feminist conception of agency as involving autonomy, pleasure, safety,
health, etc.), it becomes conceptually more difficult to distinguish between
agentic and non-agentic performances of sex (i.e., is the attention that a pro-
vocative Miley Cyrus receives of her own making or is she – like Hannah
Montana warns us – being tricked into thinking that it is of her own making
by an opportunistic industry?). One way to help in this distinction is to add
authenticity into the equation, something that no female celebrity, because of
the structure of celebrity itself, can perform or embody adequately. As audi-
ences, we cannot access the authentic, inner self of the celebrity – female
celebrity is inherently unknowable, and thus always already transgressive.
This produces an interesting tension as popular feminism somewhat displaces
post-feminist discourses in the public domain. The emergence of the “new”
Miley at the 2013 VMAs, along with Beyoncé’s self-titled album release that
same year (in which she samples Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “We Should All
Be Feminists” speech) are often taken as the turning point in which popular
culture more broadly, and female celebrities more specifically, begin to publicly
embrace feminist politics. This “popular feminism,” as Banet-Weiser (2018) calls
it, is a form of liberal feminism that favors “leaning in” (see Sandberg 2013) to
corporate, capitalist systems of exploitation rather than a broader and more
radical feminist politic of disruption and revolution. Yet, one of the appeals
of popular feminism is its claim to delineate the supposed “internalized” male
gaze (or false consciousness) from an “authentic” female sexual subjectivity
(or subjecthood), signaled by a woman’s self-awareness. In other words,
Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus are not simply commodifying feminism, they are
using feminist discourses to differentiate their performances of sex from the
falsely conscious woman who thinks she has agency but does not (if you can

Table 4.2 Mapping Authenticity onto Bay-Cheng’s (2015) Agency Model

High Agency* Low Agency*
High Authenticity* Actresses and models “Victims”/“trainwrecks”
Low Authenticity* Sex tape/reality stars Sex workers/porn stars
*This is not a claim about these women’s actual levels of agency or authenticity, but rather a
claim of how their agency is discursively constructed.
132 New Media, Old Power
name the exploitation, you can delineate yourself from it). Their perfor-
mances are, therefore, agentic, and ought to be celebrated in a neoliberal
environment that rewards agency (and capital). But these performances are
often not celebrated because, I would argue, they are not authentic – the
female celebrity always benefits in some way from sex, unless it is stolen from
her. This bears repeating: the only way to ensure a famous woman’s sexuality
is authentic – wherein authentic means that she cannot and will not profit
from it – is to remove her agency, to violate her, and post her photos, to use
her image and her sexuality without her consent.
This, in my view, is why the sex tape star is not a celebrated figure of neo-
liberal potential for women, as her non-consent (or authenticity) was annulled
by her profiting from it. Although both Kardashian and Hilton are framed as
agentic in the release of their sex tapes, they do not discursively benefit from
this agency: instead, they are punished for it, insulted, mocked, and framed as
“terrible” people. Whether or not they truly exercised agency over the release
of the tapes, they financially benefitted from them, thus removing these texts
from the realm of authentic (i.e., stolen) sexual imagery and into the agentic.
In other words, a celebrity that profits from her sexuality is always too agentic
and not authentic enough. This point, notably, is where Kardashian and Hil-
ton’s star trajectories diverge, as Hilton’s subsequent loss of control over her
image in 2007 (after being arrested and photographed crying in the back of a
police car) moved her into the authentic realm of the trainwreck celebrity.
While Hilton’s stardom then fades with much of the dominant post-feminist
thought, Kardashian thrives in a popular feminist (and misogynist) moment,
even though she strategically wields her sexuality and therefore will never be
publicly celebrated for it.
Instead of latching onto a neoliberal, post-feminist sense of women’s
empowerment through sex, Kim Kardashian embraces patriarchal/capitalist
logic and sells those ideals back to her audience. This was evidenced for some
commentators, such as The Atlantic’s Megan Garber (2014), in Kardashian’s
massively successful Hollywood app/game: “Kim takes Hollywood’s basest
expectations about women—its treatment of them as, essentially, walking sex
dolls—and doubles down.” As Alison Harvey (2018) notes, the mixed critical
reaction to the highly successful game suggests a disconnect between how
journalists and audiences perceive the devalued media and branding work of
female celebrity. Kardashian, in the game and in her image more broadly,
eschews the rules of meritocracy, embracing and making visible the manage-
ment and monetization of women’s sex in the media: posting more and more
nude photos rather than trying to counter or change that public image of
herself. In the process, she not only distances herself from hegemonic (chaste)
white femininity, but also from feminism itself. She does not use feminism or
feminist discourses to differentiate herself from a falsely conscious celebrity/
woman who uses her sexuality in the “wrong” way. Yet, at the same time,
Kardashian does not publicly fail in the way that other female celebrities do.
Unlike Hilton, Spears, and Lohan, who are destroyed by success (as signified
 Celebrity in Crisis 133
through their respective arrests, hospitalizations, and trips to rehab), Karda-
shian has yet had no public downfall, no “trainwreck” moment to serve as a
cautionary tale for young girls and women and to move her into the role of
the “authentic.” Unlike Hilton, Spears, and Lohan, her danger is not that
girls won’t want to be like her: it is that they will. And what is dangerous
about this scenario is not that girls and young women will “use” their sex,
capitalize off of it, “enjoy it,” etc. – for this is what the media tells them to do
every day – it is that they will strategically wield it. They will entrepreneur-
ialize their sexuality, no longer channeling the profits from their sexual capital
into the hands of agents, producers, studios, etc. Much like the dancers dis-
cussed in the prologue to this chapter, women like Kardashian challenge the
appeal of the more “respectable” media work of acting, modelling or beauty
pageants via their ability to directly and visibly reap the profits of their own
sexual capital.
In contemporary debates, these anxieties have shifted to “influencer” cul-
ture, wherein mostly white hegemonically beautiful women use social media
to build an audience, monetize their content, and thus bypass the traditional
gatekeeping structures of the industry. This is not to argue that they are not
exploited – the owners of social media companies are, in many ways, the new
studio heads – but it is to say that the traditional gatekeeping apparatus of
the media no longer functions to sustain an entire industry (agents, casting
directors, producers) as well as a continuous pipeline of exploitable, vulner-
able, and ambitious young women directly into the offices and hotels of
powerful/predatory men. Indeed, social media in many ways represents the re-
routing of this pipeline, away from director’s hotel rooms and directly into the
(devices of the) audience themselves. Much like the beauty pageant, social
media “ask[s] women to take those ‘basic assets of themselves’ – their
bodies – and construct them for display” (Banet-Weiser 1999, 65). While
women’s basic assets remain their bodies, “men’s natural assets include talent,
intellect, and entrepreneurial ambition” (Banet-Weiser 1999, 65). In the next
chapter I further examine how the media legitimize this gendered conception
of assets via the figure of Donald Trump and the women around him.

Notes
1 Although the focus on “speaking out” in the #MeToo movement itself becomes
revolutionary in that it undermines the argument that those who claim to be victims
are doing so to become famous because, of course, as more women use the hashtag,
the less remarkable such an utterance becomes. This is one reason that public tes-
timony has long been vital in the feminist fight against sexual violence (see Kay
2020; Moorti 2002; Phipps 2019).
2 Additionally, the Kardashian sisters’ consistent and repeated (and, for many, cal-
culated) involvement with men of color – particularly Black men – conjures his-
toric anxieties over sexual relations between white women and Black men in
America. Furthermore, their connection to the infamous O.J. Simpson murder
trial, in which their late father Robert Kardashian was both friend and counsel to
Simpson, also associates them with violent and criminalized Blackness. When
134 New Media, Old Power
journalists had to choose how to introduce their audience to Kardashian in 2007–
2008, only a handful linked her to Simpson (17 out of 101), while most used the
sex tape as a starting point, helping to legitimize the narrative that she came out
of nowhere with a sex tape (when the reality is that she, like Hilton, is well-con-
nected and runs in some of the most privileged circles in California).
3 And this intoxication already situates their participation as coercive, although there
remains a limited understanding of these videos as sexual violence.
4 In one of the few reception studies of The Simple Life, Ruth, Lundy, and Park
(2005) found that viewers generally took a skeptical stance toward the show’s
depiction of “reality,” repeatedly referring to Paris and Nicole as “acting” on the
show.
5 As argued by James Fallows (1997), the movement of journalists themselves up the
socio-economic ladder has produced a disconnect from working-class audiences and
values, and increasingly, their discourse thus reflects attitudes and views that align
with the more privileged in society.
6 A cursory Google search of the top headlines of the week after the performance
suggests that reactions were quite mixed.

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5 Neoliberal Success Stories
Trump(’s) Women and Apprentices

Prologue
There is a classic episode of the popular 1990s sitcom Friends (S1 E5,
“The One With the Butt”*) wherein the group’s resident aspiring actor,
Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) is cast in a film with his hero Al Pacino.
An exuberant Joey shares the news with his friends but when they ask
about the role he hesitates, muttering something under his breath. We soon
learn that he has been cast as Pacino’s “butt double,” and, though he
remains excited for his potential “big break,” the others cannot help but
crack jokes at his expense. In the end, Joey is fired for taking the role
much too seriously (trying to emote through clenched cheeks), and he
gripes about disappointing his mother, who he is sure will immediately
recognize the recast.
The underlying gender politics of this scenario are clear: if Joey were a
female character, struggling to make it as an actress in New York City, being
cast as a nude body double would be neither as amusing nor trivial as it is for
a man. Her friends would not make the same kinds of jokes, and her parents
would not be hilariously looking forward to seeing her big naked break
onscreen. As I have argued elsewhere (Patrick 2021, 13), the male nude body
is always more than the sum of its parts, and thus its objectification is
humorous and subversive, rather than banal and depressing.
There was only one time in my casting career where I had to cast a male
nude role. It was for a romantic comedy and the lead male actor – like Al
Pacino in the fictional scenario described above – had enough cultural capital
to request a butt double. There was a scene in the film where he and his love
interest are in the woods, and he disrobes and runs naked into the lake. It was
to be shot from behind, only revealing the actor’s backside. But he would not
do it. I had to find a butt double.
Finding a double – nude or not – is always a challenge because, not only
does the person have to have the same build and coloring as the actor they
are doubling, but they also have to be fully available on specific shooting
dates. There were many times I found stand-ins, which is a solid gig if one can
get them – you are booked for every day the lead is on set, paid a union wage,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268659-7
 Neoliberal Success Stories 141
and required to do very little work (standing in place of the actors while the
tech crew tests lighting, camera placements, sound, etc.).
Doubles are more challenging to cast than stand-ins because they need to pass
as the actors in the shot. Nude doubles are, of course, even more challenging to
find. For some, it is easier to say yes to this kind of gig, as their face will not be
shown and thus the body could belong to anyone. However, for others, the tra-
deoff of being nude on a film set (where there can be hundreds of people looking
on) is not worth it if their face (and name) is not shown.
I put out the call for the butt double to the agents in town, sending a photo
of the actor we were doubling along with his height, weight, and other stan-
dard measurements. Soon a few submissions started trickling into my inbox,
but each attached photo was of a hugely beefy, tanned, muscular man – the
kind of typically “macho” build that one might expect to see in a Chippen-
dales dancer. This was not at all the kind of body I needed. My main actor
was not built like a Magic Mike cast member; he was whiter, thinner, and
taller than everyone willing to take the gig. The actor who willingly trades in
his sexual capital is a type – nude, muscular, rock solid – whereas the actress
who does so is typical (a female nude dancer’s body does not differ from the
typical actress body in the same way). Men typically do not have to look a
certain way in order to enter the media industry. And they are able to say no
to those kinds of gigs.
My colleague and I were not sure of what to do. We called each agent, but
no one had anyone else who was both willing to take the gig and available on
that day. Would they have to cut the scene? Change it so that the clothing was
still on or the camera angle would not reveal too much? Reverse the scenario
so that it was the female character whose nude body would be shown?
Luckily, we did not have to suggest these alternatives to the team – one of the
agents’ assistants called me back. He did some acting on the side and was
willing to take the gig himself. He was close enough in size and coloring to
make it work. He was hired.

