The digital age has transformed the way we consume celebrity news. Gossip blogs, with their rapid-fire updates and unfiltered commentary, have become a dominant force in contemporary celebrity culture. These platforms, such as Perez HiltonTMZ and Lainey Gossip have usurped traditional gossip forums like weekly magazines, drawing millions of hits daily. They offer a frenetic pace of news, often undermining the carefully crafted images that the entertainment industry strives to maintain.
Gossip blogs encourage a cynical awareness of celebrity culture, prompting us to question the mechanisms through which we are positioned as consumers. However, this questioning has its limits. To understand this fully, we must examine the cultural function of these blogs and their use of the ‘Bitch’ as a narrator, especially in the context of postfeminism. This article explores how the shift towards more malicious discussion of female celebrities and the heightened profile of the female ‘train-wreck’ celebrity has been propelled by the rising popularity of gossip blogging.
The Evolution of Gossip Blogging
Blogging emerged in the mid-1990s as an evolution of personal online diaries. It gained mainstream recognition during the 2004 US Presidential campaign, offering a journalistic mechanism to reach a technology-dependent audience. Gossip blogging operates similarly, providing a platform to debate aspects of a celebrity’s behavior, lifestyle, and appearance. Unlike traditional media, gossip blogs often use derisive and vicious discourse, complicating the relationship between celebrity and audience.
Celebrities are no longer perceived as figures of aspiration but as characters to judge and deride. Almost all gossip blogs function similarly: images are posted with captions or commentary, inviting responses. The gossip blogger becomes both the producer and consumer of the celebrity, offering a route to deconstruct the celebrity image while contributing to its semiotic and cultural connotations.
The Historical Context
celebrity gossip is not new. Perez Hilton and his contemporaries represent the latest figures in a long line of celebrity gossips that began during the early days of the Studio System. Louella Parsons is generally regarded as the first gossip columnist, reporting from Hollywood for William Randolph Hearst in 1925. By the 1950s, her work appeared in numerous Hearst papers and was syndicated worldwide. Parsons remained the most powerful columnist until Hedda Hopper entered the industry in the late 1930s.
Later developments included Confidential in the 1950s, the first publication dedicated to reporting star scandal and gossip. Unlike Parsons and Hopper, Confidential had a more antagonistic relationship with the studios, fostered by the decline of the studio system and the extent to which stars lost industrial and cultural protection.
Gossip Blogging and Postfeminism
The celebrity gossip blog phenomenon is an important but largely unexamined register for the transmission and reiteration of discourses of contemporary postfeminist media culture. Postfeminism suggests that the success of feminism has rendered it irrelevant for contemporary culture. This ‘pastness’ of feminism has been embraced in popular culture, evidenced by the hyper-sexualization of phenomena like Girls Gone Wild and the reality show Girls of The Playboy Mansion.
Postfeminism is both complex and loaded, suggesting that women must buy into the products of makeover and celebrity culture to demonstrate their ’empowerment’. This reinforces the notion that the principles of second-wave feminism are archaic and fuels cultural anxieties surrounding body image, relationships, careers, and motherhood. The gains made by feminism, such as access to free and safe contraception and a commitment to equality in the workplace, have also been experienced as responsibility and fear of failure.
The ‘Bitch’ Culture
The term ‘Bitch’ has undergone a reclamation in some areas, as demonstrated by its use in relation to bestselling books like The Bitch in the House and the diet bible Skinny Bitch. However, the ‘Bitch’ culture within the gossip blog does not celebrate confident, self-assured women but continually denigrates them. Bloggers often adopt traits traditionally associated with the term; they are outspoken, flout codes of courtesy, and are fiercely opinionated.
Perez Hilton identifying as a homosexual and founding a media personality on his ‘queen persona,’ embraces a camp sensibility and insists that no celebrity should claim the right to remain ‘in the closet’ when in the public sphere. Hilton’s persona as a gay male diva embraces this ‘Bitch’ identity, while endorsing a peculiarly essentialist configuration of gender categorization. In Hilton’s cultural space, women must be essentially ‘female,’ and those who deviate from these strictures are routinely positioned as ‘other’ and labeled with terms such as ‘manly’ or ‘trannies’.
The ‘Train Wreck’ Celebrity
In recent years, there have been well-documented cases of the ‘downfall’ of young female celebrities, including Paris HiltonNicole RichieBritney SpearsMischa BartonLindsay LohanLily Allen and Amy Winehouse. These women are linked by their highly publicized drug or alcohol addictions or arrests for driving offenses. Deemed innately fascinating, they have become everyday fodder for the majority of gossip blogs, magazines, and tabloids in both the US and UK.
