Name: 'I was worried Lindsay, Paris or Britney would die': why the 00s were so toxic for women
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'I was worried Lindsay, Paris or Britney would die': why the 00s were so toxic for women

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Body shaming, media harassment, relentless cruelty – it’s time to reassess the decade that feminism forgotby Sat 6 Mar 2021 03.00 ESTI had largely forgotten about these incidents until I watched , the much-discussed documentary about the media intrusion that contributed to Spears’s 2007 mental health crisis, and her efforts to free herself from a conservatorship administered by her father. Watching footage of a 17-year-old Spears smiling politely as a male interviewer asked about her breasts brought everything back. My God, I thought. For young women and girls, the 2000s truly were a cursed era.Like a paparazzo’s flashbulb exploding in the face of an It girl stumbling out of Chateau Marmont, the period is currently undergoing a stark reappraisal. And like those paparazzi photos, it’s a none-too-flattering portrait. In addition to Framing Britney Spears, there is the upcoming Demi Lovato documentary Dancing With the Devil, which documents the 00s Disney starlet’s struggles with drug addiction. The recent BBC series also features interviews with Kerry Katona and Charlotte Church, both tormented by the media in the 00s, and footage of paparazzi upskirting women as they get into cars. Horrifying interviews have resurfaced online; in one 2003 clip, Diane Sawyer makes Spears cry after blaming her for her breakup with Justin Timberlake. (Timberlake has been slammed online for his behaviour towards Spears, whom he shamed for their breakup, and Janet Jackson, whose breast he exposed at the 2004 Super Bowl, tanking her career.)In the 2000s, it was open season on young women. “It was blatant, horrifying misogyny,” says the former New York Daily News gossip columnist Ben Widdicombe, author of Gatecrasher: How I Helped the Rich Become Famous and Ruin the World. He welcomes our soul-searching about the period. “I’m glad it’s being re-evaluated,” he says. “I think it has to be. The media was incredibly cruel to Britney and other women at the time. It was a great moral failing of the tabloid press, that we did that. And I unfortunately was a cog in that machine.”Widdicombe tells me that, even back then, the press treatment of Spears was horrifying to watch. “It was clear to us reporting staff at the time that we needed to leave Britney alone,” he says. “Her mental health required the media to step back. But this voracious capitalist engine wasn’t going to do that.” While Widdicombe didn’t personally report on Britney’s breakdown, he says he was powerless to stop his editors from splashing it on the front page, because there was simply too much money to be made from it.Widdicombe says he feared that starlets would come to harm: “I was seriously worried that either Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton or would die. Britney had mental health problems, Lindsay had a drug problem and Paris was known to drink and drive. And the media would pretend to hand-wring in sorrow, but actually their deaths would make a lot of money for them.” Why were we so fascinated with celebrity culture in the 2000s? Widdicombe traces it back to the 11 September terror attacks. “9/11 was so traumatic and gruesome,” he says. “When we recovered from the shock, editors said: ‘We need a picture of a beautiful young girl on page 12, and we need to know who she’s dating, and what parties she’s going to.’”Pop culture came roaring back, fuelled by the rise of snark-filled gossip blogs such as TMZ and PerezHilton.com, and celebrity-focused magazines including US Weekly in the US, and Heat and Closer in the UK. “We were able to see more of celebrities than ever before,” says Matt James of the fan account “because we had the internet, which gave us exciting new reach into their lives. That, in turn, caused a boom in magazines and blogs. It was a perfect storm of this all coming together and creating a society that was fixated on celebrity in a way that it had never been before.”The editors of the gossip magazines and blogs rapidly realised that the public had an insatiable appetite for schadenfreude and cruelty, particularly when it came to young women. Upskirt photos were published in magazines such as Heat as recently as 2007, and readers wanted to see glassy-eyed women stumbling out of nightclubs, hair extension tracks clearly visible. The mags wanted to build up ordinary women – such as Big Brother star Jade Goody – then tear them apart when they failed. (Once the sweetheart of the tabloids, Goody was savaged for her racist bullying of fellow Celebrity Big Brother contestant Shilpa Shetty in 2007.)“Everything was fine until the rise of Perez Hilton,” said Mila Kunis, another star fixated on by the press, in 2018. “That’s what I would credit this industry crumbling on. He was the first person that … literally just spread filth.” In 2008, Perez Hilton sold T-shirts asking why Spears couldn’t have died instead of Heath Ledger. Hilton apologised for some of his more lurid stunts in his 2020 autobiography, writing: “I have a ton of regrets … I never needed to be so mean or cruel.”