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.

Men are Pigs, and the Internet is for Porn? My World Comes Crashing Down.

Over the course of the last five months, Sex Like Men was at a standstill. No new posts, no comments, no sign that it would ever live again. And yet, during these same five months, one Friday in February to be precise, 1,220 people read my post on Vanessa Hudgens. That day was an extreme, but pretty much every day that particular post gets me more attention than anything else on this blog (although Marina’s nice plug did shift the numbers recently: thanks!) The great pity is that this post isn’t even a good one! It’s not analytical, certainly not profound, but something more like filler. Of course, most of the people who’ve landed up there don’t mind. They’re weren’t necessarily looking for analysis, so much as pictures of Vanessa Hudgens naked. That brings us to one of the more disturbing features of the blogging world: the ability to track the search terms people were using when they stumbled upon your site:

“vanessa hudgens”; “vanessa hudgens naked”; “vanessa hudgens naked pictures”; “sex fuck girls naked”; “sex children girls”; “vanessa hudgens pics”; “vanessa hudgens sex”; “naked vanessa hudgens”; “men who want to watch young girles have”; “pigtails sex”; “lesbians having sex naked”; “vanessa”; “women sex party”; “vanessa hudgens naked pics”; “girls watch men have sex”

I know. The name of this blog is Sex Like Men. There was bound to be some confusion. Which is exactly what concerns me–that, despite my wish not to judge people’s desires, I’m terribly dismayed every time I read these search terms. Is this really what people look for on the Internet? Obviously it is, and the truth is that I just didn’t want to know.

No, Really, You Have to Eat: Body Image on America’s Next Top Model

Last Wednesday, it happened. The “plus-size” contestant got kicked off America’s Next Top Model. We’d all been waiting for it–the only real question was what excuse they would use this time. Actually, it was pretty harsh: Sarah was deemed too skinny for plus-size but too big for regular modeling, and unceremoniously booted from the show. She wept. It was sad.

As Sarah herself had pointed out, she’s a regular-sized girl. Who’s hot, and really awesome, but whatever. I guess we’re not supposed to expect a girl like Sarah to win Top Model–call me crazy, but I actually had thought the show might evolve.

It’s not just the judges’ decision that proved me wrong, but the rest of the episode as well. We’ve got a major front-runner this season, Heather (at right), and her almost unbeatable appeal comes from a pale, bony body and striking, sometimes disturbing, features. Besides making Asperger’s the hottest new neurological disorder, Heather takes great pictures and charms the audience and the judges with her awkward eagerness. She also plays up a kind of false modesty—her favorite story to tell goes something like, “Until I was eleven, I sincerely believed I was ugly.” (Sounds tragic, Heather. We’re glad to hear you’ve since recovered.)

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.

Gossip Girl: All’s Fair on the Upper East Side

Dear Gossip Girl,

In the first episode of this admittedly fascinating show, Chuck attempts to rape Jenny on a rooftop. He’s mildly punished by the valiant brother Dan, but faces no consequences from his own social group. In almost every episode, he pays fleets of women to service him and his friends, not to mention making sexist and classist remarks at any moment—-but his friends seem to brush it off. “That’s Chuck,” they justify, or, more likely, “That’s what this world is like.” As Chuck says himself that first night: “It’s a party–things happen.”

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.

Hairspray the (2nd) Movie: Now I’ve Tasted Chocolate and I’m Never Going Back

In Hairspray, Tracy Turnblad’s dream of dancing on “The Corny Collins Show” also propels her into the black kids’ group at her Baltimore high school: desperate to audition for the show, she cuts class and consequently gets sent to detention. Detention, it turns out, is where all the black students hang out, and it’s not a punishment so much as a dance party.

Tracy is one of those sunny, big-hearted kids who doesn’t even notice social boundaries and taboos; interested in Seaweed Stubbs’s moves, she mixes right in with her new companions. She’s white, but, as John Waters wrote in the original screenplay, her soul is black. Tracy’s own efforts to get accepted on television as an overweight, working-class girl with admittedly fabulous hair become much more than that. She vocalizes her generation’s vision of love and tolerance, pushes her mother Edna to find her own sense of self-worth, and instigates a fight for racial integration on the dance show.

As far as Hairspray is concerned, Tracy’s presence on the Corny show is essentially linked to the fact that Lil’ Inez, Seaweed’s younger sister, will also dance her way on stage by the end of the film. This is about any kind of outsider status. “People who are different,” Tracy promises, “their time is coming.”

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.

Creep Like ‘Em

“Would the rules change up, or would they still apply?” Watch Ciara’s “Like a Boy” video.

What if she acted like a guy? That is, “had a thing on the side,” “made you cry,” “played you like a toy”–expected behavior for men, as we’ve seen. This brings us back to the equal-opportunity-exploitation, hardly to be desired, except, and implicit in this case, for the purposes of revenge. Ciara looks hot in this video, tattoos, muscles, baggy pants, but it’s of course it’s not about simply co-opting the male role. I think the best part of this song is the dig at stereotypes of female hysteria: “Can’t be get’n mad! What you mad? Can’t handle that!” That line validates all those times her yelling and crying got dismissed as overreaction, waterworks, feminine frenzy, etc. Hurts, doesn’t it? 

Next! Multiple Choice on MTV

In the latest crop of MTV dating shows, NEXT is a fabulously trashy late-afternoon hit, involving one “dater,” five contestants, and a bus. The “dater” goes on several dates, while the other contestants hang out together on the bus. The “dater” can “NEXT” a contestant at any point, and each contestant gets a dollar for every minute he or she manages to stick it out. If the “dater” likes someone well enough to propose a second date, it’s now upto the contestant whether to accept the offer or just take the cash. 

Of course, like all dating and most reality shows, what happens in each episode is orchestrated by the producers, and all the painful puns and “quips” are obviously scripted. But I remember watching NEXT when it first came on the air, and I actually think the show has evolved into something different from the original intent. The dater is the one who’s supposed to be able to act out his or her fantasies, making the contestants do ridiculous things, like strip down to speedos or ride around on camels. But actually the dating part of the show is never as interesting as the other aspects: the camaraderie between contestants on the bus, the malicious delight of rejecting someone, and the opportunity to be as shallow as you can be. NEXT doesn’t even pretend to be about setting successful couples up; the dating show has become an art and end in itself. A cash prize and a date are now interchangeable.