Introduction
At the start of 2007, NBC was airing its sixth and final non-celebrity edition
of Trump’s business reality show The Apprentice. Ratings had been in a
steady decline since the breakout first season, and, in an attempt to revive the
tired format, the latest season was relocated from gritty New York to the
dreamscape of Los Angeles: center of the American film industry and celeb-
rity culture. For this particular season, producers upped the ante by forcing
each week’s losing team to live outside in a makeshift camp, but they also
brought on board – for the first time – Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and
son Donald Trump Jr. to act as his “advisors” in the boardroom (in an eerie
preview of his eventual nepotistic White House staffing policy).
In addition to this latest version of The Apprentice, other notable events
were occurring in Donald Trump’s life at the time, including a volatile public
142 New Media, Old Power
feud with actress, comedian, and (at that time) co-host of The View talk show
on ABC, Rosie O’Donnell, about whom Trump made numerous fat-phobic,
misogynist, and homophobic remarks. Trump was also heading up high-pro-
file real-estate development deals, initiating and defending several lawsuits,
welcoming both a new son with his third wife, Melania (24 years younger
than him), and a new granddaughter into his family, as well as being honored
with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Although I will discuss several
of these events in greater detail below, I wanted to initiate this chapter with a
view as to how Trump’s star text already preceded and exceeded The
Apprentice, and how the mainstream media presented him not only as a
legitimate “billionaire” businessman (albeit with “bad” hair), but also as a
peer – if not superior – to Rosie O’Donnell in the world of entertainment and
celebrity culture. This legitimacy enabled Trump to evolve his business
gameshow to allow him to exercise his “power” over other celebrities – a
power that, I would argue, he tried to both re-capture and extend via his
political career.
The L.A. re-vamp of The Apprentice did not work to drum up ratings and,
according to several reports (see Collins 2007*; Kaplan 2007*; Reuters
2007*), the show was on the verge of cancellation in the summer of 2007.
Still, commentators seemed to be surprised that it was not on the fall line up
while Trump had already begun boasting publicly about “quitting” the show
(and, in another eerie premonition of how the media would deal with Trump,
there was noticeably little fact-checking on this claim). Yet, after a few years
of falling ratings, there was also a shake-up that summer at the top levels of
NBC, with Ben Silverman coming on board as co-chair of the network (Col-
lins 2007*). One of Silverman’s first moves was to revive The Apprentice, but
instead of having “regular” contestants, the show would cast celebrities to
compete for charity, rather than the (apparently) coveted position in one of
Trump’s companies. This format echoed numerous other contemporaneous
reality television programs which replaced the non-famous contestants with,
for the most part, B- or C-level celebrities, including Celebrity Big Brother in
the UK (which premiered in 2001 and lasted until 2018) and The Surreal Life
(2003–2006), which mimicked the format of MTV’s original reality hit The
Real World (1992–) with celebrities living together in a Hollywood mansion.
The success of the celebrity reality format speaks not only to the increasing
willingness and expectations of celebrities to (over-)share their intimate selves
with their fans in the age of new and social media (Giles 2017; Jenkins 2013;
Marshall 2010; Marwick and Boyd 2011), but also to the spillage of celebrity
and entertainment into other realms of media and culture more broadly (see
also Andrejevic 2016). As Celebrity Apprentice 1 in particular illustrates,
today’s fading/aging celebrities – who often can no longer rely upon the more
traditional skill or talent they used to wield, as it is no longer valued in the
marketplace – are both expected and encouraged to entrepreneurialize their
stardom (and this was reportedly part of the criteria in casting the show, see
Kinon 2007*), as long as it is channeled through the acceptable routes of
 Neoliberal Success Stories 143
mainstream media and corporate-sanctioned understandings of success
(and here, the show doubly legitimizes Trump as not only signifying
“success,” but also as stand-in for these structural powers more broadly).
Furthermore, as will be elaborated upon in this chapter, such a route is
highly gendered, with women’s sexuality (again) being exploited and
undermined by their media colleagues both within the show and beyond
it, in the news reporting.
This chapter is separated into three sections. In the first section, I discuss
Trump’s relations to women and the sexual–economic capital exchange that
structures most of his relationships. I examine the sexual implications of his
celebrity, noting that, for Trump, his economic success and celebrity grants
him access to sex he would otherwise not have; in other words, for him the
reverse scenario plays out compared to those women whose sexuality grants
them access to fame and money. I then outline his blatant misogyny as dis-
played by his feud with Rosie O’Donnell after she publicly challenged his
image of success (which is intended to be a representation of capitalist suc-
cess). In essence, Trump’s treatment of women is shown to mirror the treat-
ment of women by the media – both measure women in terms of their
available sexual and symbolic capital and thus there is no need for the media
to undermine Trump’s success.
Indeed, from there I look at how the media, in fact, does the opposite:
unquestioningly producing Trump as a success, despite his numerous failures
(economic and moral). I look at this from two angles: firstly, the reporting on
him and his show which celebrates his success and produces him as a celeb-
rity. Contrasted to the responses to other female celebrities discussed
throughout this book, the media willingly reported on Trump’s private life,
which was purposefully integrated into his public image both within The
Apprentice and beyond. I also then examine how “success” is inflected by
gender on the show itself: contrasting the treatment of women with the
treatment of men.
Finally, I analyze Trump’s Apprentice in relation to the intensification of
neoliberal governmentalities (see Couldry and Littler 2011) in the aftermath
of the global recession. I examine the show both as a result of neoliberalism –
the proliferation of “cheaper” production methods that also happen to cele-
brate business and capitalism – and a tool of neoliberalism: a pedagogical text
that teaches audiences the “rules” of entrepreneurial business. I trace the
uptake of The Apprentice pedagogy in schools as reported on by the news
media across 2007 and 2008 and the celebration of charity over wealth redis-
tribution as portrayed on the show. While I wish to avoid too deterministic a
stance, I do argue that Celebrity Apprentice, in many ways, served as the
proverbial canary in the coalmine of American society, signaling a shift
towards the celebritization of culture, the legitimization of nepotistic and
neoliberal corporate structures, and a widespread normalization of racist and
misogynist discourse, particularly when coming from “authentically” anti-
politically correct men like Donald Trump.
144 New Media, Old Power
Trump’s Sexual Capital
“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab them by
the pussy. You can do anything” (The New York Times 2016). These now-
infamous words of Donald Trump were captured on a “hot mic” during a
2005 interview with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. Access Hollywood is
an entertainment reporting show that is produced and distributed by NBC
and is hosted by a former president’s nephew. Much like other, more “ser-
ious” forms of journalism, the show contributed to Trump’s celebrity: legit-
imizing him via numerous appearances across the years, while also amplifying
his celebrity by exposing Trump to audiences who might not otherwise be
watching or consuming his texts. In this “behind the scenes” (i.e. authentic)
moment, Trump’s misogynist worldview is laid bare. However, this view is
also clearly visible in the “onstage” moments of his life via his investment in
beauty pageants, his public feuds with outspoken women, the casting policies
and formatting of The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice, and his highly
publicized relations to the women in his own family. What is of note in this
quote, then, is not only Trump’s free admission to sexually assaulting women
without consequence, but, also, that the media (here encapsulated by Billy
Bush and NBC) was so enthralled with Trump’s brand and celebrity that they
did not dare challenge him. Trump serves as a stark contrast to the female
celebrities discussed throughout this book who, although they did not sexu-
ally harass others, were publicly derided for their sexuality, their lack of
“talent,” their ambition, and their improper ways of embodying and per-
forming success.
Trump’s comments further suggest that his celebrity was of use to him, not
only in terms of political power, but as a way to access women who would not
otherwise be interested in or attracted to him. Here it is important to distin-
guish between women who had sex with Trump consensually, whether they
were interested in his money or not (and, as noted throughout this book, a
woman’s status within the capitalist system has long been determined by her
sexual relationships with men) and the women who were harassed, assaulted,
or coerced into either sexual or even platonic relationships with a man who
held more power than them, and potentially direct power over them, as their
employer. The Apprentice – and Celebrity Apprentice – were paths not only to
public legitimacy, but also to building sexual capital for Trump while also
authorizing his wider misogynist treatment of women. This point is crucial
and will be developed throughout this section: whereas women like Anna
Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, and Kim Kardashian are demonized for “using”
their sexuality to attain success, Trump’s use of his so-called “success” to
attain sex (consensual and non-consensual; paid and unpaid) is normalized
and even rewarded by the media and society more broadly (for he was elected
president just weeks after the Access Hollywood tape was made public). Of
course, such double standards are a feature, not a bug, of a capitalist patri-
archal system. No matter how women “use” their sexuality, they are
 Neoliberal Success Stories 145
“whores” (either gold diggers for marrying rich men/enjoying sex, or fame-
whores for directly selling/profiting from or their sexuality), while the men
(like Trump) who “buy” said women are “successful” and aspirational models
of hegemonic masculinity who can do, and get away with anything.
In her discussion of sexual capital, Ashley Mears (2015) delineates between
the bodily capital accrued and exchanged by (young, thin, beautiful) women
and the appropriation of said capital by (rich, older) men. Tracing the con-
cept from Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, Mears (2015, 23) outlines
how “embodied capitals are convertible for individual rewards, like earnings,
status, and romantic outcomes.” Yet, as astutely argued by Mears, bodily
capital is not only of value to those who embody it: men are able to appro-
priate women’s bodily capital to “generate status and social connections in an
exclusive world of businessmen” (2015, 23). While her arguments are groun-
ded in the case studies of VIP nightlife, this “exclusive world of businessmen”
is also the world inhabited by Donald Trump, having inherited wealth and
social connections from his father and regularly appearing at high society
events in and around New York City for decades.
This distinction between who benefits from women’s bodily capital and how
is central to understanding the hypocritical double standards displayed by the
media in relation to female celebrities. As noted in the previous chapters,
famous women wielding such capital for and on behalf of themselves (rather
than channeling it into their VIP businessmen escorts, or Disney/Playboy
productions) generate immense pushback from the media: violation, textual
containment, discursive punishment (gendered insults), and minimization. In
the neoliberal post-post-feminist moment, women’s so-called sexual empow-
erment is not only contained by neoliberal scripts around agency (see Bay-
Cheng 2015), it is also measured against their ability to profit from said
sexuality and agency. As I outlined in the previous chapter, women’s strategic
entrepreneurialization of their sex (whether via new media technologies or
very old forms of sex work) – which seemingly ought to be celebrated in
neoliberal times – is positioned in binary opposition to authentic sexual
desire. Women are not allowed to be or even imagined to be capable of both
enjoying/wanting sex and profiting from it at the same time, nor of enjoying
their profiting from sex (and, of course, not all women equally embody or
exchange their sexual capital in this way).
This dubious understanding of women’s sexuality is, of course, rooted in
puritanical, patriarchal standards regarding white women’s sexual status: their
sexuality ought to be controlled and wielded for either male pleasure or
reproduction of the white race. But, in reality, both men and women often
enter into what Mears (2015, 35) calls “strategic intimacies”; quotidian dating
rituals feature discussions of who will pick up the tab, while many others in
relationships negotiate who will stay at home and who be the breadwinner
before entering into marriage. Yet, such strategic exchanges of heterosexual
intimacy usually reflect poorly on the woman in the exchange and not the
man because it is assumed that his motivations are authentic, whereas hers
146 New Media, Old Power
are not (the man, in paying for sex, is understood to be pursuing his authentic
pleasure). The woman – especially one who dates above her inherited class
status – is a gold digger, that reviled figure of calculating white womanhood
discussed in detail in Chapter 3. There is no parallel derogatory term for the
man who marries her.
Of course, as demonstrated by Mears (2015), men’s motivations can be as
equally dubious as women’s. Men do not only benefit physically, but also
socially and economically from their partnerships and associations with
beautiful young women. Trump’s personal and public trajectories display his
awareness of these benefits. Trump’s cycle of younger and younger wives
demonstrates a view of marital partnership as one of these forms of sexual–
economic exchange. Much like the VIP club women discussed by Mears in
her ethnography, Trump’s wives’ sexual capital depletes as they age (hence
Mears’ preferred term of “girlie capital”) and, thus, they must be “traded in”
for younger versions who bring in a renewed sense of status and social con-
nection for the man who collects and wields them like trophies.
Yet, this relationship is also reciprocal: Trump’s economic and social status
make him desirable to women seeking money, status, and visibility for them-
selves. While women’s sexual capital could be understood to be the ways in
which her sexuality can be bartered for money, status, and fame, men’s sexual
capital is (often) commensurate with capital itself: money is not only of eco-
nomic value, but also takes on a sexual value, making him desirable to
women who would otherwise have no sexual interest in him.2 This is the
foundation of the strategic relationships that Trump builds with women,
including sex worker Stormy Daniels, whom Trump both bought (with
expensive/lavish treatment) and bought off (i.e. paid hush money to keep
silent about the affair). Trump likely senses that without his wealth he would
be less desirable and so views heterosexual intimacy as a transaction: women
are either desirable objects to collect and sustain his status as a “successful”
businessman or as undesirable and disposable objects that are of no use to
him and thus ought to either defer to his power or stay out of his way.
Trump’s much publicized feud with host Rosie O’Donnell demonstrates the
stakes of this view of sexual capital. It certainly reveals how important it is for
Trump to be seen as powerful and successful in the eyes of the media broadly,
but also, notably in the eyes of (white, American) women more specifically.3
The feud began after O’Donnell publicly criticized Trump’s handling of a
controversy around, ironically, one of his beauty pageants: indeed, Trump’s
view of women as trophies to be collected is made literal via his ownership of
the Miss USA group of beauty pageants. As discussed in Chapter 3, the
televised beauty pageant is a rich source for examining visions of ideal
womanhood in both the media and society more broadly. Foregoing Holly-
wood’s investment in discourses of “talent” to occlude the role of beauty and
sexuality in women’s success, the beauty pageant involves women competing
for money, a crown, and, often, a job or education, based directly on their
appearance and their feminine demeanor (see Banet-Weiser 1999; Roberts
 Neoliberal Success Stories 147
2014). While the specific rules of judgment may have changed over the years –
Miss America proudly touted the end of its swimsuit competition in 2018
(Haag and Buckley 2018) – the emphasis on women’s looks and likeability as
tools for “success” reflect not only years of entrenched patriarchal beliefs, but
also a broader economic structure that, in fact, does reward women for their
appearance and likeability.
Unlike the Miss America pageant, however, the Miss USA group of
pageants (which include Miss Teen USA, Miss USA, and Miss Universe) are
known not only for their contestants, but also for their owner. Trump’s highly
public investment in and association with the pageant, demonstrates, again,
an economic and symbolic investment in young women’s sexual capital (both
legitimizing him as a celebrity/mogul and giving him access to sexual prey).
Further, the “tacky” reputation of the pageant that gives out cash prizes
rather than scholarships (see Banet-Weiser 1999, discussed in Chapter 4)
sticks also to Trump, whose ostentatious displays of wealth and frequent
appearances in tabloid magazines marked him out as a “tacky” celebrity
businessman in comparison to other billionaire moguls who are often much
less visible to the public and media than Trump prefers to be.
While Trump’s sexual exploitation of his female contestants is now well
known, thanks to the investigative reporting that has been uncovering allega-
tions of harassment since his 2016 campaign (see, for instance, Blau and
Vazquez 2019; Stuart 2016), it is both unfortunate and telling that more was
not made of his treatment of women earlier. Indeed, the media seemed to
welcome him with open arms, granting him guest spots across a range of
cinematic and television texts over the years (Home Alone 2, Days of Our
Lives, The Drew Carey Show, Sex and the City), awarding him a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007, and partnering with him on long-term
broadcast deals (NBC was host to the Miss USA pageants and was also, of
course, the network behind The Apprentice/Celebrity Apprentice 4). Unlike the
reporting on female celebrities discussed across this book, the press approa-
ched Donald Trump more as a light-hearted joke than an existential threat to
women and girls across America. The media appeared to revel in his crass
and misogynistic words about Rosie O’Donnell (perhaps because they so
closely mirrored the press’ own discourses on female celebrity) and seemed
hesitant to question his legitimacy or success, despite numerous bankruptcies,
public protests, and lawsuits against him.
The feud with O’Donnell, indeed, sparked much interest in the media
across 2007 and 2008. O’Donnell apparently initiated the feud when she
publicly criticized Trump’s forgiving treatment of a recent pageant winner
who had fallen into a controversy over drug use. Rather than removing her
title, Trump stood by his 2007 Miss USA, Tara Conner, after news broke of her
underage drinking and cocaine use (Bobbin 2007*). When asked about the situa-
tion, Trump stated that “[i]n future years, there will be people who are perfect as
Miss USA or Miss Universe and people who will be less than perfect. Those who
are less than perfect, we will work with. Almost everybody has problems” (Bobbin
148 New Media, Old Power
2007*). While it may seem noble to forgive his female contestants for past mis-
takes, the sins of some are apparently more forgivable than others. When Miss
Universe winner Alicia Machado gained weight after being crowned in 1996, for
instance, she says that Trump called her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeper” –
a jab at her Latina heritage – and forced her to exercise on camera, in front of the
media (Barbaro and Twohey 2016; Stuart 2016). This double-standard demon-
strates how Trump’s ability to profit from women’s sexual capital structures his
relations to them: a drug problem is less threatening to a winner’s sexual capital
than weight gain.
Yet Trump’s feud with O’Donnell was not only rooted in his misogynist
dislike of outspoken women. O’Donnell’s comments were made while she was
serving as host of The View, a daytime television talk show that is targeted to
women. After Trump’s public “forgiving” of Conner, O’Donnell mocked his
apparent benevolence by reminding the show’s mostly female viewership that
Trump has been married three times (with a notable reputation for phi-
landering) and was, therefore, in no position to act as a “moral compass”
(Globe and Mail 2007*). While many jabs were taken at Trump in the reports
I found, he reacted particularly virulently to O’Donnell. This suggests that
there was something, in particular, about her identity, her words, and her
platform (or all three) that he took issue with.
Rosie O’Donnell, whom Trump called “ugly” and “disgusting” (Rubinoff
2007*) does not inhabit the hegemonically ascribed role of most women in the
media, instead relying on her comedic chops and gift for talking to build her
celebrity. Before becoming co-host of ABC’s The View in 2006, O’Donnell
had an extensive career in film and television and had already hosted her own
Emmy-winning talk show on NBC for six years. O’Donnell “came out” as a
lesbian in 2002 (Williams 2002) and has never constructed herself as an object
of the male gaze. Her sexuality and fatness, however, outweigh any of her
accomplishments in the eyes of a man like Trump who only values women for
their sexual capital. Although Trump was often much viler and more explicit
in this valuation of women than the supposedly meritocratic media system,
this misogyny is both normalized and perpetuated via the reporting on
Trump’s comments. Further, the insistence of the media on comparing
O’Donnell’s celebrity to Trump’s – via repeated tales of him getting a star on
the Hollywood Walk of Fame before she did – further legitimized his celebrity
over hers, despite O’Donnell’s career being built on very traditional notions of
skill, talent, and merit.
Yet, it was not only who O’Donnell was, but also what she said and where,
that set off Trump in a particularly misogynistic, homophobic, and fatphobic
way. O’Donnell’s comments came, not via newspaper or radio, but on what
we now know to be Donald Trump’s preferred platform and source of power:
television. As co-host of a nationally syndicated, female-led, daytime talk
show, O’Donnell was delegitimizing Trump’s sexual capital to an audience of
mostly women who are supposed to be impressed with, rather than critical of,
his status, which he sustains via his relations with women. Further, this
 Neoliberal Success Stories 149
critique extended from the public and masculinized sphere into the private
domestic one. Firstly, O’Donnell critiqued his power over the young female
beauty pageant contestants: he has no moral superiority over them, nor, I
would add, cultural superiority, for, as the second section of this chapter
argues, he is as (if not more) “useless” and “talentless” than a beautiful
woman in a bathing suit. Secondly, his personal life reveals this lack of mor-
ality not because of his several marriages (if he were Black, of course, his
marriage and fatherhood track record would be much more scrutinized by the
media), but because he clearly sees marriage as a business transaction: he is
only interested in wives for as long as they serve as desirable trophies that
legitimize and secure his status. To use these women, as O’Donnell did,
instead, to undermine his status to an audience of other women, who, in turn,
are supposed to covet such positions themselves, poses a significant threat to
his cultural, political, and sexual capital (as well as the larger patriarchal
system that sustains the use of women to build status for men).
Of course, the media cannot or will not recognize the underlying gender
politics here, re-framing O’Donnell’s reasonable comments into a “he-said”/
“she-said” spectacle of schadenfreude and positioning the two celebrities as
equals. While a few reporters expressed cynicism toward both Trump’s and
O’Donnell’s motives (see, for instance, Gensler 2007* and Rubinoff 2007*),
most journalists fueled the fire by continuously platforming Trump, gleefully
quoting his misogynistic comments at length (see Rubinoff 2007*) and seek-
ing out more by repeatedly asking him about O’Donnell in the weeks and
months following the incident. In fact, Trump’s own admonishment of the
press for this practice suggests that he was well aware of how eager the media
would be to quote and perpetuate his misogynistic (and, eventually, racist)
remarks to a broader American public. In response to yet another reporter’s
prompt about O’Donnell in early 2007, Trump says: “The real question is
‘When’s it gonna [sic] stop?’ And I believe it only stops with you folks and
when the media in general stops asking the question. Every question I get is
about Rosie” (Toronto Star 2007*). While by this point, he may have recog-
nized that the feud was old news, he also encourages this ongoing investment
by giving them yet another insult in the same story: “I have no regrets. I think
I exposed her for what she is – she’s terrible, just a terrible, disgusting human
being” (Toronto Star 2007*).
Again, Trump calls Rosie O’Donnell a “terrible, disgusting human being”
because she makes a public crack about his multiple marriages and lack of
authority on issues around morality. That he would respond so dis-
proportionately suggests not only his underlying sense of entitlement and
fragile ego, but also his inherently misogynistic view of women – that they
ought to be looked at, not heard from – that is embraced and lauded by the
media more broadly. Trump’s extension of forgiveness to certain women
(beauty pageant contestants who stay “beautiful”) over others (outspoken,
lesbian women who do not conform to hegemonic beauty standards) is cer-
tainly not surprising. What is perhaps more surprising is tracing the ways
150 New Media, Old Power
that, years before his presidential campaign, Trump was testing and learning
the limits of acceptable public discourses around women (there are few),
leaning into the media’s need for and perpetuation of scandal, and vigorously
defending his right to use women – both publicly and privately – to secure his
status as a legitimate and aspirational model of successful American
masculinity.
Between this very public treatment of women, and his investment in (and
reported harassment of) beauty pageant contestants, it is not difficult to ima-
gine that Trump’s off-camera businesses foster an environment of sexual
degradation and harassment, particularly for those women who conform to
hegemonic beauty and femininity norms. Just as in society more broadly,
those women are the ones most likely to “rise” to the top of the supposed
meritocracy, particularly if they are also white and middle- or upper-class
women. But they likely also still have to maneuver a hostile work environ-
ment, where sexual harassment and bartering is, as we have seen with the
recent rise of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, par for the course. As
of 2019, at least 15 women have made sexual harassment allegations against
Trump; one of his most often-invoked defenses against these reports is that
said women were “too ugly” for him (Blau & Vazquez 2019).
Giving Trump institutional, symbolic power over celebrity women further
entrenches and legitimizes his status and misogynistic views. As owner of
beauty pageants with young trophy wives and mistresses, he is legitimized not
only as a “successful” businessman, but also as a connoisseur of womanhood.
Having secured his authority over women, Trump is then positioned by the
media – both in The Apprentice/Celebrity Apprentice, and in the reporting on
him – as an idealized example of hegemonic masculinity for others to look up
to. Rather than being seen as using his success to attract and retain the
beautiful women around him, Trump is seen as a “deserving” man whose
relations to beautiful, unattainable women contribute to (rather than are a
result of) his success. He is the opposite of Kardashian and Hilton, who have
used their sexuality to attain success, and the patriarchal capitalist system –
first, the media, and, then, the cultural, political, and social world more
broadly – rewards him for it. I next examine how the media reward him for
embodying these values, both legitimizing him as a figure of business success,
despite his clear failures in running a business, and legitimizing him as a
celebrity who belongs in, rather than invades, the public sphere.

