Hilton first came to national attention eight years ago, the teenage heiress to the Hilton hotel fortune. She was a wealthy party girl who liked to pose for photos and dance on banquettes at the tail end of '90s New York's boom days. And why not? The sun had risen and set on many a wifty socialite with no discernible skills, talents or opinions. What grated particularly, perhaps, even in those early days, was Hilton's open vapidity -- the unapologetic blankness of her stare, her affected Valley Girl upspeak, the fact that she didn't even bother to try to disguise her own lack of intellectual or moral ambition. But still -- another decade, another spoiled child pictured in the papers and in the pages of Vogue.
But Hilton's fame mysteriously increased as her coming-of-age coincided with a booming Internet gossip culture and an explosion of weekly magazines in need of trashy characters to keep their serialized narratives chugging along. Hilton saw an opening and took it, gaining enough steam for simply being rich and divertingly dumb that she landed a feature profile in Vanity Fair and a snail trail of photographs tracing her moves from nightclub to movie premiere. She became the star of a night-vision sex tape in which she left an impression not by showcasing one smidgen of eroticism, but by answering her cellphone mid-act.
She has trademarked her catchphrase, "That's hot," and been unashamed to admit that despite all the educational advantages her family's vast fortune could provide her, she is not aware that London is in the United Kingdom. This has been Hilton's whole shtick: I'm dumb and badly behaved, but it doesn't matter because I'm rich.
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As Hymowitz observed in her piece, "slurs like 'tramp,' 'tart,' 'slut,' 'skank,' and 'skanktron' have suddenly become acceptable again, as long as Paris is their target." Indeed. Unable to choose between politically incorrect punch lines, the New York Post recently ran a photo of Hilton, Spears, and Lindsay Lohan under the cover headline "Bimbo Summit" and the inside headline "3 Bimbos of the Apocalypse"; the piece concluded with the sentence, "Skanks for the memories!" And it was funny! Which is part of what is so dangerous about our attentions to Hilton. It's easy to suspect that it is because she offers gratifyingly inappropriate opportunities to lash out against femininity and sexuality (outbursts to which few object, because there is literally no one who wants to defend her) that she has remained famous at all.
But aside from the creepiness of what she says about a not-so-latent American desire to have a stupid and sexualized woman around to degrade and humiliate, what makes Hilton horror-movie scary is the evil that she spreads. It's the poisonous effect she has on people and how long it's taken anyone to really catch on. Look at the trail of consumptive, addled, brokenhearted, humiliated bodies she's left behind her: Hilton's most famous friend Nicole Richie has suffered from an "inability to gain weight" so severe that the 25-year-old woman has recently appeared on the verge of death. Kimberly Stewart, Rod Stewart's daughter and an early Hilton home-girl, was recently revealed to be suffering from some sort of liver disease precipitated by partying too hard. Paris' younger sibling Nicky was inspired to get into a quickie -- and quickly annulled -- marriage while partying with her sister in Vegas. Oil-heir Brandon Davis, egged on by Hilton, was moved to go on a Looney-Tunes tirade about actress Lindsay Lohan, in which he was videotaped calling her "firecrotch"; his grandmother soon packed him off to rehab. While he was dating Hilton, shipping heir Stavros Niarchos insulted a homeless man by offering him money to pour a drink over his head while Hilton and their other friends laughed. And Lohan, an arguably talented young actress who keeps on-and-off company with Hilton, appears closer to serious, party-ravaged collapse every day.
It is surely fair to say that Hilton is not sticking her own finger down anyone's throat, or blowing drugs up their nasal passages, or pouring drinks down their gullets. But her proximity to the scene of every misfortune is enough to send frissons of exquisite terror down a spine.
The other almost-supernatural aspect of Hilton's reign of harebrained horror is the way that she herself remains intact while those around her wither. Hilton is like some kind of Dorian Gray cockroach. While her buddies waste away and collapse and see their careers flushed down the celebrity toilet after having been in her presence, she grows stronger: appearing on more magazine covers, getting bigger record contracts, attracting more attention, sleeping with more of her fading friends' boyfriends. Even her Plasticine exterior seems unravaged by her excessive behaviors.
She is, frustratingly, indestructible. Hilton has been caught on tape referring to two black friends as "dumb n-s." She has been arrested for drunk driving. She has peed herself in a taxicab in Hawaii. She has vomited onstage while singing her own songs. She has laughed like a retarded hyena as boyfriends like Davis and Niarchos have embarrassed themselves and ruined their own reputations. And yet, she has never had to go on Letterman to apologize; she has never had to meet with leaders of a community to make amends; she never even had to clean the taxi that she befouled. As a completely non-achieving celebrity, there are no higher moral, spiritual or intellectual expectations burdening the heiress. So she's a moronic, racist, boyfriend-stealing, talentless twit? Surprise.
Paris Hilton is more than a punch-line-rich pest. She is poisonous and culty and insidiously evil, and her tyranny must end. Last week, as she spread like a rash to Spears, the scariest image was not Spears' nude lady-parts or the weird fishnet-trading Toulouse Lautrec get-up that Hilton arranged for the pair. It was a picture of the young women walking hand-in-hand, Hilton in a T-shirt that read "I'm Paris Hilton, I can do whatever I want." Next to her, Spears wore a shirt reading, "I'm Paris Hilton, I can do whatever I want."
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