Inselaffen Klatsch

These days I'm really into the English gossip. Its tension is different from American gossip’s, more overtly class-based. I have no idea who the people the inselaffen are gossiping about are, because usually they’ve done much less in a professionally public sense than American gossip objects have – lots of Page 3 girls and footballer’s wives and reality television stars, whereas in America you usually have to be a singer or actor or something for people to care about you. Fantasy is still important in America - the fantasy that the aging Ciccone bint is Madonna, that sad old sack Terry Bollea is the Hulk, that the fat dead narc Elvis, like Jeebus, fucking lives. You've got to be a member of a disproportionately rich family or an ex-con, at the very least.

There's something grimmer, more cynical in England - I'd say more realistic, but sometimes fantasy is more honest than decontextualized reality. And no reality is more decontextualized than reality television. Reality television has taken off in a different way there than in America, in a way that some commentators describe as a celebration of mediocrity (a bit rich coming from Paul McCartney, considering his seminal contributions to pop music over the past 30 years, but I'm shooting at clay pigeons with no Wings here.) I’m not trying to be cruel when I say that if their gossip is anything to go by, it's because the English have an obsession with useless people.

I believe this is because of their monarchy and aristocracy – the remnants of a bunch of gluttonous, arriviste armed thugs who burst in from Scandinavia, and then France, Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, and then Germany, and monumentally enriched themselves at everyone else’s expense over more than a millenium now. And over the last few hundred years, serving absolutely no function for good or for ill except for being the sort of figureheads who help reinforce the status quo – which is a purpose I find profoundly useless when the status quo has been such shit.

There's no real fantasy associated with monarchy or aristocracy, just a decontextualized reality - you don't think, I wish I was a princess because then I'd be a great singer or dancer or football player or actress or politician and I'd be so great everybody would love me - no. Chicks wish they were princesses so that they would be princesses. For the same reasons English people wish they were reality stars - to be rich and famous and influential beyond their talents or intelligence. The difference being that the English monarchy and aristocracy managed to enrich themselves and impoverish the other classes so entirely that they became the arbiters of taste instead of its challengers.

And the present breed of English arrivistes, while managing to accrue multi-million pound fortunes, haven’t taken over to the degree that they can be the arbiters of taste; they’re very much a fucking taste challenge. They're 'chavs'. Chavs. What a word. You’re not allowed to say proles anymore because we're supposed to be living in some sort of post-Marxist world, and anyways they’ve got too much disposable income, even in that impoverished iniquitous shithole of a pseudo-European nation, to be proles in the way the bourgeois were educated to regard proles. So the bourgeois rename them chavs and don’t have to ask themselves hard questions about their place in the class conflict. They're just celebrity gossiping. About rich chavs. Not proles. No biggie. And all the while this profound fear and disgust and jealousy at the thought of yet more idle, useless barbarians taking over . . .

Paris Hilton is a disease ridden tramp

The United States has a problem: here it is. The figures must be taken with a grain of salt; when looking at the second column one must remember the United States has a better diagnosis rate than most places with high AIDS/HIV prevalence. The real problem is the estimated rate of new infection; hefty numbers in a first world country. AIDS isn't the flu; except in cases of assault or institutional incompetence, the only way to get AIDS is by being ignorant of the consequences of some pretty fucking involved choices. Rough to see in a developed country.

Maybe laughing in the dark is the easiest way to deal with this. For example, by suggesting Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan get locked in a house without AZT and see who falls first, like Todd of IDLYTW. What exactly he's laughing at in the dark is unclear, however. The suggestion is an reference to the promiscuity of the two women in question, neither of whom have thus far indicated any symptoms of venereal diseases, an aversion to safer sex, an enjoyment of intravenous drugs, or even a level of promiscuity outstripping that of typical pretty, insecure people of that age.

The ability to laugh at a suggestion like this depends on the cultural belief in the 'dirty skanky ho'. Old and enduring as the hills in North America, it's a synthesis of schoolboy Christian conservatism - looseness equals disease - and masculine insecurity - sexually active women are scary. Todd's articles are striking in this regard both in terms of the overtness of his attitude - witness his obsession with rigourously virginal Brazilian model Adriana Lima here and here - and most recently with his unquestioning belief that the Da Vinci code film mocks Jesus in a way that manifests the liberal, arrogant quality of Hollywood.

The phenomenom is complex, involving political, sexual and religious philosophies, but I'd like to point out just one thing today: even if gossip blogs gleefully discuss assfucking and masturbation, in some ways they're no more envelope-pushing or socially interesting than the Fox News Network.

Who's that now?

An alien struggling to integrate into the human race without reading gossip rags could be forgiven for not knowing who Lindsay Lohan is. She hasn't been in that many films; besides the one that came out Friday she hasn't been in anything since playing second fiddle to a sentient car in 2005, and before that hadn't been in anything since Mean Girls, which was rough. It was a bad, bad film. Even by the standards of coming of age girl films, that was a really bad film.