Gendered Legitimacy and Success

The media’s treatment of Donald Trump serves as a fascinating foil to the
female celebrities discussed throughout this book. As outlined in the previous
chapter, Trump’s journey through life into the public eye in many ways par-
allels the life of Paris Hilton (as well as Kim Kardashian and Nicole Richie)
but, instead of relying on his own sexual capital to achieve fame, Trump
repeatedly appropriated the sexual capital of the women around him – that of
 Neoliberal Success Stories 151
his wives, his beauty pageant contestants, and even his daughter, Ivanka.
While his female contemporaries were being chided for their ambition,
Trump’s ambitions were celebrated, legitimized, and heightened via the “rea-
lity” television platform, in a show that lauded his success instead of policing
it. This was generally how the media also approached both the show and
Trump himself: aside from some minor digs at his hair, reporters legitimized
him as a public figure, producing pages and pages of content about his pro-
fessional and personal lives, despite much evidence that his success was
dubious and his character questionable.
Although I am less interested here in whether or not Trump was actually
successful in business than I am in how his “success” in business went unin-
terrogated by the media, it is worth noting that we now know, again thanks to
the work of investigative journalists, that Trump lost over one billion dollars
in the late 1980s to 1990s (Buettner and Craig 2019). This is an important
fact in the context of the larger argument that I am making with regards to
the success of women being publicly policed and punished. Trump’s “success”
was no more real, legitimate, or earned than that of Paris Hilton or Kim
Kardashian, who were also born into their privilege. It seems that only when
commentators want to diminish his accomplishments that such similarities
seem obvious, as when, during his presidential run, he is called the “Karda-
shian of politics” (see Gabler, cited in Ouellette 2016, 648). However, this
same media system elevated Trump to the level of, as Laurie Ouellette (2016,
649) argues, “expert and leader extraordinaire” as his own business show host
and judge. This legitimization of Trump not only worked to shore up the
gendered pathways to “success” in the media, but also, and perhaps more
crucially, gave rise to the image of a man who knew enough about economics
to run a country, enough about success to revive a dying American dream,
and enough about aspirational masculinity to inspire a generation of lost
young white men.5

Reporting on Trump: Public and Private “Success”

