Making the Brand: Pamela Anderson, Posh Spice, and Sarah Jessica Parker

Just a few weeks ago, a shocking photograph hit the blogosphere and tabloids: Pamela Anderson was spotted reading former Punk Planet editor Anne Elizabeth Moore’s latest book, Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (New Press, 2007). In a bikini, no less:

And really, who doesn’t enjoy a good read in the sun? While gossip blogs made a few painfully old dumb-blondes-can’t-read jokes, Jennifer Pozner chose instead to point out the cognitive dissonance of “one-woman brand-maker for Playboy, Stuff, G.Q., Baywatch, V.I.P., and numerous other my-boobs-move-media devices” reading AEM’s excellent tract against corporate creep.

A brand is a symbol, perhaps also a phrase, that connotes very particular meanings and qualities, and most essentially, that is standing in for a product. The most successful of brands don’t just suggest a specific idea, but actually come to mean them. In other words, if you looked up Busty Blonde in the dictionary, you might just find Pamela Anderson. The product could be any number of things, from Baywatch paraphernalia to men’s magazines. It’s a powerful thing to attach Anderson’s name and image to a product; people might purchase it because they’re attracted to her and want to find out more, but many will also pick up a product for the simple reason that it’s Pamela Anderson. You know that you have branding power when someone will buy something simply because your name is on it, even if that thing is totally unrelated to your work and identity. Celebrity perfumes, for example.

The tricky thing about a person actually becoming a brand is that you run the risk of your body actually becoming the product. Women, already commodities, are particularly vulnerable to this trading in flesh. Like Victoria Beckham in this provocative/misogynist Marc Jacobs ad, women can be tumbled into an enormous shopping bag and carried home, dangling a pair of twiggy legs that aren’t even recognizably human.

Except, in this case, where the varnished doll-like legs are recognizably Posh. Victoria Beckham, of course, is a perfect example of successful branding. From the beginning, the Spice Girls were built on the idea of five distinct women with easily defined and internally consistent personalities. This premise allowed femininity to include such meanings as sporty and…scary? (read: not white), thus propelling the concept of girl power to the global scene. By way of this, the Spice Girl industry also established the notion of girl power as an explicitly commercial tool, one that initiated pre-teen girls into the role of consumer.

Iphigenia in Skinny Jeans

Thanks, Koreanish, for this sad/funny post on the way the media (everyone) hounds young female celebrities in some weird ritual sacrifice. My feelings exactly.

We prop these women up, rewarding all kinds of idiotic behavior, only for the pleasure of punishing them when they stumble. (For more, see my previous posts on Vanessa Hudgens and Paris Hilton.) As you say, “it was like after Princess Di instead of ‘never again’ it was ‘oh yes, annually.’”

And can I just say, I fucking hated Iphigenia in high school? Even that one important film version from the ’70s. It’s just this small gag reaction I have to the brutal sacrifice of young women in the service of working out society’s problems.

So I Posed Naked Once. Fuck Off.

Don’t you wish that was the standard response? C’mon, Vanessa Hudgens, stand up for yourself!

Apologies for the hiatus. Moving to a new city, floundering from apartment to apartment, and not having a television for three months can do that to you. The good news is: I’m settled for a while and my roommate has DVR. I think we have a very chatty fall ahead of us, what with Grey’s starting up again, my new addiction to Ugly Betty, and the upcoming films on my radar, like Lust, Caution; Across the Universe; The Brave One and Ira & Abby. Marykate Olsen’s been doing the talk-show and magazine circuit, Britney’s been looking very despondent on live television, and then there’s the Vanessa Hudgens issue.

She’s been made to apologize for having once posed nude—before she was noticed, in fact when she was probably struggling to get noticed, and, most unfortunately, before she was the Disney princess she’s since become (I mean, she’s even dating her dreamy High School Musical co-star; what more could the pre-teen fans desire?). We monitor the sexuality of our young female stars, and then we punish them too. Of course we can go on and on about Lindsay and Paris, etc., and girls who deliberately expose themselves to the public, but dredging up dirt from the past? I don’t like it.

The beauty queen scandals bother me too (although who needs a stupid crown? just look at the kick-ass Vanessa Williams now!). The bigger questions is: to whom are these girls apologizing? Disney issued their own lovely statement: “Vanessa has apologized for what was obviously a lapse in judgment…We hope she’s learned a valuable lesson.” Naughty child, go to your room.

I Kinda Feel Bad For Paris

Whose jaw didn’t drop with shocked delight watching Sarah Silverman’s opening monologue at the MTV Movie Awards? See the clip below.

Silverman was on her game, and I guess it’s nothing I didn’t expect. But there’s something disturbing about this world of relentless display, a world in which Paris Hilton is in the audience (and apparently scheduled for more than that) at the MTV Movie Awards mere hours before she checks in to prison. How strange to think that, for some people, this is actually real life–showing up at an awards ceremony is almost like gamely showing up to work. That it would make some sense to her to share what must be a crisis in her young life with MTV’s viewers and, inevitably, the entire public. Perhaps she didn’t expect the reaction of the audience, but she risked it.