Paris Hilton has been famous for as long as I can remember. First just the atmospheric fame of extreme wealth, later as a party girl, later still as a reality TV star. She always seemed a cipher for whatever was disapproved of at the time, so people poured scorn on her for being a “celebutante”, famous for being famous, and later held her up as the height of 2000s vacuity. Granted, the '00s were pretty vacuous, but there seemed to be a top note of misogyny to all this. Surely, party men were vacuous, too – but “party men”, as a genre, didn’t even exist.
Likewise, Hilton’s sex tape, by today’s lights, was a clear example of exploitation. But the whole business was so shrouded in mystery - indeed, her business was mysterious: what was a paparazzi shot, sneaked without her knowledge, and what had she deliberately set up? What was real, in her air-headed reality TV persona, and what was she amplifying for comic effect? Which parties was she paid to attend, and which was she at to authentically see her authentic friends, and was there even a Rizla of difference between the two? So the rumours that perhaps she’d had a hand in the tape’s release, for publicity purposes, seemed just as likely as anything else.
You’d have had to be a really close Paris-watcher to parse these fine distinctions, and none of them seemed to matter that much, since she seemed to be having a blast, either way. At the start of her fame, it was fashionable to disapprove of consumerism and vapidity, while at the same time feverishly following it. More recently, privilege has taken their place, and Paris Hilton embodied that too, with all the same caveats, that she was simultaneously derided for it and obsessed-over. I hadn’t really processed her as a human being, because of all these swirling, shape-shifting caricatures, and I definitely hadn’t processed her life story as in any way sad, or for there to be any genuine troubles underneath the insistent, jaunty flashing of those incredibly white teeth.
In fact, there’s a hell of a lot of awful trauma in her past: grooming by a teacher, drugging and likely sexual assault by an acquaintance, kidnapping - sanctioned by her parents - to one of those “therapeutic” boarding schools like '60s borstals without the oversight. It’s still quite hard to match this past with the magazine-cover perfection she presents to the world, but perception turns like an oil tanker. Speaking to Paris, it seems she’s had enough of being a caricature.
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