The Apprentice first aired on NBC in 2004 as part of the reality boom of the
early aughts. The show is a “business” competition that allows some of the
brightest and most successful young entrepreneurs in America to be judged by
and recruited to work for the much less qualified Donald J. Trump, who,
again, inherited his business/brand from his father Fred Trump and lost
plenty of money along the way. The show, which was hosted by Trump for
fourteen seasons (2004–2015), follows a simple format: the teams, divided by
gender initially, are tasked with a business-related (capital-earning) challenge;
they select a “project manager” who takes charge of the task; the task is
performed; and, after the results are revealed, the losing team – which can be
decided based on a range of metrics, usually of Trump’s choosing – must face
Trump and his “advisors” in a combative session where someone is fired.
Although the advisors chime in, Trump publicly has the ultimate hiring and
152 New Media, Old Power
firing authority, with the season’s winner usually becoming project manager
for a “real world” Trump project, thus earning a high salary and coveted
position at his company. As noted by Elmer and Todd (2016, 662), Trump’s
boardroom decisions produced an important distinction between losing a task
and being a loser that he would carry into his political career – a contestant’s
reaction to their loss was more important, in his eyes, than their role in the
loss: “There could be no admission of a loss, no taking ownership of defeat or
personal failings that contributed to the loss. One must keep playing the
game.” Success, in Trump’s world (again, as produced and sanctioned by
mainstream media channels) is not about winning or losing (i.e., actual suc-
cess), but, rather, the image one projects to the outside world.
This is particularly important in relation to the construction and legitimacy
of Trump as a celebrity. The Apprentice provided Trump with a platform and
path to legitimacy, despite his many public “losses” that, if experienced or
produced by a female celebrity, would undermine her credibility. This contrast
demonstrates the highly gendered stakes of reality television narratives. While
“women’s genres” of reality television (such as The Anna Nicole Show and
The Girls Next Door, discussed in Chapter 3 as well as The Simple Life, dis-
cussed in Chapter 4) are often dismissed as superficial or derided as harmful
to women and girls, the more “masculinized” subgenre of business reality
television is understood to be (and framed as) educational, productive, and
valuable to everyday Americans who are (or ought to be) interested in learn-
ing the rules of neoliberal capitalist subjecthood and success. Inserting Trump
into such a narrative, therefore elevates his image, whether he was deserving
of this role or not. Although I more closely examine what the show itself was
doing in the final section of this chapter, this section looks at the framing of
and reporting on Trump as the show’s host/symbol of success in the early
aughts.
In casting Trump as judge and host, The Apprentice legitimizes him, but
the news media also helped prop up this façade in important ways: first, they
never questioned his status as billionaire – as Trump demonstrated in the
boardroom, one’s projected image of success is more important than one’s
actual success (see Elmer and Todd 2016); and, secondly, they willingly
reported on both Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka’s media endeavors
and personal life (with much less cynicism than they expressed toward
Hilton), thus enabling a textual expansion rather than producing textual
containment (see Chapter 4). In a reverse scenario to the one played out with
regards to Paris Hilton in the previous chapter, the media’s reporting on
Trump produced him as a success, despite his many public failures and
shortcomings: he was a non-success turned success.
Again, we now know that more investigative reporting on Trump at the
time could have uncovered numerous bankruptcies and losses, but the main-
stream media were not as interested in questioning his status as they were the
female celebrities who exhibited the same levels of privilege and public visi-
bility at the time. Reporters unquestioningly reproduced Trump-as-success
 Neoliberal Success Stories 153
claims made by both NBC and Trump himself. For instance, Trump was
commonly referred to as a “billionaire” in the news: across 2007 and 2008 the
word is used 17 times (in 334 articles), where “reality TV star” is used to
describe him only four times. The descriptor of billionaire is taken-for-gran-
ted, as most reporters made no effort to quantify his billionaire status (how
many billions is he worth?), nor cited any figures from his companies (how
much did his companies earn at this time?), nor referenced any business pro-
files [one of the few exceptions to this is Reiter’s (2007*) profile for Reuters
that cites a Forbes estimation of $2.9 billion]. Other favored descriptors of
Trump include “tycoon” (used 36 times), “mogul” (54 times),6 and “busi-
nessman” (8 times). Such words do important cultural work in producing
Trump as a legitimate celebrity/authority, versus the words used to describe
Hilton discussed in the previous chapter (“celebutard,” “walking blow-up
doll,” etc.).
Furthermore, the news also unquestioningly reproduced Trump’s own
claims to his success and NBC’s praise of him. In a piece for the New York
Daily News (carried in the Calgary Herald), reporter Richard Huff (2007*)
quotes Trump boasting of having “one of the most successful shows ever on
television” without providing any fact-checking, commentary, or even poten-
tial qualification as to what Trump means. As noted earlier, Trump’s emphasis
on building a public façade of success works to undermine any specificity of
the term (and this discursive technique was later used by Trump in his poli-
tical campaign: i.e., making America “great” again, which is read as code for
white/male, but ambiguous enough that it is left open). Yet Trump is not the
only one for whom such vague claims do important work. An NBC executive
praises Trump’s “greatness” without need for quantifying what is so great
about him: “The guy has a certain magic […] We love him, we want to stay in
business with him” says Entertainment President Kevin Reilly (Huff 2007*).
This quote was provided during the ratings decline of The Apprentice, thus
suggesting that NBC was willing to produce a demand for him that was
lacking in the audience.
Indeed, much of the reporting on the show’s slide in ratings (and omission
from NBC’s spring line-up in 2007) suggested that it had nothing to do with
Trump, and that he was, despite data indicating the opposite, a key draw for
audiences. In a story carried by Reuters, Kimberly Nordyke (2007*) reported
that other networks were “rumored” to be interested in picking up the show,
and that, if not The Apprentice, NBC would be interested in working with
Trump on another project. While such rumors may or may not have been true
(and the reproduction of them in news stories itself suggests questionable
journalistic standards), they produce the opposite of the textual containment
of Hilton outlined in the previous chapter, with numerous stories about her
being too reported on and assertions that no one wants to watch her new
television shows. Even the biggest names in (reality) television come to
Trump’s defense in the papers, such as when Apprentice creator Mark Burnett
says: “Donald Trump is a television icon, and ‘The Apprentice’ changed the
154 New Media, Old Power
landscape of reality television and remains a very strong ratings performer”
(Nordyke 2007*, my emphasis). Again, such discourses – emanating from
“experts” in media production such as Burnett and other NBC executives –
legitimize Trump as a successful celebrity, despite failing ratings and failing
businesses.7 They also seemingly allowed the news media to report on his
private life without the cynicism and disdain shown for women in similar
positions (Hilton, Kardashian, Lohan, etc.).
Again, Trump serves here as a fascinating male foil: the reporting on him
necessarily entails reporting on both private and public, as his star image
spans both domains. This is, of course, not uncommon for celebrities in the
contemporary media environment, where new technologies and platforms
merge the various “performances of self” that happen both onstage and off
(see Marshall 2010). Reality television exacerbates this phenomenon, which
Mark Andrejevic (2016, 654) calls the “dedifferentiation” of celebrity: a
“parodic end of the division of [cultural] labour” (Debord, cited in Andrejevic
2016, 654). Someone who is famous for something (i.e. real estate; tabloid
divorces) can easily become famous for something else (reality tv) and then
use that fame to start a new public career (politics). Once again, however, it is
male celebrity that affords such slippages: the female “hustler”/reality star/
entrepreneur cannot access the legitimacy and, therefore, social and cultural
capital, to “slip into” the role of President of the United States (even when
she has the political capital to do so, as evidenced by Clinton’s loss to
Trump).
Indeed, Trump’s apparent “erosion of the boundary between self-disclosure
and self-promotion, between sites of leisure, labor, domesticity, and con-
sumption” as Andrejevic (2016, 654) describes it, does not threaten to
undermine his “seriousness” as a businessman. As noted in the previous sec-
tion, his accumulation of women’s sexual capital in his private life lends to his
public image of “success,” so much so that these women are incorporated into
The Apprentice to bolster his claim to authority (although, again, this aspect
of Trump’s celebrity precedes and exceeds the reality show as his love life had
been tabloid fodder for decades). The show features numerous appearances by
Trump’s third (and youngest) wife Melania (a former model 24 years his
junior), but also daughter Ivanka, as well as sons Eric and Donald Junior.
The contestants (and cameras) make repeated visits inside the Trump home,
merging the backstage and frontstage of Trump’s image in ways that are
similar to, but much more publicly acceptable than the female celebrities
whose lives are too exposed on reality television. Again, when news reporting
focuses on women’s private lives and/or reality television appearances, this
often de-legitimizes the women’s status and undermines any suggestions that
they might have a publicly recognized/valuable skill. The merging of public–
private into one persona is framed as a “decline” from “stardom” – an era
when stars were distant, inaccessible and mysterious to audiences – to a cur-
rent, lesser-than state of “celebrity” where we know too much about women
and see too much of them in the media (see Holmes and Negra 2011).
 Neoliberal Success Stories 155
The existence of reporting on Trump, much like for any other celebrity/
scandal, is not merely a reflection of his fame, but also constitutes it: ampli-
fying, in real time, his public profile, his legitimacy (or illegitimacy, if he were
a woman), and his ability to generate further publicity/fame/money for him-
self. The reporting on his adult daughter, Ivanka, suggests that the media’s
authorization and celebration of Trump’s celebrity was strong enough to not
only extend that celebrity to his daughter (without her needing to accomplish
anything on her own), but also that his symbolic power was enough to shield
her from the criticisms that her peers – like Paris Hilton – faced.
The nepotistic legacy of the Trump family, from which Donald benefitted
immensely (see Trump 2020), continued to flourish in the sixth season of The
Apprentice, when, for the first time, Donald Jr. and Ivanka were brought in to
replace Trump’s earlier boardroom advisors (most commonly, long-time
Trump executives George Ross and Carolyn Kepcher, although these were
rotating positions). As outlined earlier, the advisors play an important role in
the boardroom climax of each episode, questioning the losing team’s decisions
and strategy. Trump often asks his advisors for their thoughts before “firing”
the least desirable contestant (and here I purposefully use the term “desir-
able,” since, as noted earlier, it is the performance after the loss that matters
more than the loss itself). Although the decision is presented as solely his, the
role(s) of the advisor is a significant one in the show, and it grows in sig-
nificance as his adult children are brought in (with them appearing through-
out the episode, monitoring team progress on challenges, and not just at the
end in the boardroom).
In the lead-up to her debut as a regular on The Apprentice, a lengthy profile
on Ivanka ran in the Vancouver Sun. The story, written by Tania Padgett
(2007*) for Newsday (a New York area daily), provides a glowing appraisal of
Trump’s daughter’s persona, credentials, and blossoming celebrity. Padgett
outlines Ivanka's journey to becoming vice-president of development and
acquisitions after graduating from the Wharton School of Finance at the
University of Pennsylvania and refers to her as “telegenic,” “smart, cultured,
tasteful and unfailingly polite.” Throughout the article Padgett cannot help
but to make implicit comparisons to another, unnamed heiress: Paris Hilton.
It is not hard for readers to guess who Padgett is referring to when she states:
“In these ‘rich girls behaving badly’ times, one would expect the 25-year-old
daughter of Donald Trump to be seen boozing it up at nightclubs, arriving at
red-carpet affairs sans underwear or peddling some sordid sex tape.” In case
her reader had not yet caught on that Ivanka is not like those other heiresses,
Padgett praises her performance in the documentary Born Rich (Johnson
2003*), which portrays the life of several 20-something heirs and heiresses:
“In the film, Trump shines as a grounded business student while many of her
peers came across as boorish, dissipated brats” (my emphasis). This is a cur-
ious (and very capitalist) reading of the film: Ivanka Trump seemed, in many
ways, less grounded than her peers, many of whom ruminated on their own
privilege and purpose in the context of American myths of meritocracy.
156 New Media, Old Power
Instead, Trump cheerfully showed off her penthouse childhood bedroom with
expansive views of Manhattan while fantasizing about her own future colo-
nization of this same skyline.
Yet this celebration of Ivanka is echoed in several other stories about her
appearances on The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice. Again, in the New
York Times, entertainment reporter Kathryn Shattuck (2008*) welcomes
Ivanka’s anticipated interactions with the famous contestants: “The best part
[of Celebrity Apprentice] will be watching Ivanka Trump dole out verbal
punches alongside her father to tough guys like Trace Adkins, Tito Ortiz,
Gene Simmons and Lennox Lewis.” While Buffalo News reporter Alan Per-
gament (2007*) takes a slightly more critical stance toward the Trumps more
broadly, he still has much to praise about Ivanka in his review of the sixth
season:

The best news is Ivanka is quite good in an expanded role, smartly and
candidly joining in the boardroom discussions and going to the scene of
the tasks to see how the would-be apprentices are behaving. She even is
used for comic relief, with one male contestant in a car wash contest
asking her, “Want to take off your shirt and help out?”

That Pergament finds this bit of sexual harassment (of a male employee
toward his female superior) to be “comic relief” is telling not only of how the
media view Ivanka (“looking a certain way”), but also of how women are
viewed in (and beyond) the business world of The Apprentice.