“There was a market for shame when it came to women,” says Tara Joshi, the co-host of , a podcast that examines 2000s pop culture. Joshi’s co-host Simran Hans situates this wave of misogyny as a pushback against the riot grrrl movement of the early 90s, and the lad-culture-adjacent feminism popularised by the Spice Girls in the late 90s. “It was a reaction to the third wave of feminism in the 1990s,” says Hans. “We’d had the rise of ladettes and this reclaiming of being a ‘boy’s girl’. The 2000s felt like a punishment for women trying to get in on the act.”Along with the rise of this celeb-obsessed culture came another dangerous trend: size zero. Body positivity was nonexistent in the 00s; the ideal body was all clavicle and juddering hip bones. The It girls of the period – such as Mischa Barton or Paris Hilton – were extremely slim. On TV and in films, plus-sized women were either figures of fun, such as the “fat Monica” seen in flashbacks on Friends, or unlovable, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s fatsuit-wearing character in Shallow Hal. Bridget Jones, the period’s fictitious everywoman, was in a continual battle to lose weight, despite the fact that she was only a size 12. (Conversely, some of the biggest movie franchises of the period, such as American Pie, were sexist fantasies in which nerdish men achieved their God-given right to have sex with attractive women.)The forces of body shaming and cruelty towards young women converged disastrously. Heat magazine ran a celebrity cellulite special in 2004, ringing offending patches of fat on Martine McCutcheon and Beyoncé’s legs with white circles. In his memoir The Celeb Diaries (2008), former Heat editor Mark Frith talks of searching for images of women looking “terrible”, before printing images of Jennifer Lopez with cellulite on her thighs. For teenage girls, the message was circled in white on the cover of our favourite mags: if your thighs touched, you weren’t trying hard enough.“I remember constantly reading headlines about how Charlotte Church was a size 12,” says Hans. “Diet culture was so pervasive, and wasn’t yet tied up with wellness, and pinkwashed into something ‘feminist’ and acceptable.” Emerging from the toxic swamp of 2000s diet culture as a teenage girl without an eating disorder was a real challenge. “So many people I knew had eating disorders,” recalls Joshi. “It felt like a normal part of being a teenage girl.”For their part, some of the worst offenders in the decade’s apparent misogyny have apologised for their behaviour. “My actions contributed to the problem … [I] benefited from a system that condones misogyny,” said Timberlake last month in a statement addressing his behaviour towards Spears and Jackson. In interviews since Framing Britney Spears aired, Perez Hilton has said he now “regrets” most of his comments about her. How sincere these apologies are, time will tell.Still, any wider reckoning with 00s-era behaviour needs to recognise that these figures were not acting unprompted. There was an audience for cruelty, and we were it. “There is very little daylight between public demand and what the media is reporting on,” says Widdicombe. “If people are writing 1,000 Britney stories, it’s because there’s an audience for 1,000 Britney stories. Any reckoning of that era has to consider public consumption habits.” Things began to improve for women in the 2010s, with the rise of feminist publications such as Rookie magazine and so-called Tumblr feminism. “More positive representations of women became mainstream,” says Hans. “Online there began to be more of a sense of community.” Meanwhile, as legacy media waned, the free-for-all on young starlets abated (although a recent Sun article calling Lovato a “druggie mess” represents the death rattle of a once all-powerful tabloid mentality).This is not to say that we are kinder to women in public life: one only needs to look at the treatment of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. But the tone of these articles is less overtly hostile; their sexism and racism more euphemistic. The most overt misogyny comes from anonymous commenters. “Look at tweets or Instagram comments under these women,” says James. “The attitudes you’ll find isn’t that far off those decade-old video clips.” The sickness of the 00s hasn’t dissipated entirely but it has mutated, as society has become more enlightened about mental health, drug and alcohol addiction. As a society, we are more progressive: two-thirds of young women ; to say so when I was a teen would have been unthinkable. Although it does not feel like it – living as we do in a pandemic era, wracked by nostalgia and constantly throwing back images of pop culture moments, such as when all piled into the same SUV – the 2000s were a very long time ago. That past was a different country. I hope that we never go back.

Body shaming, media harassment, relentless cruelty – it’s time to reassess the decade that feminism forgotby Sat 6 Mar 2021 03.00 ESTI had largely forgotten about these incidents until I watched , the much-discussed documentary about the media intrusion that contributed to Spears’s 2007 mental health crisis, and her efforts to free herself from a conservatorship administered by her father. Watching footage of a 17-year-old Spears smiling politely as a male interviewer asked about her breasts brought everything back. My God, I thought. For young women and girls, the 2000s truly were a cursed...

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I write features mostly for @guardiang2 and am a Guardian angel for @gdnsaturday. Want to do something nice for a nice person? 📧 guardian.angel@theguardian.com

Sirin Kale

TheGuardian.com, formerly known as Guardian.co.uk and Guardian Unlimited, is a British news and media website owned by the Guardian Media Group. It contains nearly all of the content of the newspapers The Guardian and The Observer, as well as a substantial body of web-only work produced by its own staff, including a rolling news service.

'I was worried Lindsay, Paris or Britney would die': why the 00s were so toxic for women

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