But here's her ass:



Lindsey Lohan's clothes and the body parts that pop out of them are objects of intense interest to Jenny of I Don't Like You That Way (+ ass), Trent of Pink is the New Blog, Hollywood Tuna . . . all of them, really. So the question is, why? Especially considering Trent's evident lack of reproductive interest in girls and Jenny's insistence on her interest in men.

Is it remarkable, the degree to which this teenager falls out of her clothes? At nineteen, isn't self-exposure the norm? Either through topless dancing in sweaty bars, topless marching in demonstrations, getting giggly over being topless on topless beaches in Southern France, expositions of one's most intimate thoughts on MySpace or MSN. . . Lohan is famous enough to be able to expose herself on television, which is perhaps even less remarkable than most of us young ladies having exposed ourselves elsewhere, because television is already full of bums and boobies and whatnot. So why in god's name is this woman interesting enough to write about on the almost daily basis so many gossip sites do?

I think it has something to do with her active relationship with gossip bloggers. Comfy-womfy . . . as evidenced by her cuddles and shout-outs to Trent of PITNB here and on TRL a few weeks ago. This approachability (working with the gossip blog medium in a conscious effort to maintain a notoriety beyond what could have been earned by her tiny body of film work) combined with her banality in terms of being a self-exposing 19 year old of girl-next-door kind of pretty must make her irresistible to gossip bloggers in search of a relationship with a relatively famous subject, even if her fame is an eat-its-own-tail sort of thing.

This becomes even more remarkable in terms of straight male gossip blogger's half-scornful, half-titillated attitude (explained nicely in Egotastic) to her supposedly 'wild' sexual life - which, once more, is probably not particularly remarkable in relation to that of most reasonably attractive, healthy, single, insecure 19 year old girls.

A hairy snatch and a tired pregnant woman

Jenny of I Don't Like You That Way thinks PJ Harvey, a musician she cheerfully admits to knowing nothing about, should get her snatch waxed.

And some Socialite is having a hard time with the way Maggie Gyllenhaal looks pregnant and tired.

So neither of these women is all that famous, comparatively speaking. PJ Harvey hasn't been big in North America since that "Down By the Water" single and was most lately known to be playing bass with Moris Tepper - best known for playing with Captain Beefheart, who I'm going to bet a pop-tart caker like Jenny has never heard of. And nobody would even know how to spell Maggie Gyllenhaal's name if her brother hadn't just made waves by starring in a long, boring movie about sheepherders in love; her movies are usually pretty low-key and the mainstream ones she appeared in - Riding in Cars with Boys and Mona Lisa's Smile - were shit, best avoided.

On top of their relative lack of fame, the criticisms of both women are a little like making fun of hippies for smoking weed. Here's what PJ Harvey had to say about her live performances in Spin magazine - not exactly the words of a woman who, on being alerted her hairy snatch was showing onstage, would immediately call for a razor, shocked and upset over her faux-pas:

"It’s that combination of being quite elegant and funny and revolting, all at the same time, that appeals to me . . . Maybe that’s just my twisted sense of beauty."

And in terms of Maggie Gyllenhaal - pregnancy is long, hard and tiring. It's the one time in a woman's life she can be reasonably expected to not give a shit about the way she looks, and is probably legally justified in slapping anyone who even suggests she should run a comb through her hair. This is obvious to the meanest of intelligences.

So what was the interest in writing up these two pieces? And what was the interest in reading them, which judging from the quantity of comments, a lot of people did? We're not reading about cocaine habits or scandalous sexual practices here, there's no juice. For a lot of people, there's not even the thrill of recognition since these women aren't all that notorious.

I think it's a sort of self-dread; an awful thrill of self-recognition. Most women have more snatch hair than they want; obviously Jenny does, considering the quantity of options she offers - in the first person - to lend to PJ Harvey. Not to mention the urgency with which she offers it, as though having a hairy snatch was a real hygienic sin, rather than an aesthetic choice. Running through this is inferiority - the fact Jenny must be aware if she flashed her gash on-stage, no matter how painstakingly tended, it wouldn't give her the power and respect an alternative rocker like PJ Harvey gets from hundreds of screaming fans - it would either get her raped or mocked relentlessly to her face.

Same for Maggie Gyllenhaal - most women are going to get pregnant at some time in their lives and will therefore go through extended periods of looking and feeling like shit. Does one look at Maggie Gyllenhaal in a bandana and say 'if I look like shit when I'm pregnant, at least I'm not the only one'? Or are these pictures about how we must laugh at pregnant women now while we're not, since our pregnancies will mark the time we have to fight the hardest with the least available energy to maintain girlish good looks? Or even worse - does this negative energy come from women burdened the worry that they'll never get pregnant, and who must therefore focus their concentration on how ugly pregnancy can make you?