Gendered Success on The Apprentice

Much like it is in other media, success on The Apprentice is filtered through
gender. In her analysis of Trump’s public image on and beyond the show, Lisa W.
Kelly (2019) observes a stark distinction between the gendered work on the self
as represented on reality television. Drawing on the work of Laurie Ouellette and
James Hay (2008), Kelly argues that “reality television works to translate and
legitimize the demands of neoliberalism for the wider audience, specifically the
ways in which it places responsibility on the individual to continually transform
in order to survive within the flexible economy” (2019, 90). While contestants
(and hosts) on reality television model this continuous transformation (via
makeovers, self-work, and self-branding, for instance), the depictions of and
reactions to such transformations are highly gendered, such that when under-
gone by men it is understood as authentic (honest) work, whereas for women, it
is “crafty self-promotion” (Ouellette and Hay, cited in Kelly 2019, 91).
Of course, this gendered understanding of self-work, self-branding, and
transformation extends beyond the reality television world into celebrity more
broadly (as discussed throughout this book) and, notably, the world of politics
(again, into which Trump enters as “authentic” and “successful” versus the
“crooked” Hillary Clinton, see Kelly 2019). Yet we can also narrow our focus
 Neoliberal Success Stories 157
to witness such dynamics play out within the narrative of a singular text such
as Celebrity Apprentice, where Trump’s treatment of his cast demonstrates
that the “masculine” qualities of aggression, domination, and individualism
outweigh and outlast (and are rewarded much more airtime both on televi-
sion and in the news reporting) the more feminine characteristics of coop-
eration, vulnerability, and community. As TV critic Gail Pennington (2008*)
writes, the women of Celebrity Apprentice all seemed too “sweet” for the
cutthroat competition: “Each time, a quiet, hapless woman was ‘fired,’ [she]
seemed relieved to exit.”
The gender dynamics on the show – particularly the separation of teams
into men versus women – help to uphold traditional notions around gendered
success in several ways. Firstly, by reinforcing gender stereotypes, particularly
around women’s (un-)suitability for business (i.e., when the women’s teams
lose it can be understood to be because of their gender). Secondly, by cele-
brating women’s sexual exploitation (the use of women’s sexuality in the task
itself, to raise funds was commonplace across the show). And, finally, by
normalizing sexual harassment of women, by men, in the workplace. Trump’s
view of women – as either beautiful and therefore valuable or not – thus
becomes particularly sanctioned and commodified on The Apprentice. While the
original show was premised upon a merit-based system, numerous stories about
the female cast members’ post-show exploits demonstrated that a certain kind of
woman was also favored in Trump’s business fantasy world: one who may have
some education or experience credentials, but still also conforms to the rules of
hegemonic beauty and femininity. An important lesson for such women, it
would seem, is that using their sexual capital can provide much more symbolic
and economic capital than an impressive list of credentials and traditional forms
of “hard work” (particularly when “work” is already understood to be calculat-
ing self-ambition when performed by women).
Such was the case for contestant Kristine Lefebvre, a 37-year-old attorney
with celebrity clients such as Pamela Anderson and Deborah Gibson, who
appeared on the sixth season of The Apprentice. She was eventually fired by
Trump after having participated in several successful challenges, including
one where she modeled a bikini for a new swimsuit line and the prize for the
winning team included a trip to visit Hugh Hefner at the Playboy mansion
(“Kristine Lefebvre” 2020). No less an institution than the Associated Press
(2007*) followed up on Lefebvre’s post-show journey to Playboy, noting that,
as a cancer survivor, Lefebvre wanted to “use the magazine opportunity to
send a message of support to others with the disease.” Such discourses excuse
a potentially highly lucrative but transgressive use of her sexuality, demon-
strating her own awareness of how this decision would potentially “destroy”
her credibility as a lawyer (shifting her image to that of money-hungry sexpot
à la Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, etc.).
Of course, the famous women who participated in Celebrity Apprentice also
tended to conform to hegemonic beauty and femininity standards. As with
most editions of the show, the celebrity cast was half comprised of women, in
158 New Media, Old Power
order to divide the teams along gender lines. Among the women cast in the
first season of Celebrity Apprentice was Carol Alt, a former supermodel, Tif-
fany Fallon, a former Playboy playmate, and Marilu Henner, an actress
whose most notable role was on the late 1970s sitcom Taxi (the remaining
female contestants consisted of athletes Nadia Comaneci and Jennie Finch,
former Apprentice contestant Omarosa Onee Manigault Newman, and pro-
ducer Nely Galán). The second season had another Playboy playmate in
Brande Roderick, with African American model Claudia Jordan further
rounding out the beauty-based skillset on the team. Carol Alt, who placed
third on the first season of Celebrity Apprentice, was used as team model in a
task to sell yogurt body wash. Like the bikini task discussed above, Trump
often rewarded female contestants for using their sexuality to make money
and win tasks.
Male cast members of Celebrity Apprentice, on the other hand, were posi-
tioned as interesting people challenging themselves with new experiences.
When KISS front man Gene Simmons spent what little time he had on the
show harassing women, reporters called him “the most compelling” contest-
ant (O’Hare 2008a*) and heralded his business skills, as demonstrated via his
self-branding efforts on and through reality television (at the time Simmons
was also starring in his own family docudrama series Gene Simmons Family
Jewels).8 Again, we see the gendered distinction between neoliberal forms of
entrepreneurship and self-branding as displayed by the media’s celebration of
Simmons’ efforts to challenge himself by appearing on the show (Bentley
2008*), versus female celebrities’ reality appearances (and, again, the report-
ing on Simmons not only sanctioned his celebrity, but also contributed to it:
Simmons was mentioned in the news reporting more than Apprentice co-star
Marilu Henner, despite her lasting five weeks longer than him on the show).
Simmons, who brags about having slept with over 5,000 women (TMZ 2010),
is welcomed by the media system, given numerous platforms (to espouse his
sexist views), and remains a celebrated “icon” of American masculinity, so
much so that Ivanka claims that to not be sexually harassed by Simmons is an
insult: “[k]nowing his reputation, I don’t know if my pride could handle it if
Gene Simmons hadn’t at least tried to flirt with me” (WENN 2008b*).
Most of the men of Celebrity Apprentice subscribed to and performed
various versions of Western hegemonic masculinity. Boxer Lennox Lewis and
MMA fighter Tito Ortiz (the only men of color on the show), country singer
Adkins, as well as Sopranos actor Vincent Pastore were all large and physi-
cally imposing men. Such traits were in line with the various forms of star-
dom they inhabited: Adkins as a down-home, no nonsense cowboy; Lewis
and Ortiz are physically fit athletes from particularly violent sports; and Pas-
tore was most known for his tough-guy mobster roles onscreen. Gene Sim-
mons and Piers Morgan were both verbally assertive and even aggressive:
Simmons in a sexual and sexist manner, while Morgan displayed aggression
toward both sexes (it is noteworthy that he directed most of his insults to the
sole Black woman in the cast and continues to display his misogynoir9 via his
 Neoliberal Success Stories 159
ongoing, malicious attacks on Meghan Markle). Again, such behavior sanc-
tioned their celebrity more broadly, as opposed to undermining it: Simmons’
sexism as part of his rock-star bad boy image, and Morgan’s combativeness as
part of his news/media persona more broadly (serving as the “cranky” British
judge on America’s Got Talent from 2006–2011 and, more recently, as the
angry white man on Good Morning Britain, until publicly quitting – on air –
after being challenged by one of his co-presenters). Lastly, as part of the
Baldwin brother acting dynasty, Stephen was perhaps less known than his
brothers Alec and Billy, yet still represented a form of masculine success and
attractiveness unattainable to most men.
In the end, the first season’s competition came down to two competing
versions of masculinity. The finale, in fact, was framed as a battle of “good
versus evil” by both the show and the press in its coverage. “Good” was the
all-American, calm and reserved cowboy Trace Adkins, who mostly stayed
under the radar throughout the season and treated fellow contestants with
respect, while the loud and arrogant Piers Morgan served as the “evil.”
Despite being a “disgraced” tabloid editor (Baker 2008*10), Piers Morgan’s
performance of toxic masculinity is rewarded as “winner” of the show, while
Trump’s own masculinity is shored up via his authority to assess and reward
the “correct” gender performances (via more screen time and money for the
celebrities’ chosen charities). Trump not only gets to reward certain men (and
women), he also gets to “fire” others, which, for the male celebrities in parti-
cular can be emasculating and, thus, damaging to their public images. He also
gets credit for the celebrities’ post-show successes.
As was noted by several reporters, the cast of Celebrity Apprentice was
comprised of people whose fame, at its peak, would be considered B- or C-
list, and has since faded. B- and C- list celebrities are not usually those who
appear on red carpets, premières, and awards shows [see, for instance, Corpus
Christi Caller Times’ (2008*) description of the cast as “somewhat famous
people”]. They do not “open” movies as the marquee star and do not usually
get invited to the “hottest” parties. Their turn to entrepreneurialism is usually
a sign of this lessened status, and Celebrity Apprentice is one of the few
domains in the media that celebrates, rather than disparages, celebrities shil-
ling products. Yet the underlying assumption is that these hustles (both within
and beyond the confines of reality television) signify celebrities’ desires to
return to their previous levels of fame and work opportunities. When a cor-
relation occurs – an appearance on a reality show leads to further appear-
ances, endorsements, and perhaps even roles – it can be framed as causation
and Trump can be credited with “reviving” a dying career.
The supposed success of the celebrity contestants post-Apprentice not only
legitimizes Donald Trump, but also legitimizes the show, which, in turn,
allows producers to lure more celebrity contestants. This builds a cycle of
legitimization, as bringing on more and bigger celebrities, in turn, brings in
more ratings for the show. Trump benefits from both ends of this relationship:
he is further legitimized as a media success by “kick starting” the flailing
160 New Media, Old Power
careers of his peers, while also choosing who gets to benefit most from this
publicity (in the form of having the most screen time11). In a 2008 radio
interview with Ryan Seacrest, Trump brags about the celebrities lining up to
get fired for season two, saying that he’s received “countless calls from celeb-
rities desperate to revive their careers with a turn on his show” (WENN
2008c*). NBC’s “reality chief” Craig Plestis echoes Trumps’ boasts: “There’s
no other show like it to prove your business brain, and we are already getting
calls from high-profile celebrities who want to challenge themselves in Season 2”
(Andreeva 2008*). Celebrities who sell themselves/their images for the show are
framed as “challenging themselves,” but the women who do so outside of the
confines of network television, movie studios, or other forms of mainstream
media are “self-pimping” rather than proving their “business brain.”
Indeed, when entertainment reporters recapped the antics of celebrities on
the show there was much less a sense of impending doom and crisis in legiti-
macy. In a report on the finale for CanWest News, Alex Strachan (2008*)
muses: “Does any of this matter? Not really. This season’s Apprentice has
certainly been entertaining, though.” New York Daily News reporter David
Hinckley (2008*) echoes such sentiments, describing the show as a “fistful of
fun moments [with] no losers,” which might actually be how many fans would
also describe Richie and Hilton’s show The Simple Life or Keeping Up with the
Kardashians. Yet women’s reality television shows signify – in the discourse of
news reporting, at least – a new, less legitimate form of celebrity that signals a
decline in traditional conceptions of work, achievement, and success. They are
playing a media game with no substance or talent to back that up.
But, again, so is Donald Trump. In many ways these different reality shows,
and the news media’s responses to them, illustrate the key tenets of Daniel
Boorstin’s conception of “pseudo-events”: events that, rather than happening
spontaneously, are artificially created by the media (Boorstin, cited in Klecker
2020, 217). In her analysis of Trump as pseudo-event, Cornelia Klecker
(2020) discusses the ways in which Trump constructed himself as what Boor-
stin would call a “human pseudo-event”: a celebrity that is artificially pro-
duced – in and through media – without having accomplished something
great. Trump qualifies because of his ability to falsely craft an image of him-
self as a successful, self-made billionaire that was legitimized by and through
a media system unwilling to dig behind this image (Klecker 2020). Celebrity
Apprentice bolsters this comparison further, crafting an image of Trump not
only as boss of other celebrities, but gatekeeper to their access to fame and
economic reward (despite him being significantly less “talented” and
“accomplished” than many he fired). For many, such as cultural commentator
Neil Gabler, Trump’s “media-created” image of success invokes a comparison
to Kardashian (again, “Trump is the Kardashian of politics” quoted in
Klecker 2020, 215), yet, I would argue that the reporting on female celebrity
as shown throughout this book is, in many ways, the anti-thesis of a pseudo-
event: there is, indeed, an artificially produced “demand” for such reporting
(particularly when these women publicly wield their sexual capital) but it does
 Neoliberal Success Stories 161
not legitimize them as successful or great. It builds a scandal where there is
none (pseudo-scandals, perhaps?), searching far and wide to find outraged
parents who will echo reporter sentiments, or young girls who will demon-
strate that female celebrities are as dangerous as they seem (see previous
chapters). Indeed, the news reporting produces female celebrities, not as fig-
ures of admiration, but instead as grave threats to the well-being of American
women and girls, despite them having done little beyond what the media and
capitalism has encouraged them to do for decades (if not centuries).
This is not, however, to argue that the gendered contrast between Trump
and Kardashian (or Hilton) is meaningless. Indeed, recouping Trump as a
pseudo-event does help to reveal the gendered meritocratic mythology that
structures media representations of and reactions to public success. The
media’s simultaneous celebration of Donald Trump and daughter Ivanka –
“play[ing] the role of successful business[person]” (Klecker 2020, 223) on an
NBC prime-time reality television show – and pearl-clutching over the decline
of “talent” and “achievement” in the age of Paris Hilton reveals not only the
gendered forms of media gatekeeping, but also the broader systems of eco-
nomic, social and political power inhabited by both Donald Trump and the
media owners (NBC executives) with whom he built significant and long-
lasting relationships. Donald Trump is and was not only a popular womani-
zer, game show host, and pseudo-businessman, he also became a key figure of
neoliberalism itself.

The Apprentice and Neoliberalism

Although the term “neoliberalism” has broad meanings and usage across
disciplines today, it is often tied to a socio-economic shift in Western nations
both caused by and reflected in policies implemented in the 1980s by Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. and U.S. President Ronald Reagan
(Dardot and Laval 2013; Duggan 2003; Gill and Scharff 2011; Littler 2013).
Neoliberalism is characteristically defined as an economic system favoring
privatization and deregulation, as well as an upward (re)distribution of
resources (Duggan 2003; Gonick 2015); and as a socio-cultural state where
“individualism […] has almost entirely replaced notions of the social or poli-
tical, or any idea of individuals as subject to pressures, constraints or influ-
ence from outside themselves” (Gill and Scharff 2011, 7). Further,
neoliberalism interpolates its ideal subject12 as “a market wo/man, or an
entrepreneurial, autonomous, and self-sufficient being whose democratic
freedoms emerge from participating in competitive free market labor and
consumer relations” (Irving 2014, 101). Neoliberal capitalism differentiates
itself from a more generic form of capitalism through its emphasis on indivi-
dualism, deregulation, self-surveillance, and entrepreneurialism (Duggan
2003). According to neoliberal logic, for instance, it is better to “be your own
boss” than to be a low-level worker who is securely employed, unionized, and
receiving benefits. Neoliberalism upholds other, identity-based forms of
162 New Media, Old Power
oppression by doubling down on the meritocratic myth that the (economic)
playing field is even for all and that “hard work” can lead anyone to “suc-
cess,” a term that is itself centered in and reinforcing economic value(s).
While some work has been done connecting both Trump and The Appren-
tice to neoliberal policies and ideologies (see Couldry and Littler 2011;
Ouellette 2016), I aim to supplement that work here by more closely exam-
ining the role of journalism and news reporting in mediating neoliberal values
to the broader American public. I first look at The Apprentice, and the rise of
Celebrity Apprentice as a specific result of neoliberal approaches to media
production: a proliferation of new media formats that favor the production of
fast, cheap, exploitative content. Much like neoliberalism itself, reality televi-
sion is less a loosening of the restrictions around media gatekeeping than it is
a restructuring of them. Rather than represent a “democratic” turn (see
Turner 2010; Williamson 2016), allowing for “ordinary” people to both enter
into the media landscape and into the “high-powered” deal-making world of
Trump enterprises, The Apprentice represents an extended form of gate-
keeping: merely transferring some of the power (and exploitation) from media
producers into Trump’s (and his “sponsoring” businesses’) hands. Secondly, I
examine The Apprentice as a tool of neoliberalism: a pedagogic text that not
only normalizes neoliberal ideology and policy, but also, in tandem with the
news media, teaches audiences which forms of success are laudable and
aspirational in contrast with those discussed throughout this book.

