I I went to university in 2007. On my first day, all freshmen had their photos taken; the photos were pinned to a bulletin board in my hallways. That night, older students scribbled on the girls’ photos, assessing our attractiveness. Nobody got in trouble. Later, the same men published a gossip magazine that placed Photoshop on images of schoolgirls in porn stars, dissected our sex lives, and made rape jokes. The magazine was printed with university funds. No one was expelled. None of this seemed particularly questionable to me, an 18-year-old girl. That was the way it was. Internalized misogyny was more profound in the 2000s. Hell, I was happy to get a high score on my photograph.
I had practically forgotten about these incidents until I watched Framing Britney Spears, the much-discussed documentary about the media invasion that contributed to Spears’ mental health crisis in 2007 and his efforts to break free from his father’s guardianship. Watching footage of 17-year-old Spears smiling politely when an interviewer asked about her breasts brought everything back. My God, I thought. For girls and girls, the 2000s were really a cursed era.
Like the flash of a paparazzo exploding in the face of a girl who stumbles out of the Chateau Marmont, the period is currently undergoing a total reevaluation. And like those paparazzi photos, it’s a not-so-flattering portrait. In addition to Framing Britney Spears, there is Demi Lovato’s upcoming documentary, Dancing With the Devil, which documents the 2000s Disney star’s struggles with drug addiction. The recent BBC series, Celebrity: A 21st-Century Story, also features interviews with Kerry Katona and Charlotte Church, both plagued by the media in the 2000s, and images of paparazzi walking away from women as they get into cars. Horrible interviews have reappeared online; in a 2003 clip, Diane Sawyer makes Spears cry after blaming her for breaking up with Justin Timberlake. (Timberlake was criticized online for his behavior towards Spears, whom he was ashamed of for the breakup, and Janet Jackson, whose bosom he exposed in the 2004 Super Bowl, destroying his career.)
In the 2000s, there was a hunting season for young women. “It was a blatant and horrifying misogyny,” said former New York Daily News gossip columnist Ben Widdicombe, author of Gatecrasher: How I Helped the Rich Become Famous and Ruin the World. He welcomes our reflection on the period. “I am happy that it is being reevaluated,” he says. “I think it has to be. The media was incredibly cruel to Britney and other women at the time. It was a major moral flaw in the tabloid press that we did that. And unfortunately, I was a cog in that machine. “
Widdicombe told me that, even then, the treatment that the press gave Spears was horrible to watch. “At the time, it was clear to us on the news team that we needed to leave Britney alone,” he says. “His mental health required the media to back off. But this voracious capitalist machine would not do that. Although Widdicombe did not personally report Britney’s collapse, he says he was powerless to stop his editors from sneezing on the front page, because there was simply too much money to be made from it.
Widdicombe says he feared the stars would be harmed: “I was seriously concerned about the death of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. Britney had mental health problems, Lindsay had a drug problem and Paris was known for drinking and driving. And the media would pretend to be suffering, but in reality, their deaths would make them a lot of money. ”
Why were we so fascinated by celebrity culture in the 2000s? Widdicombe dates back to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “9/11 was so traumatic and horrible,” he says. “When we recovered from the shock, the editors said, ‘We need a picture of a beautiful young woman on page 12 and we need to know who she is dating and what parties she is going to.'”
Pop culture has returned in full force, fueled by the emergence of gossip blogs full of sarcasms, such as TMZ and PerezHilton.com, and celebrity magazines, including US Weekly in the U.S., and Heat and Closer in the UK. “We were able to see more celebrities than ever,” said Matt James of the Pop Culture Died in 2009 fan account, “because we had the internet, which gave us a new and exciting reach in their lives. This, in turn, caused a boom in magazines and blogs. It was a perfect storm of all of this coming together and creating a society that was fixed on celebrities in a way it had never been before. “
The editors of gossip magazines and blogs quickly realized that the public had an insatiable appetite for schadenfreude and cruelty, especially when it came to young women. Upskirt’s photos were published in magazines such as Heat in 2007, and readers wanted to see women with glassy eyes coming out of nightclubs, with hair extension bands clearly visible. The magazines wanted to build ordinary women – like Big Brother star Jade Goody – and then separate them when they failed. (Once the tabloid darling, Goody was attacked for racist intimidation against Shilpa Shetty, a contender for Big Brother Celebrity in 2007.)
