Return of the brainless hussies

From "American Idol" to Paris Hilton to an army of jiggly video stars, vapid females seem to be everywhere these days. Have we really gone this far backward, baby?

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Oprah Winfrey, Feminism, Pop Culture, Teenagers, Paris Hilton, Rebecca Traister, Life

May 19, 2006 | During the last week of April, Ellen DeGeneres welcomed Paris Hilton and her four Chihuahuas to her daytime talk show, ostensibly for a special episode about dogs. Once the host had the hotel heiress sitting down, however, she pressed her on a non-canine issue, asking whether she was hurt by Pink's video for "Stupid Girls," which mocks Hilton and her shopping-zombie peers for their essentially somnambulant behavior, and which two weeks earlier, DeGeneres had praised on her show. "I haven't even seen it yet," said the hotel heiress, in her flat monotone. "But I think ... it's just a form of flattery."

Any thinking person who has seen Pink's video, in which she sends up Jessica Simpson's "These Boots Were Made for Walking" video by humping a soapy car, imitates an Olsen twin in Montana-size sunglasses and Wyoming-size handbag walking straight into the plate-glass door of a boutique, and savagely mocks Hilton's appearance in a dingy night-vision sex tape, would not confuse the clip with any known form of flattery. Especially if that thinking person heard the "Stupid Girls" lyrics, which go, in part: "They travel in packs of two or three/ With their itsy-bitsy doggies and their teeny-weeny tees/ Where, oh where, have the smart people gone?"

But Hilton is not a thinking person. Or, if she is, she hasn't let on. For the purposes of the American public, she is chief Stupid Girl, unembarrassed to admit that she doesn't know what Wal-Mart is, to testify that she isn't aware that London is in the United Kingdom, or to get the name of her own video game wrong; Hilton is so vacant that her behavior recently inspired a new Page Six epithet: "celebutard." When DeGeneres pressed her on whether she felt any responsibility as a role model to young girls, Hilton averred: "I think I definitely am a role model? I work very hard. I came from a name, but I've done my own thing." DeGeneres neglected to point out that doing one's own thing in the face of terrible privilege is not the same as being a role model, especially when one's own thing involves trademarking the phrase "That's hot."

Listening to Hilton try to have a conversation, the wind whistling between her eardrums, makes it hard to ignore claims of cultural critics who have noticed an alarming new vogue for feminine vapidity. In addition to Pink's sharp-toothed treatise, the recent "American Idol" ascension of blond malapropism-spewing Kellie Pickler prompted a spate of stories about how playing dumb seems a sure way to get embraced by the American public. And Oprah recently summoned Pink, Naomi Wolf, "Female Chauvinist Pigs" author Ariel Levy and others for an episode called "Stupid Girls," which she kicked off by ominously announcing that culture is "devaluing an entire generation of young girls" by celebrating women as jiggly video stars, boobie-flashing twits, half-clad clotheshorses and label-whoring anorexics. To hear media watchdogs tell it, dumbness -- authentic or put on -- is rampant in pop-culture products being consumed by kids; it gets transmitted through their downy skin and into their bloodstreams through the books and magazines they read, the television they watch, the trends they analyze like stock reports, and the celebrities they aspire to be.

In an effort to find out exactly what signals teens could be picking up, I spent a couple of weeks as immersed in girl pop culture as an old-fogy 30-year-old can get -- reading sudsy high school novels and teen magazines, surfing MySpace, and watching MTV reality shows -- waiting to see if I'd be overtaken with the urge to don giant sunglasses and pretend not to understand math. I found myself pleasantly surprised at some of the teen media I encountered -- surprised enough to consider that the criticism we've been hearing may be vastly overblown by grown-ups who've forgotten the air-popped diversions of their own youth. But I was dismayed enough by the rest of it to acknowledge that the adults crying "fire" have a troubling point. Some of the images currently being retailed to teens illuminate both how far young women have come, and how easy it still is to cling to, recycle and sell outmoded yet comfortable images of unthreatening femininity.

I kicked off my inquiry into adolescent mindlessness at Barnes & Noble. I'd read Naomi Wolf's March New York Times essay about the objectified females with charge cards who populate the successful "Gossip Girl," "A-List" and "Clique" series and had been willing to believe it. Wolf had been appalled at the way the books' packagers (including 17th Street Productions, a part of Alloy Entertainment, the Y.A. advertising and marketing factory behind Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarized "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life") dressed their product in pastels to make them "look cute," so that "any parent -- including [her] -- might put them in the Barnes & Noble basket without a second glance," only to get home and find them full of "not the frank sexual exploration found in a Judy Blume novel, but teenage sexuality via Juicy Couture, blasé and entirely commodified." In truth, one look at the covers of the "Gossip Girl" books, many of which featured coltish females touching each other's butts or their own breasts, should have tipped off Wolf that thar was sex in them thar pages.

I chose "I Like It Like That," mostly because the lipstick-application-cum-simulation-of-fellatio cover and a blurb promising "plenty of aprés-ski hot tub fun" seemed to be sound indicators that I would find Wolf's blasé and totally commodified teenage sexuality inside. Reader, I finished it. And, like, there was no sex. Don't get me wrong; "I Like It Like That" is a cheaply written book about spoiled teens who talk about sex, have apparently had sex in previous volumes, get angsty about virginity, smoke, drink, do drugs and drop brand names at an alarming per-sentence rate. (Study question: What is a Bogner ski suit and why is it a plot point in both "I Like It Like That" and Wendy Wasserstein's novel "The Elements of Style"?) But not once within the book's 202 pages do any of these kids get it on! In fact, one of the heroines, high school senior Blair (stop here if you're planning to read "I Like It Like That"), gets geared up to lose it to her best friend's older brother Erik, a super-foxy and rather sweet Brown freshman, but when they get naked, her knees sort of push him away. "I guess I'm not ready," she tells Erik, who smiles reassuringly and says, "Nah, you're ready. I'm just not the right guy, that's all." Alert the gatekeepers of virtue!

As far as mindlessness goes, "I Like it Like That" was far less aggressively anti-intellectual than what Wolf had prepared me for. Sure, the basic literary conceit and style are dopey, but since the books are about rich kids in Manhattan, the characters have expensive educations and highly developed senses of irony. If a Bogner ski suit nudges the story along, it's only fair to point out that so does a Marc Chagall painting in the Guggenheim. These kids refer to bulimia as "stress induced regurgitation" and wonder if a literary magazine called Red Letter was named in homage to Hester Prynne. Sure, these references are just signifiers of characters' elite places in the class pecking order, as one-dimensional as a pair of shorts with "Juicy" stamped across the ass. But if the fear is that kids are mapping out a pubescent path to brainless brand consumption by reading about (and being expected to understand the significance of) Prada, isn't it somewhat reassuring that they're also asked to recognize references to art and literature?

And while Wolf worried about the books' reproductions of a constant dilemma of young womanhood, that girls "are expected to compete with pornography, but can still be labeled sluts," I was actually impressed that the performances of objectified femininity were limited to a tight cashmere sweater here, a couple coats of lip gloss there. One of the most appealing women in the series has a shaved head.

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