The Apprentice: A Result of Neoliberalism

Throughout this book, I have argued that new media developments shift the
power structures of the entire industry in ways that often favor women who
are hegemonically beautiful enough to (symbolically) sell their sexuality on
the market. The proliferation of new media technologies and platforms means
that certain women can now enterpreneurialize their sexuality and shift the
profit structure of the media industries in ways that inspire intense pushback.
This is not, however, to suggest that either the terms of entry for women (and
other marginalized groups) into the media industry are now fair, or that
quality, talent, and work ethic are not meaningful metrics when discussing
media and celebrity texts. These are not incompatible claims because, in many
cases, the corporate media are more interested in making money than pro-
ducing “quality” content and are willing to sideline “talented” and “hard-
working” individuals in that pursuit, while also policing who and what gets to
count as talented, hard-working and of quality.
Indeed, it would be difficult to argue that reality television has not, in some
ways, democratized celebrity by offering media access to a broader range of
participants than ever before (see Turner 2010; Williamson 2016). Former
gatekeeping models of fame – wherein a person must have a recognizable
talent, be discovered, and then obtain a “lucky break” – have shifted into a
potentially “equalized” playing field where the terms of access are merely the
 Neoliberal Success Stories 163
possession of an outrageous (affectively expressive) personality. The sig-
nificance and veracity of this shift is both lauded and contested. While cer-
tainly there is a wider array of “ordinary” people that can obtain media
exposure, and this might broaden wider understandings of both success and
talent, the terms of long-lasting and lucrative fame still favor those who most
readily conform to hegemonic modes of gender, sexuality, and capitalist (and,
increasingly, neoliberal capitalist) citizenship (Marwick 2015; Weber 2009).
Furthermore, access to reality shows, specifically (much more so than social
media and Internet) is still a gatekept process whereby contestants must be
chosen by casting directors and producers and, though they may experience
(short-lived) fame and success, they are still generating immense profits for
others with much more structural power than them. In this way, as I argued
in the previous chapter, reality television contestants are similar – if not often
better off – than other laborers in media who, for the most part, never attain
any cultural capital to wield for themselves. Indeed the 2007–2008 Writer’s
Guild of America (WGA) strike suggests that TV writers were quickly coming
to this inevitable conclusion themselves, recognizing a turn toward a neo-
liberal conception of production where traditional forms of specialized labor
no longer carried the same value as flexible and entrepreneurial forms of
labor.
Although the revival of The Apprentice was announced five months before
the WGA strike began, the convergence of these events demonstrates how the
shift in forms of media production can directly impact content. As noted
earlier, The Apprentice was a dying show until the shakeup at NBC inspired a
new and revitalized format starring celebrities. After the strike began, the
show changed to a two-hour format, suggesting that this content was a
response, not to audience demand, but rather to the gap in production initi-
ated by the WGA strike. Indeed, an innocuous report on the week in televi-
sion ratings in January 2007, ten months before the strike began, shows that
the ten most watched programs included only one reality program (Extreme
Makeover Home Edition) and three sports programs. All remaining six tele-
vision shows in the top ten were scripted (Maynard 2007*).
In many ways The Apprentice is a much more neoliberal show than most
“business” reality programs, so it is apt that it helped to fill a gap produced
by organized workers. Rather than rewarding innovation and entrepreneuri-
alism (as, arguably, the reality program Shark Tank does), or emotional con-
nections between “bosses” and their employees (i.e. Undercover Boss), or even
hinting at a meritocratic celebration of “raw talent” (i.e. American Idol) or
social skills (i.e. Survivor, Big Brother), The Apprentice mimics the dynamics
of the media industry more broadly: power is concentrated in the hands of
few; nepotistic hiring and promotion practices abound; decisions are rooted in
internal/personal biases with little transparency (behind the closed doors of
“the boardroom”); and the loudest, often most entitled/privileged personal-
ities prevail (i.e. Donald Trump and Piers Morgan over Marilu Henner and
Trace Adkins). Despite, or perhaps more accurately, because of this, The
164 New Media, Old Power
Apprentice is one of the most blatant celebrations of neoliberal capitalism to
emerge in the age of reality television: an ideology that devalues the power of
collective bargaining, equitable working conditions, and class consciousness.
In 2008 reporters seemed split on whether the WGA strike was a sign of the
end times for media production or if it gave way to more entertaining content
such as Celebrity Apprentice. As an example of the former, The Detroit News’
Mekeisha Madden Toby (2008*) credits the WGA strike with the impending
“death of TV”: “Until the WGA and the studios come to an agreement, we—
the innocent viewers—will have to suffer through shows such as ‘The Celeb-
rity Apprentice’ […] Be strong.” Another report on the strike for USA Today
(2008*) laments the networks’ turn to “new helpings of faked reality” and
then, somewhat presciently, goes on to discuss the demise of American politics
through the metaphor of reality TV: “a far more important and compelling
reality show is unfolding in plain sight. Call it Last Candidate Standing or Sur-
vivor: 100 Pennsylvania Avenue.” The piece then laments the lack of political
coverage on network television in favor of “fake” reality programming: eerily
foreshadowing the eventual merging of the two via Donald Trump.
Importantly, this framing positions news reporting – much like economics and
The Apprentice itself – as a zero-sum game: if reality television and/or celebrities
are getting coverage, it is understood to be at the expense of more serious issues,
even when it is entertainment reporters doing the covering. But, at the same
time, as budgets for newsrooms shrink and different reporting beats are axed, the
idea of zero-sum reporting becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: when there is not
enough staff to cover both stories, the sensational one wins out. The connections
between cuts in newsrooms and cuts to television ought to have been an obvious
angle for reporters, but they seemed less interested in this than providing classist
and sexist judgments of “taste” and “culture.” In his report for The Washington
Post, for instance, Tom Shales (2008*) describes the “reality” genre as one that
“celebrates and elevates life’s most trivial drivel.” Critiques of sensationalizing
“everyday” life and emotions are commonly levelled at the reality genre, with
writers lamenting that the format panders to viewers, despite, as noted above,
significant audience preference for scripted shows.
Again, the news media – and entertainment critics in particular – play an
important role in legitimizing and promoting such content to audiences that
might want other options. While there were a few articles critiquing the format
(as outlined above), there were twice as many that praised the genre or The
Apprentice more specifically. In a lengthy profile of The Apprentice for The Hol-
lywood Reporter, Michael Rechtshaffen (2008*) demonstrates the press’ devotion
to the show, crediting The Apprentice with doing the “unthinkable: It’s made
business sexy.” The story also positions Apprentice viewers – unlike the stereo-
types around reality viewers more broadly – as “classy,” noting that the show
was particularly popular in households earning over $100,000 per year. A report
from New York Daily News, carried in the Calgary Herald echoes this sentiment,
stating that despite its dwindling ratings, the show was a darling for investors
because it courted the “upscale audience advertisers crave” (Huff 2007*).
 Neoliberal Success Stories 165
Such information circulating broadly positions The Apprentice as an
aspirational text: not only portraying the “success” that can be achieved via
corporate capitalism, but also by becoming known as a show for the middle-
to upper-class audience. Readers of such news articles might not earn six
figure salaries themselves, but they come to understand – via news reporting –
that The Apprentice is a show that is enjoyed by the well off and well-edu-
cated, separating it from other “low brow” reality television shows catering to
a lowest common denominator. This absolves audiences of guilt for watching
the show – in fact, in can be a point of pride – as the show potentially has
educational value, breeding both a higher taste level and “showing” people
how to “make it” in the business world (see also Couldry and Littler 2011).
The aspirational dimensions of the show are further bolstered through its
use of “luxury goods” as rewards for a winning team (Couldry and Littler
2011, 268) and onscreen partnerships with high-end brands. On almost every
episode of The Apprentice, the teams are challenged to provide some form of
promotional material for a partner brand. As noted by several marketing
reporters, product placement within a (reality) show is often more effective
advertising than a 30-second spot sold during the commercial break (Chang
2007*; Johannes 2007*). In what was essentially a promotional article for the
show in PR Week trade magazine, Irene Chang (2007*) notes the example of
Ciao Bella Gelato’s appearance on the show in 2004, which produced an
8000% jump in website traffic and a 200% spike in online sales. Company
spokespeople, in turn, bolster the legitimacy of Trump and his show. For
instance, in a 2008 story for Furniture Today, a news magazine for the furni-
ture industry, Serta President Bob Sherman boasts about an upcoming
appearance on Celebrity Apprentice: “Donald Trump selects only the top-tier
brands to work with, and we are confident that working with him will
strengthen our brand awareness across the country” (Perry 2008*).
That sentiment, of course, is key to the success of product placement in The
Apprentice versus Survivor or American Idol: viewers can purchase the sym-
bols of wealth and success and thus feel connected to (and develop more
empathy with) the wealthy and successful. As argued by Bourdieu (1984), a
key characteristic of “success” in capitalist societies is its visibilty to others.
Buying the “luxury” brands allows “regular” people to both internalize
“success” (even if it is only symbolic) and to display that success to others
(which, of course, becomes even more valuable in the social media/influencer
economy that would take hold just a few years later). Of course, such incli-
nations are tied to the broader values of neoliberal capitalism: a system that
both makes possible and is made more possible by shows such as The
Apprentice.

The Apprentice as Pedagogical Tool

The rise of reality television production in the early aughts is often conceived
of as a spontaneous response to audience demands and shifting technologies
166 New Media, Old Power
more than as part of a broader neoliberal project of pushing a “new norma-
tive logic capable of integrating, and enduringly re-orienting, policy and con-
duct in a new direction” (Dardot and Laval 2013, 148). Not only was The
Apprentice a response to a more neoliberal approach to media production –
again, the use of quicker shooting techniques and schedules as well as cheap,
non-unionized labor – it also embodied this new normative logic of neoliber-
alism. In their discussion of the British version of the show (starring Alan
Sugar), Nick Couldry and Jo Littler (2011) caution against an oversimplified
“media effects” model of consumption wherein audiences passively absorb the
neoliberal messages being sent to them via such programs. Instead, they
query: “through what mechanisms do general representations of work in rea-
lity become absorbed into wider culture?” (Couldry and Littler 2011, 265).
In the final section I want to help answer that question by specifically
examining news reporting, which across 2007 and 2008 illustrates a clear
uptake of the values, format, and ideology of The Apprentice into businesses
and schools. The rise of reality television in line with the rise of global, neo-
liberal capitalism is not coincidental. The format celebrates competition,
individualism, the pretense of an equal playing field, meritocracy, and
aspirations for wealth. The characteristics of The Apprentice, however, take
these values to the extreme. In addition to building empathy with the rich (via
aspirational representations targeting middle-class viewers), The Apprentice is
uniquely neoliberal in several ways: rewarding extreme individualism and
competition (particularly visible in the pitting of teammates against one
another in the boardroom sequences); the veneration of entrepreneurship and
“branding”; and in its unquestioning celebration of Donald Trump and his
version of wealth/success.
As Couldry and Littler note, The Apprentice is often positioned by produ-
cers and networks as a pedagogical text, “teaching” viewers “what it means to
be a contemporary entrepreneurial worker (2011, 268). Such an education
plays an important role in the neoliberal transformation of society, where
workers must learn how to see themselves as potential owners and bosses,
despite not being owners and/or bosses. As Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval
(2013, 97–98) outline in their thorough history of neoliberal thought, post-
war German economic theorists such as Wilhelm Röpke argued that this shift
(or “de-proletarianization”) in workers’ identities would help stave off the
conditions in which collectivism and socialism thrive. Although Röpke’s eco-
nomic solution to this problem – ensuring that each worker was a property
owner and independent producer – is falling further out of view for most
workers today, the social solution – ensuring that each worker identifies with
and as an entrepreneurial subject who conducts themselves by the rationale of
the market – is thriving in the contemporary moment via an onslaught of
cultural messages encouraging them to do so. Although, as cultural studies
theorists have been arguing for years, the masses do not necessarily passively
absorb such ideologies as packaged and sold via The Apprentice, they do
encounter these messages in myriad ways every day, including via news
 Neoliberal Success Stories 167
reporting that, as discussed in the last section, frames such shows as aspira-
tional texts that (ought to) appeal to educated, middle-class audiences and,
perhaps more crucially, in education curricula across North America.
Indeed, the importance of heralding an educated middle-class demonstrates
what is at stake in these representations. In his classic analysis of discipline,
Michel Foucault (1979) demonstrates how contemporary disciplinary institu-
tions, which include schools, militaries, hospitals, and workplaces, produce
“docile bodies” ready to work (and produce efficiently) and obey. Schools,
like the media, play a critical role in producing such subjects, teaching
pupils – from a very early age – the practices not only of obedience (to bosses,
owners, capitalists), but also inuring them to surveillance, control (over their
highly regimented time, space, and social interactions), evaluation (via grades
and exams), and classifications. With the apparatus already in place to pro-
duce the kinds of economic subjects required by capitalism, it apparently was
quite simple to adapt to the demands of neoliberal capitalism in the early
aughts via the implementation of Apprentice competitions into schools across
Canada and the United States.
Throughout his career Trump has positioned himself as a teacher: he has
written several “how to” books which claim to outline the secrets to business
success (Klecker 2020, 219). The Apprentice, of course, further legitimized this
“successful” image and the media helped bolster the claims without inter-
rogating his success the way that they do for female celebrities. Perhaps even
more interesting, then, are the ways in which reporters seemed almost eager
to trace the uptake of neoliberal culture into schools without the same level of
disparagement or moral panics displayed towards young women’s engage-
ment with celebrity culture. In her article for the Chicago Daily Herald,
Arlene Miles discusses a recent high school marketing class project where the
students have a weekly “board meeting” with their teacher who issues “fir-
ings” (i.e., grades lower than A) to underperforming groups. In order to
mirror the experience of “real life,” the teen-aged students also rate each
other – every week – on their “attire, professionalism, participation, and
expression of thoughts” (Miles 2007*). Perhaps such practices are realistic
and prepping them for “real life,” but no discussion was had in the article
over whether this kind of world – where a teacher rewards students’ classist
(and often racist and sexist) judgments of one another – is the one we want or
ought to create. No child psychologists are interviewed (as they are when
discussing young female celebrities), nor are there any outraged parents or
grandparents who want to shield their child from such “too grown up” topics
and practices (see Chapter 2 on Disney stars).
This Chicago educator was not alone in looking to the pedagogic offerings
of a competitive reality show in 2007–2008. Gozanga University’s chapter of
the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization (or CEO) sponsored an Appren-
tice-like competition amongst three teams of four students in Spokane,
Washington (Davenport 2007*). The Santa Fe Community College sponsored
its own version, called “The Intern” where the lucky college student winner
168 New Media, Old Power
received an internship with the mayor in Gainesville, Florida (the story did
not specify whether it was paid) (Snyder 2007*). Professor Carolyn Birming-
ham’s students in Organizational Behavior at the University of Idaho com-
peted in teams to fundraise for local charities and learn about “corporate
citizenship” from the “excellent role model” of Wells Fargo bank, who
donated checks and checking accounts to the student competitors (US Fed
News 2007*). Towson University hosted “The Associate,” a competition for
eight graduating seniors from the College of Business and Economics to
compete for a six-month fellowship at St. Joseph’s Medical Center and a
voluntourism trip to Tanzania (Watson 2008*). A group of teenagers from
Carbondale, Illinois competed in “Muffin Madness” – an Apprentice-style
challenge for “young aspiring business leaders” to bake and sell their own
muffins (Targeted News Service 2008*). Even Windsor, Ontario got in on the
action with “Windsor Apprentice,” a competition for local high school stu-
dents to encourage teen entrepreneurship by giving them an item to sell to
local businesspeople/judges (Poliakov 2008*).
Notwithstanding the uncritical reporting on teen entrepreneurship (and
internships), these articles perpetuate the idea that The Apprentice is a valu-
able “real world” example of how business does and, more importantly,
should operate in the neoliberal world: a competitive, winner-take-all system
that (supposedly) blindly rewards whoever earns the most money. This ideol-
ogy is perpetuated further when former “winners” of the show are brought
into businesses, colleges, and schools to “teach” others the valuable lessons
they learned from Trump. Two of the show’s most high-profile winners – Bill
Rancic (season one) and Randal Pinkett (season four) – made repeated public
appearances where they lauded Trump and the show for their success
(Rancic) and promoted entrepreneurship and “bootstrap” ideology to young
university students (Pinkett).
In fact, Pinkett’s messaging was notable for its emphasis – like many of the
school-run competitions outlined above – on “giving back” to the community
as a marker of “success.” Pinkett, an African American man who launched a
multi-million-dollar consulting company before joining The Apprentice,
author of two books, and holder of four post-graduate degrees, including a
Ph.D. (US Fed News 2008*), was less likely than Rancic to credit the show or
Trump in his media interviews. Pinkett did, however, promote a central tenet
of today’s neoliberal system with regards to the redistribution of wealth. In a
lengthy profile of the entrepreneur ahead of a speaking engagement in Spar-
tanburg, South Carolina, Pinkett declares: “I draw the distinction between
being successful and being great. For me, success is about what you do for
yourself and greatness is what you do for others.” (quoted in Conley 2008*).
While many might suggest such values are admirable – and certainly, they
come across this way in the news’ uncritical framing – the underfunding and
undermining of social services is often legitimized, in neoliberalism, via dis-
courses that celebrate “successful” millionaires and billionaires “giving back”
philanthropically to their community, over systematic justice and equity.
 Neoliberal Success Stories 169
Such an ethos is solidified in the transition from The Apprentice to Celebrity
Apprentice, wherein contestants are no longer competing for a job but for their
chosen charity. This not only promotes capitalist wealth accumulation, but also
helps celebrities – who often serve as capitalist scapegoats, despised because of
their wealth and “success” in an unequal system – to soften their public image
through philanthropic imagery (and a key affective sequence in the celebrity ver-
sion of the program involved the “winning” project manager visiting their charity
to hand deliver their cheque). This angle is further highlighted in the reporting on
the show, which celebrates the celebrities’ supposed generosity and impact. An
interview with executive producer Mark Burnett quotes him at length:

[The celebrities are] raising so much money for charity. Think of the
underlying value—the amount of goodness being done from this show is
incredible. No question, really changing lives. There’s no country like the
United States of America. If America stops its charity, the world would
fall apart, fall apart. People don’t get that about America, (the generosity
both) governmentally and individually.
(O’Hare 2008b*)