“Everything was fine until the rise of Perez Hilton,” said Mila Kunis, another star set by the press, in 2018. “This is what I would say that this industry is falling apart. He was the first person who … literally spread dirt. In 2008, Perez Hilton sold T-shirts asking why Spears couldn’t have died instead of Heath Ledger. Hilton apologized for some of his most sinister stunts in his 2020 autobiography, writing, “I have a ton of regrets … I never needed to be so mean or cruel”.
“There was a market for shame when it came to women,” says Tara Joshi, co-host of Twenty Twenty, a podcast that examines pop culture of the 2000s. Joshi’s co-host, Simran Hans, places this wave of misogyny as a setback against the riot grrrl movement in the early 1990s and the feminism adjacent to the youth culture popularized by the Spice Girls in the late 1990s. “It was a reaction to the third wave of feminism in the 1990s,” says Hans. “We had the emergence of ladettes and this claim to be a ‘little girl’. The 2000s seemed like a punishment for women trying to enter the market. “
Along with the rise of this celebrity-obsessed culture, came another dangerous trend: size zero. Body positivity was non-existent in the 2000s; the ideal body was all trembling clavicle and hip bones. The IT girls of that time – like Mischa Barton or Paris Hilton – were extremely skinny. On TV and in movies, the oversized women were fun figures, like “Fat Monica” seen in flashbacks of Friends, or unlovable, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s character wearing fat overalls in Shallow Hal. Bridget Jones, the fictional woman of the period, was in an ongoing battle to lose weight, despite being only a size 12. (On the other hand, some of the biggest movie franchises of the period, like American Pie, were sexist fantasies in which nerdy men achieved the God-given right to have sex with attractive women.)
The forces of body shame and cruelty to young women converged disastrously. Heat magazine published a special on cellulite for celebrities in 2004, highlighting offensive fat spots on the legs of Martine McCutcheon and Beyoncé with white circles. In his memoir The Celeb Diaries (2008), former Heat editor Mark Frith talks about searching for images of women looking “terrible” before printing images of Jennifer Lopez with cellulite on her thighs. For teenagers, the message was circled in white on the cover of our favorite magazines: if your thighs touched, you weren’t trying hard enough.
“I remember constantly reading headlines about how Charlotte Church was size 12,” says Hans. “The culture of the diet was so widespread and was not yet linked to well-being, and it was transformed into something ‘feminist’ and acceptable.” Emerging from the toxic swamp of the 2000s dietary culture as a teenager without an eating disorder was a real challenge. “A lot of people I knew had eating disorders,” recalls Joshi. “It felt like a normal part of being a teenager.”
In turn, some of the worst criminals of the decade’s apparent misogyny have apologized for their behavior. “My actions contributed to the problem … [I] benefited from a system that tolerates misogyny, ”said Timberlake last month in a statement addressing his behavior towards Spears and Jackson. In interviews since Framing Britney Spears aired, Perez Hilton said he now “regrets” most of his comments about her. Since these excuses are sincere, time will tell.
Still, any broader assessment of the behavior of the 2000 era must recognize that these numbers were not acting spontaneously. There was an audience for cruelty and we were that. “There is very little light between public demand and what the media is reporting,” says Widdicombe. “If people are writing 1,000 Britney stories, it’s because there is an audience for 1,000 Britney stories. Any calculation of that time must take into account the consumption habits of the public. ”
Things started to improve for women in the 2010s, with the emergence of feminist publications such as Rookie magazine and the so-called Feminism Tumblr. “More positive representations of women have become commonplace,” says Hans. “Online there started to be more of a sense of community.” Meanwhile, as legacy media dwindled, freedom for all young stars dwindled (although a recent Sun article calling Lovato a “drug addict’s mess” represents the death throes of a once-all-powerful tabloid mentality).
This does not mean that we are more kind to women in public life: just look at the treatment given to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. But the tone of these articles is less overtly hostile; its most euphemistic sexism and racism. The most open misogyny comes from anonymous commentators. “Look at the tweets or Instagram comments under these women,” says James. “The attitudes that you will find are not so far from those video clips from a decade ago.”
The disease of the 2000s did not completely dissipate, but it did mutate as society became more enlightened about mental health, drug and alcohol addiction. As a society, we are more progressive: two-thirds of young women identify themselves as feminists; saying that when I was a teenager would be unthinkable. Although it doesn’t seem – living as we live in an era of pandemic, destroyed by nostalgia and constantly throwing back images of pop culture moments, such as when Britney, Paris and Lindsay huddled together in the same SUV – the 2000s were a long time ago. That past was a different country. I hope we never come back.