The term ‘train wreck,’ an American expression adopted by most gossip bloggers, has become a catch-all term for young female celebrities deemed to be ‘out of control.’ During 2006 and 2007, a number of these celebrities were photographed seemingly encouraging paparazzi to take pictures of their intimate body parts while exiting limousines. Perez Hilton and others have regularly posted these images of female celebrities ostensibly exposing themselves.
This exposure could be read as an espousal of a feminist ideal of freedom of choice: these women opt to be in the public eye and choose to display their bodies in particular ways to the waiting paparazzi, fully aware that these images will appear on such sites, commodified for our consumption. Yet these episodes and images do not suggest freedom. Rather, they evoke a postfeminist trickery that encourages hypersexualization and exploitation in the name of empowerment.
The mainstreaming of celebrity hatred has also taken place, and the evolution of the gossip blog—with its use of the ‘Bitch’ narrator—has certainly propelled this development. Turner suggested in 2004 that invasive, exploitative, and vengeful celebrity coverage is niche and targeted at a ‘minority for whom such coverage may well operate in ways that are difficult to interpret from the outside.’ Yet today, this discourse is far from niche, not least of all because ‘Bitch’ culture has become firmly embedded within the mainstream paradigms of celebrity mediation.
Few celebrities have received more negative attention than Britney Spears. Her fall from pop stardom and descent into mental health problems and drug addiction has been well documented, not least due to her supposed status as an ‘unfit mother.’ The speed with which Spears provided content through her erratic behavior meant that traditional newspapers and magazines could not keep pace with the raft of stories available, and gossip bloggers function to plug this gap.
This wrought a pertinent convergence of paparazzi video footage and gossip blogging. This video footage, which is now an intrinsic part of such sites, brings the audience in closer contact with the spectacle of the female body while encouraging a curious mixture of desire and repugnance. regularly uses such footage and has its own crew placed outside key locations such as Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles, a popular haunt for the famous. In Spears’ case, the public was able to witness the downfall of a celebrity in such fast and cerebral terms that it became acceptable to witness hordes of paparazzi following her and for gossip bloggers to post content almost continually.
Such is the frenetic nature and voracious appetite for images of young women ‘out of control.’ Furthermore, the paparazzi have generated new templates of car-based celebrity scandal in which they use baiting techniques in a desperate attempt to taunt celebrity subjects into a ‘train-wreck’ response, whether in terms of road rage or displays of reckless driving. Most of these encounters were captured on video, are well documented on or YouTube and were obviously lucrative for the photographers and agencies involved.
Celebrities featured in the machinery of their profession, at premieres, awards ceremonies, on-set, or even in their ‘ordinary lives,’ are now considered staid and do not feed the voracious media and public appetite for scandal. The scaling down (in some quarters) of coverage of what we might call ‘practiced celebrity’ has dovetailed with the apparent decline of more meritocratic explanations of fame. Those who are famous for their ‘well knownness’ have often become a key focus for gossip bloggers, given the expectation that they are more likely to make ‘desperate’ (and thus scandalized) bids for fame.
However, it is always a more significant event when a celebrity with a more apparently meritocratic persona breaks down in the manner of Spears (Spears, once an unusual example of a smooth transition from child to adult star, was at least seen as a successful singer and dancer, even if the cultural value of pop celebrity remains contested). The coverage of celebrity mental illness is increasingly gendered. The long-held assumptive link between genius and mental illness is most often associated with men, while famous women with a mental illness are often placed into the category of the melodramatic woman who cannot be controlled.
The zealousness with which intense negative coverage of Spears’ mental illness was relayed via gossip blogging suggests that the archaic representational template of the hysterical woman continues to be keenly perpetuated. Gossip bloggers regularly describe female celebrities in derogatory terms if they are represented as behaving in perceived ‘inappropriate ways,’ but these women are caught in a paradox. On the one hand, they are encouraged to imitate plastic female stereotypes of postfeminist sexuality, while on the other, they are condemned as behaving in morally reprehensible ways. Terms such as ‘famewhore,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘has-been’ are used regularly by Hilton to designate perceived transgressions of behavioral norms, and celebrities are essentially dragged back through the mechanisms that made them.
As suggests of Spears: ‘She embodies the disdain in which this culture holds its young women: the desire to sexualize and spoil them while young, and to degrade and punish them as they get older. Of course, she also represents a youthful feminine willingness—stupid or manipulated as it may be—to conform to the culture’s every humiliating expectation of her.’ As Rebecca Traister suggests, celebrities are caught between this double helix of meaning, which is symptomatic of a contemporary postfeminist popular culture: female celebrities are encouraged to hyper-sexualize themselves in order to generate revenue for the organizations surrounding them, yet they are routinely condemned for growing older (and by implication losing their sexual value).