Wealth inequality is reframed in terms of generosity and it is up to the weal-

thy – be they individuals or governments (who are increasingly unable or
unwilling to recoup the taxes owed to them by the wealthy) – to decide if and
how they will “give back” to those less fortunate (and upon whose labor they
rely to generate their millions in income).
This reframing of wealth as individually earned and altruistically donated
is also helpful to the “sponsors” of each task in the show. Corporations under
neoliberal capitalism have the freedom to earn more money than ever and,
thus, must usually offset their unimaginable profits with some form of phi-
lanthropy (see Jeff Bezos recently and vaguely pledging $10 billion dollars
toward fighting climate change). Such initiatives were practiced by the busi-
nesses whose products (and executives) feature as the challenge in each epi-
sode of Celebrity Apprentice. For instance, in an early episode of the first
celebrity season, the teams were tasked to design a marketing campaign for
SolesUnited, “a program from footwear manufacturer Crocs that recycles
donated shoes for distribution to developing nations” (O’Hare 2008b*). While
the Crocs company might not have to do as much public relation positioning
as, say, Apple or Amazon (both companies are notorious in their exploitation
of workers), it does boost sales and consumer goodwill to appear to champion
a “good cause” that potentially only slightly offsets the damage it is doing
environmentally.13 Crocs benefits from this goodwill appearance, which, in
turn allows the company to generate more sales and profit, while NBC makes
money and Donald Trump and his team of celebrity “apprentices” get a
boost in their public image. Everyone (with power) is happy.
The imbalances of power, the growing wealth inequality, and the increasing
reliance on charity and philanthropy all are reflections of decades of
170 New Media, Old Power
neoliberal policy. Yet policies that disproportionately negatively affect the
marginalized and the majority need to be justified. Reality television provides
not only a cheaper alternative to traditional media production, but also a
platform to legitimize neoliberalism. The focus on a winner-take-all competi-
tive system, rewarding of selfishness and disloyalty, celebration of wealth at
the expense of ethics and community, and illusory propagation of merito-
cratic narratives produces a citizenry that is endlessly self-absorbed and self-
regulating, admires billionaires and millionaires (no matter their character,
but matter their gender), and believes in their innate ability to one day
achieve the same “American dream,” despite all evidence to the contrary.
The Apprentice was both part of and symbolic of a shift in culture and
values that exceeds Donald Trump’s own star text. In many ways, the show
served as both an aspirational and a pedagogical neoliberal text, teaching
viewers that capital is the number one value, cutthroat individualism is the
way to that capital, and that women-hating/trophy-collecting rich white men
are the ultimate symbols of and rightful gatekeepers of “success” and happi-
ness. That these lessons were then taken up more broadly and perpetuated
through schools, universities, and businesses across Canada and the United
States shows that the values circulating in-and-through popular culture
cannot be siloed off and/or dismissed as only affecting those who engage with
it. And, whether or not he is or ever was actually popular (or rich), a reality
star/heir became one of the most powerful political leaders in the Western
world. While it is dubious to lay responsibility for either of these broad
developments entirely at the feet of The Apprentice and its producers, it is
difficult not to trace a line directly from the show to President Trump’s plu-
tocratic and corrupt political office. As a society, we are still only beginning
to comprehend the effects of media conglomeration and deregulation, the rise
in cheap and exploitative reality tv production, and the unmitigated celebra-
tion of neoliberal capitalism, and getting us all to focus our anger instead
toward naked celebutantes was, perhaps, the media’s greatest con of all.

Notes
1 One important note about this chapter is that Celebrity Apprentice is no longer
available to view either for purchase or on streaming platforms (at least in Canada,
from where I write). I therefore am unable to conduct a textual analysis of this
version of the show, although I do admit to having watched several seasons during
its original airing (and thus have some knowledge of certain rules and tropes on
the show). For this chapter, then, I am relying much more heavily on the news
reporting around the show to make my arguments.
2 This is one reason that the growth of the so-called “incel” community in late-stage
capitalism is notable: as economic mobility moves further out of reach in neo-
liberal societies, heterosexual men’s capacities to build sexual capital are threa-
tened, thus making them less likely to attract women who are socialized to view
marriage as an economic transaction.
3 Indeed, it was white women whose votes helped secure Trump’s presidential victory
in 2016: although they did not overwhelmingly vote for Trump (their vote was
 Neoliberal Success Stories 171
pretty evenly split), Black women and Hispanic women overwhelmingly voted
against him at 98% and 67%, respectively (Pew Research Center 2018).
4 NBC also offered Donald Trump plenty of airtime during the 2016 campaign,
granting him a Saturday Night Live guest hosting gig in November 2015 and an
infamous appearance on The Tonight Show in September 2016, wherein host
Jimmy Fallon tousled Trump’s hair.
5 Indeed, in their study of the parasocial relations between Trump and his voters/
supporters, Gabriel et al. (2018) found a strong correlation between Apprentice
viewership and belief in Trump.
6 “Mogul” was also used to describe Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis: specifi-
cally, “porn mogul” (WENN 2008a*). In her recent work, Boyle (2019, 116) outlines
the anti-Semitic roots of the term, particularly as applied to Harvey Weinstein.
7 There were a couple of notable exceptions to this reporting: an article for Reuters
news service questioned many of Trump’s self-marketing decisions (see Reiter
2007*); the Associated Press ran a story about his failed casino business (Godlesky
and Associated Press 2007*); and several stories were run about lawsuits and neigh-
borhood conflicts (McConville 2008*; Matthews 2008*). While certainly this lack of
critical reporting on Trump’s business ventures could be attributed to my search terms
(I searched articles that mentioned The Apprentice), it at least suggests a lack of con-
textualization of the numerous business “misses” Trump experienced at the time.
8 Not all reporters echoed this sentiment: in a preview for an upcoming episode of
the show, St. Louis Dispatch reporter Gail Pennington (2008*) said that Simmons
displays a “deliberate, condescending sexism.”
9 It is important to note that this term, which describes a specific form of anti-Black
racism faced by Black women, was coined by Moya Bailey and Trudy (see 2018).
10 In one of the few articles that critiqued the selection of Morgan at the time, the
National Post’s Kevin Baker reminded readers of Morgan’s disgraceful firing from
The Daily Mirror after publishing fake photos showing British soldiers abusing
Iraqi prisoners. Morgan’s public trajectory, however, has not been slowed by repe-
ated public demonstrations of petulance, corruption, and ineptitude.
11 Of course, it is possible that Trump does not have full authority over the decision
of which celebrity is fired (see Klecker 2020, 224), but by being presented as sole
authority on the show, he is elevated over the other celebrities and thus is ascribed
more symbolic power than them.
12 The invocation of the ideal subject of neoliberalism necessarily invokes its mirrored
Other – the failed subject of neoliberalism (Charles 2012; Hey 2009; Tyler 2013).
Within this framework it would seem that failed subjects are those who do not succeed
at being entrepreneurial and autonomous citizens. However, as discussed throughout
this book, the rules of neoliberalism are unevenly and inconsistently applied. Stars
serve an important prescriptive function then in that they can be used to articulate
contradictory rules (Dyer 1979). As noted by Imogen Tyler and Bruce Bennett (2010),
“celebrity culture operates to establish ‘social hierarchies and processes of social
abjection’ which include both gendered and classed distinctions between ‘proper’ and
‘improper’ personhood” (quoted in Allen 2011, 151–152).
13 Crocs shoes are only recyclable in the sense of being donated to other users but are
not biodegradable or made from recyclable plastic (Crocs.com; Peterson 2020).

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6 Conclusion

Then and Now

On September 29, 2021, a California judge finally removed Britney
Spears’ father as her conservator after 13 years of struggle and increasing
public scrutiny of the arrangement (Stump 2021). The next day, Spears
posted a series of nude photos of herself on Instagram. Although I
cannot claim to know her state of mind, there is clearly a connection
between autonomy and the sexual self in these posts. Watching Spears
reclaim her body and self, I could not help but think of the ways in
which her sexual capital had been appropriated and wielded against her
over the years. The post-feminist era in which she blossomed, as well as
the recessionary moment of crisis, in which she failed, delineated the (im)
possibilities for her from the start: a life of repeated objectification, being
reduced to her body and sexuality (even as a teenaged girl) yet expected
to always be chaste, innocent, and authentic; positioned as an idealized
standard to live up to (framed as a role model, idolized and worshipped
by girls and grown men) yet tormented for her inevitable failure in this
role; and forced for years to publicly perform for the profit and benefit of
others, while her private life was micro-managed and every decision –
down to her own reproductive freedom – taken away from her. When
that agency was finally wrested back, she wielded what she has been
taught is her main asset – her body – reclaiming a form of capital that
had been lost to her for many years.
Yet, this sexual capital has clearly depleted. Misogyny, ageism, and ableism
have changed the lens through which the public views these displays of her
body. No longer does a sexualized Britney wield the power she did in her
snake-dancing, Madonna-kissing, Timberlake heart-breaking days. The
patronizing comments on her 2021 photos (not across the board, but many
commentors pointed out use of photoshop and non-polished makeup) sug-
gests that, although Britney might seek to reclaim her sexual capital (and she
still, in many ways, carries that same bodily capital; she remains thin, toned,
blonde), too much has happened to and with her for this capital to yield
symbolic returns. She continues to be objectified by the media, but now,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268659-8
 Conclusion 179
rather than an object of idolization, sexualization, or pathologization, she is
an object of sympathy, if not outright pity – where a broader public reflection
upon and reckoning with how she was treated need not threaten to reinstate
her symbolic power, nor challenge the underlying misogyny of the media
industry.
The contemporary “re-evaluation” of Spears’ celebrity and her treatment
by the press in the early aughts – spurred by both the #FreeBritney move-
ment as well as recent documentaries like Framing Britney Spears (Stark
2021) – provides discursive and affective cover for ongoing abusive behavior
by the media toward female celebrities. It is because she has lost symbolic
power that the media is willing to reckon with Spears’ earlier treatment. Yet
these framings – of women as manipulative, money hungry, untrustworthy,
inauthentic, sexualized sirens luring both innocent men and innocent young
girls into unhealthy fantasies – continue to plague the media’s engagement
with famous and successful women. The negative talk about Kylie Jenner, for
instance, or Rihanna, as they entered into the billionaire class – especially in
comparison to the men who populate that group and hold much more sym-
bolic power than they do (i.e., Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, from Face-
book and Amazon, respectively) – suggests that these anxieties over women,
success, and sexuality have not subsided in recent years.1
Indeed, Rihanna’s public trajectory has been complex: she not only had to
navigate a highly publicized abusive relationship as a young woman (with a
man who is still a culturally sanctioned celebrity) but she also lives with an
ongoing and quotidian entitlement toward her labor and energy, as her fans
(although lovingly, in their eyes most likely) repeatedly demand that she turn
away from her passions (design) to theirs (making music). As more women of
color enter into the world of female celebrity, these negative discourses are, of
course, amplified by racism. The public treatments of and reactions to
Meghan Markle and Naomi Osaka – both of whom have publicly shared
their own struggles with life in the public spotlight – show that we have not
come so far from the days of Britney, Lindsay, and Paris. It is their lack of
current cultural capital – versus Markle and Osaka’s very real power and
influence today – that allows us to reflect on celebrity safely contained in the
past. Adding to this, the misogynoir (Bailey and Trudy 2018) faced by famous
Black women demonstrates both new and ongoing anxieties about the place
of white women and men in a “post-race,” neoliberal world. White women
continue to invest in these systems, despite the violence and disdain with
which the biggest “successes” of our culture are treated, and this investment –
this belief that, for me, it could be different – forecloses identification and
alignment with a broader, more oppressed class of peoples with whom a
revolutionary force could be built. The media as an institution both serves to
police the boundaries of success and to continually turn young women toward
it; it is designed to contradictorily promote the values of the capitalist system
while denying the violence that this system perpetuates (and, indeed, needs, in
order to sustain itself). This violence is sexual, because female celebrity itself
180 Conclusion
is inherently sexual – always dependent upon a woman’s ability to publicly sell
her sexual self (while maintaining a veneer of innocence and/or allowing her
sexual capital to be appropriated by others). The specter of sexual violence and
violation haunts all women who seek any form of power or visibility in our cul-
ture: either as a bartering tool (wielded by powerful men against them, or via
women seizing the means of their own violation), or as a disciplinary tool
reminding women of their proper place and function in the patriarchal order. The
growth of new media technologies changes the rules of participation, but not the
logic on which the game is founded: women are as useful as the profit generated
from their sexuality – whether or not it comes packaged in a “feminist” discourse.

Summary
The book began by looking at women who “earned” their success through
traditional, gate-kept media jobs: particularly actresses and singers. These
young women – in particular, Vanessa Hudgens, Miley Cyrus, and Linsday
Lohan – are often forced to navigate their own “scandalous” sexuality, whe-
ther intended for private or public consumption. As a critical site in the pro-
duction of narratives around girlhood, Disney produces numerous idols of
American femininity that are held to impossible standards, perhaps because
of their enormous, growing symbolic power. Their messages to young chil-
dren – that grown and famous women’s sexual selves are inauthentic and sites
of loss – produce womanhood as a site of danger. Should that not be enough,
the broader news media supplement the world created by Disney, stepping in
with their pedophilic gaze to produce young, female celebrity as overly
sexual, easily manipulated, and a site of both skepticism and moral panic
(even when parents do not see them this way). These forces are critical to
ensuring that the identificatory ties between these celebrities and their young
audiences are broken, so that their eventual abuse and exploitation by the
media is seen as deserved and necessary.
In the third chapter, I then examined this abuse and exploitation, noting the
continuities between Disney’s use of female celebrities and Playboy’s. The
later stages of female celebrity,2 as embodied by the “trainwreck,” invokes
feelings and discourses of loss and nostalgia for a more meritocratic/properly
feminine era. Ignoring the continuities between Monroe and these young
women, the media frames the stories of contemporary women’s public “fail-
ures” as a new and dangerous “crisis”: a crisis that I read in terms of post-
feminist narratives assuring young women of their empowerment, while re-
orienting them toward cruelly optimistic (Berlant 2011) promises that success,
economic mobility, and proper displays of sexuality will lead them toward the
“good life.” The pathologizing of these successful failures helps to occlude the
ways in which the system itself falls short of its promises, allowing us all to
reinvest in important, yet increasingly fallible narratives of meritocracy.
The second half of the book continued these conversations by examining
sex tapes and reality television celebrity as a gendered site of de/legitimization
 Conclusion 181
of American privilege. The celebrity sex tape – whether actually stolen or
purposefully leaked, it is an illicit text – produces violation as inherently
beneficial to women. Violation becomes a mediated commodity, desired and
consumed (by men) because of the humiliation and degradation that brings
famous, privileged women back down to their proper, subservient place in
patriarchy. At the same time, these sex tapes are not stand-alone objects:
neither Paris Hilton nor Kim Kardashian’s celebrity was contained to the
world of pornographic culture. Both launched a multitude of products,
extended their celebrity via reality television, and – more recently – used
social media to sustain and grow their empires (Kardashian, more success-
fully so). This bypassing of traditional gatekeeping structures – in which all
media workers are embedded and invested – produces a crisis of legitimacy.
Reporters responded by framing Hilton, in particular, as a non-success
(despite her success) and pushing back against Kardashian’s ability to entre-
preneurialize sex, while not yet experiencing the kind of public “crisis” that is
used to strip women of their symbolic power.
Finally, I turned my attention to another socialite turned reality star who
appropriated women’s sexual capital for his own gain and, despite his very
real lack of entrepreneurial skills, was positioned as a titan of business in and
through mainstream media discourses. Rather than produce Trump as a non-
success, the media take the opposite approach, legitimizing him and crediting
him for far more than he had accomplished. His celebrity and masculinity
were further sanctioned when he was granted full symbolic power over other
celebrities on Celebrity Apprentice – a show that was itself a direct result of
union efforts to slow the neoliberalization of film and television production in
the early aughts. Unlike their responses to the female celebrities discussed
throughout this book, reporters found Trump’s show to be fun, light-hearted
entertainment, either ignoring or celebrating his misogynist and abusive
treatment of women, evident in numerous off-screen interactions such as the
infamous hot mic incident (which occurred in the presence of a reporter).
Furthermore, while female celebrity is repeatedly blamed for the sexualization
of culture and the dumbing down of media institutions, Donald Trump’s
reality show became a pedagogical tool, indoctrinating an entire generation of
high schoolers and university students to neoliberal values and logics. The
uncritical celebration of competition, wealth accumulation, and billionaire
philanthropy has usurped any sense of community, fairness, and equity in
American culture. While many factors contributed to Trump’s political rise, it
is clear that the media plays a significant role in producing certain people as
successful, intelligent, powerful, and trustworthy, no matter their level of
accomplishment or questionable moral and ethical views.