McRobbie also suggests that a key factor in the dismantling of feminism is the ‘normalization of pornography,’ in which ‘There is quietude and complicity in the manners of generationally specific notions of cool, and more precisely, an uncritical relation to dominant, commercially produced, sexual representations that actively invoke hostility to assumed feminist positions from the past in order to endorse a new regime of sexual meanings based on female consent, equality, participation, and pleasure, free of politics.’ This new regime of sexual meaning, which McRobbie describes here, is also at work within the gossip blog. Bloggers are keen to exploit celebrity images in the name of commercial gain, yet they vilify those who appear to ‘transgress’ sexual boundaries. This expropriation of meaning thus suggests a much more complex relationship between popular culture and feminist frameworks.
Celebrity culture encourages audiences to criticize celebrity bodies through the discourse of the gossip blogger, yet this also perpetuates the consensus that we cannot escape the judgment of our own bodies against the famous. As Blum suggests, ‘In identifying with the two-dimensional bodies (which is the invitation) implicit in celebrity culture, we simultaneously experience seeing and being seen. We are subject and object of the gaze, which is the ultimate achievement of the narcissistic subject.’
The ‘Bitch’ persona that many bloggers have adopted is inextricably enmeshed within a postfeminist cultural landscape. It functions as a figure of pseudo-empowerment by seemingly promoting a ‘shared’ attitude toward the celebrity that is couched in a tone of humorous, ironic discourse. Yet it clearly vilifies female celebrities who have been afforded all of the freedom that second-wave feminism offered, while labeling them ‘sluts,’ ‘has-beens,’ ‘fame-whores,’ and ‘trainwrecks.’ Many of the so-called ‘train wreck’ celebrities are caught in the constricting hold of celebrity culture, aware that they must remain young, beautiful, and sexualized in order to retain visibility.
The highly public negotiation of new female freedoms raises complex questions requiring the responsibilities that the gains of second-wave feminism have created. The representations of ‘train wreck’ celebrities discussed here are set alongside the more widespread sexualization of culture, or as Ariel Levy has famously termed ‘raunch culture.’ Levy suggests that ‘The proposition that having the most simplistic, plastic stereotypes of female sexuality constantly reiterated throughout our culture somehow proves that we are sexually liberated and personally empowered has been offered to us, and we have accepted it.’ As Levy proposes, the convergence of raunch culture dynamics and the allure of celebrity have particularly worrying consequences for feminism.
Gossip blogging is a mechanism symptomatic of a culture that has no ‘colossal’ stars anymore; all celebrities (especially if female) are there to be deconstructed, their images taken apart piece by piece via the hypercritical ‘Bitch’ persona which pervades many sites hosted by both male and female bloggers. Indeed, Perez Hilton’s childlike use of Photoshop—in which he scrawls snarky comments over the image of the celebrity—seems designed to mitigate against criticism by suggesting a certain innocence—a use of ‘home-made’ technology which usefully undermines the practices of the more carefully constructed (professional) image. The apparent instantaneous nature of the blog clearly elicits a sense of interactivity with the processes of manipulation, and Hilton’s use of Photoshop serves to further stress that women are still judged by narrow standards of beauty.
Through these mechanisms, audiences become complicit in a postfeminist policing of the boundaries of the celebrity body through identification with the ‘Bitch’ persona of the blogger. While Rebecca Feasey suggests that the coverage of celebrity style in heat magazine can be a potentially empowering discourse for the female reader, here the ridiculing of female celebrities in gossip blogs arguably creates even more rigid boundaries of prescribed femininity.
Female celebrities have become accustomed to such policing of their bodies via the ‘Bitch’ character in blogs and magazines. The audience consumes this policing as part of the apparatus of contemporary celebrity culture, while being subject to interpellation as a consumer themselves. Lainey Gossip’s description of Paris Hilton as ‘Hollywood Ebola – Deadly Ebola Virus devastates those in its path – leaving victims bleeding out from all orifices. Such is the effect of Paris Hilton on Hollywood. Like Ebola, Hollywood Ebola cannot be killed. She lurks in cracks and corners, unleashing her destruction on anyone who gets too close, retreating into the rain forest to regenerate only to come back even uglier, more potent, more vile’ is not atypical, and these discourses are now commonplace within gossip blogging.
Female stars and celebrities, whether perceived as traditionally ‘talented’ or not, are no longer held up as models to aspire to unless they rigidly conform to this limited range of representational tropes. With ‘Bitch’ rhetoric increasingly dominating everyday commentary regarding female celebrities, the rhetoric of postfeminist hostility and judgment is truly in action. Perhaps the postfeminist ‘Bitch’ culture that pervades the celebrity landscape allows a validation of competitiveness as audiences revel in the downfall of those who seemingly have it all. In order to fully examine these cultural shifts, more complex conceptions of the gendered hierarchies of fame which structure celebrity gossip are needed. But for now, female celebrities will continue to be dissected for public consumption, and audiences will continue to revel in it.