Moving Forward
Women’s uses of technologies – particularly in capitalist societies – have long
been policed and contained by patriarchal forces. The neoliberal age in which
182 Conclusion
new media tools are mobilized toward economic ends has somewhat shifted
the playing field: a playing field which was never even to begin with. In the
contemporary environment, women who fit certain standards of femininity
(beautiful, able-bodied, and most often white) are able to entrepreneurialize
their engagement with media. No longer reliant upon the gatekeeping forces
of traditional male-run media (i.e., no longer having to be “chosen” by pro-
ducers, directors), certain women can now directly sell and recuperate the
profits of their sexual selves. Furthermore, they make visible this labor, pro-
viding an example to other women of how they can (if they are lucky enough
to fit the mold) monetize their own sexuality in today’s economy of visibility.
These shifts have resulted in extreme pushback from the traditional media
in which narratives of meritocracy are both created and experienced by some
of the most privileged people in society. Panics around the shifting terms of
“success” reveal ongoing anxieties about women’s place and potential amas-
sing of various forms of capital in patriarchal societies. Furthermore, the
apparent failings of success – the living examples that so-called “success” for
women may not be desirable and may, in fact, be toxic – reveal the instability
of an economic system that relies upon a diminishing faith in an impossible
reality. As neoliberal policies are taken to the extreme and the so-called
“good life” falls further out of reach for most people (while the amassing of
wealth by the few is celebrated, if discussed at all in the media), their frus-
trations are increasingly scapegoated onto, alternately, the few sites of extre-
mely visible wealth in America (celebrities) as well as some of the most
marginalized populations in the world (immigrants and refugees).
These issues are reaching critical importance today. When I began work on
this project approximately seven years ago, celebrity culture, journalism,
feminism, and politics were generally considered to be quite disparate issues.
Over the past several years they have converged, as is evident in the 2016
election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. While more and
more scholars try to decipher the causes and implication of such a trend, the
issue is much bigger than one man’s media trajectory in recent years (despite
what Trump’s worshippers might believe). While here I have attempted to
contextualize Trump within a broader, misogynist media system, much more
work can and will be done to unpack the ties between Trump and white
supremacist hate, online conspiracy communities and misogyny, as well as the
populist response to growing wealth inequity and global economic precarity.
I would like to end this book on an optimistic note, which, for me, is young
people. In 2011, I returned to academia with two goals: 1) learning the theo-
retical language to make sense of my experiences in casting; and 2) to chal-
lenge students to think through and beyond what the media and mainstream
society teaches them to think. And I see this happening every day, all around
me. The growing popularity of progressive, leftist (socialist) politics in the
United States shows that the neoliberal ethos is waning. The surge in popular
feminist figures and discourses is trickling down to students, who I see fight-
ing for marginalized groups, mobilizing against hate, and becoming highly
 Conclusion 183
skeptical of celebrity. If the language of critique can be learned and wielded
against female celebrities, imagine how powerful it will be once trained on the
billionaire class. I look forward to the day when wealthy, privileged, mediocre,
white men are considered to be, at the very least, as “useless” and “talentless”
as the female celebrities that have so long carried such labels. While Paris,
Britney, and Lindsay are all doing okay (for now), there are numerous other
people who are not; many of whom are far worse off and deserve far more
attention than the celebrities who are supposed to distract us from the bigger
issues at hand (again, that is the system, not the celebrity). We do, as a public,
with access to new media technologies, have the power to shift the focus of
our attention and conversations – that’s one of the things that makes these
tools so dangerous. When we realize the potential of these devices – both in
terms of our own private pleasures and in holding power publicly accoun-
table – we will start to have, as Hannah Montana says, the best of both
worlds.

Notes
1 Of course, this is not to suggest that having billionaires is either necessary or bene-
ficial, nor that more female billionaires ought to be a feminist goal. It is telling,
however, that these women often become the focus of capitalist critiques, especially
when they are labelled “self-made” (as though other billionaires have not experi-
enced privilege and/or inherited their families’ fortunes).
2 It is, on its own, quite remarkable that “late stage” female celebrity is generally
anyone over the age of 25.

References
Bailey, Moya, and Trudy. 2018. “On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism.”
Feminist Media Studies 18 (4): 762–768. doi:10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. E-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. Duke
University Press.
Stark, Samantha, director. 2021. Framing Britney Spears. FX Network.
Stump, Scott. 2021. “Judge Removes Britney Spears’ Father from Conservatorship.”
TODAY.Com. September 29. Accessed October 28, 2021. https://www.today.com/p
opculture/popculture/judge-removes-britney-spears-father-conservatorship-rcna
2419.
Appendix
Factiva Search Parameters and Results

Search Terms/ Dates Number of Number Number

Parameters Results Downloaded Analyzed

“Paris Hilton” + 01/01/2007 to 536 388 163

“sex tape” (Full 31/12/2008
article)
“Kim Karda- 01/01/2007 to 163 163 101
shian” + “sex 31/12/2008
tape”
(Full article)
“Celebrity” + 01/01/2007 to 77 58 18
“nude photo” 31/12/2008
(Full article)
“Celeb” + “nude” 01/01/2007 to 118 113 33
(Full article) 31/12/2008
“Lindsay Lohan” 01/01/2007 to 339 274 171
+ “nude” (Full 31/12/2008
article)
“Vanessa Hud- 01/01/2007 to 212 196 156
gens” + “nude” 31/12/2008
(Full article)
“Donald Trump” 01/01/2007 to 443 415 334
+ “Apprentice” 31/12/2008
(Headline and
lead paragraph)
Index

#MeToo 3, 110, 133n1, 150 Dyer, Richard 9, 10, 11, 35, 69, 71, 78,
79–81, 86, 87, 116, 171n12
Access Hollywood 144
agent see talent agent Facebook 2, 5, 85, 105, 179
The Anna Nicole Show 19, 83, 90–93, 152
The Apprentice 5–6, 22, 120, 140, 142, exploitation 3, 8–9, 11–12, 21, 22, 33, 36,
143, 144, 147, 150, 151–157, 162–165, 51, 54, 57, 58, 74, 76, 83, 85–86, 88,
166–168, 170, 171n5 89, 91, 93, 95, 104, 105, 113, 117–118,
assault see sexual violence 119, 126–127, 129, 131–132, 133, 143,
audition 1, 2, 14, 20, 31, 32, 33, 44, 46, 147, 157, 162, 169, 170, 180
85, 103, 104, 119
gaze 34, 37, 58, 69, 82, 85, 96n9, 110,
Banet-Weiser, Sarah 55, 113–115, 126, 118, 131, 148; Disney gaze 34, 36, 50;
131, 133, 146–147 pedophilic gaze 34, 43, 49, 50, 180
beauty 2, 10, 11, 12, 23n3, 77, 78, The Girls Next Door 83, 90, 94–95, 152
79, 84, 85, 87, 89, 104, 106, 107, gold digger 84, 88–89, 113, 145, 146
112–113, 115–116, 157, 158;
pageants 113–115, 126, 133, 144, Hannah Montana 19, 33, 50–51, 52–53,
146, 149–150, 151 54–55, 56–58, 131, 183
Berlant, Lauren see cruel optimism harassment see sexual violence
Bourdieu, Pierre 96n1, 145, 165 Hefner, Hugh 73, 83, 86, 90, 94–95, 157
High School Musical 21, 34, 38–39, 40,
casting 1–2, 14–15, 20, 31–32, 67–68, 43–45, 46, 47, 48–50, 51, 52, 55, 115
94; 103–104, 119, 126, 140–141, 142, Hilton, Paris 4, 6, 7, 19, 21, 22, 71, 74
144, 152, 182; casting directors 9, 85, 104–112, 115, 116–133, 144, 150; 151,
133, 163 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 160, 161, 181
The Celebrity Apprentice 6, 22, 142, 143, Hudgens, Vanessa 6, 21, 34, 38–50, 51,
144, 147, 150, 156, 157–160, 162, 164, 55, 56, 58, 60n8–9, 73, 76, 86, 108,
165, 169, 170n1, 181 128, 180
cruel optimism 71, 72, 83, 87, 95, 118, 180
Cyrus, Billy Ray 50, 52, 54, 57–58, 61n12 influencer 3, 104, 128, 133, 165
Cyrus, Miley 6, 21, 33, 34, 44, 50–59, Instagram 2, 10, 12, 105, 178
61n13, 73–74, 76, 86, 108, 110, 128,
130, 180 Kardashian, Kim 4, 6, 13, 17, 19, 104,
105–106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113,
Disney Channel 21, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 115–116, 118, 119, 128, 130, 132–133,
50, 51, 54, 60n2, 73, 74 134n2, 144, 150, 151, 154, 157,
Duff, Hilary 33, 73–74 160–161, 181
186 Index
Lohan, Lindsay 6, 7, 21, 23n6, 50, 59, selfie 3, 7, 37, 39
70–78, 79, 82, 85, 86–87, 95–96, 105, sex tape 6–7, 17–18, 22, 73, 104–118,
106, 110, 116, 118, 120, 129, 132, 133, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 134, 155,
154, 180 180–181
sexting 13, 40–43, 55, 60n7
male gaze see gaze sexual agency 17, 34, 44, 48, 57, 130–132
meritocracy 7, 9, 14, 22, 71–72, 73, 85, sexual capital 8–9, 11, 12, 22, 23n3, 33,
89, 96, 104, 106, 107, 112, 115, 118, 51, 57, 59, 73, 85, 86, 88, 111, 129,
119, 122, 124, 126, 128, 132, 148, 150, 133, 144–149, 150, 154, 157, 160,
155, 161, 162, 163, 166, 170, 180, 182 170n2, 178, 180, 181
Monroe, Monroe 7, 21, 69, 70, 75–82, sexual violence 2, 3–4, 13, 15–16, 17, 40,
83, 84, 85–87, 95, 96n7, 97n11, 108, 43, 45, 50, 108, 110, 133n1, 134n3,
110, 120, 129, 180 144, 147, 150, 156, 157, 158, 180
moral panic 16–17, 34, 36–37, 40, 43, 44, sexualization 19, 37–38, 40, 56, 59, 82,
48, 49, 50, 55, 58, 70, 112, 128, 129, 128, 179, 181
167, 180 The Simple Life 19, 105, 119, 120–122,
MTV 71, 74, 90, 129, 130, 142 134n4, 152, 160
Smith, Anna Nicole 6, 7, 21, 70, 73, 83–96,
neoliberalism 3, 4, 7, 13, 22, 70, 71, 88, 97n11, 110, 120, 125, 144, 152, 157
106, 119, 123, 124, 130, 132, 143, 145, Spears, Britney 6, 7, 50, 59, 70, 71–72,
152, 156, 158, 161–170, 171n12, 179, 73–74, 96n10, 105, 106, 118, 129,
181–182 132–133, 178–179
nostalgia 36, 43–44, 70, 77, 80–81, 82,
95, 180 talent agent 1–2, 31–32, 68, 85, 96, 104,
133, 141
O’Donnell, Rosie 142, 143, 146–150 trainwreck 6, 21, 72–73, 83, 84, 90, 95,
Obama, Barack 4, 128 128, 131, 132–133, 180
Trump, Donald 5, 7, 21, 22, 73, 88, 110,
philanthropy 169–170, 181 119, 120, 123, 125, 133, 141–170, 171
Playboy 6, 21, 35, 59, 73, 75, 79, 83, 84, n4–5 n7 n11, 181, 182
86, 89, 90, 94–95, 108, 110, 145, 157, Trump, Ivanka 141, 151, 152, 154–156,
158, 180 158, 161
post-feminism 21, 44, 53, 70, 71–72, Twitter 5, 10, 105
73–74, 78, 81, 83, 87, 94, 95, 106, 112,
113, 118–119, 128–133, 145, 178 Vanity Fair 6, 21, 34, 44, 50, 51, 53–59,
post-truth 119, 121, 126 74, 86, 120
pornification see sexualization
Projansky, Sarah 3, 16, 34, 36, 47, Weinstein, Harvey 3, 12–13, 103, 171n6
57–58, 70 WGA see Writer’s Guild of America
pseudo-events 160–161 whiteness 21, 36, 57, 81, 106, 112–113,
Pullen, Kirsten 10, 69, 83, 96n6, 115 115–116; femininity 76, 78, 81,
112–113, 118, 132 see also beauty; white
rape culture 3, 40, 48, 107, 110 sexual purity 33, 36, 40, 41, 57, 59, 81,
Richie, Nicole 105, 121, 124, 125, 150, 160 107, 110, 112–113, 115–116, 117, 118
Roberts, Blain 9, 112, 115, 117, 146 Writer's Guild of America 5, 163–164
role model 16, 35, 39, 43, 45, 48–49, 53,
60n10, 69, 72, 82, 127–128, 168, 178 YouTube 5, 105