Out of the slipstream: The creation of celebrities

None of which is lost on teenage girls, as Elspeth Probyn and I discovered when we embarked on a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project exploring young women and media consumption. In a typical exchange, a group of 14 and 15-year-olds from a regional co-ed state school talked frankly about the benefits of the celebrity lifestyle:

Vanessa: Money. How you look, and looking how you look, and the clothes and just …
Anne: And boys!
Vanessa: And the thing you get to go to, say if you become a supermodel, you get to go to all these, like, get-together things. And you know people …
Anne: And travel.
Vanessa: And people would know you.

A common theme of these discussions about the benefits of the celebrity lifestyle was the freedom it offered young women from the constraints imposed by parents, teachers and other “protectors”, as this discussion of singer Nikki Webster by 14 and 15-year-olds from a regional co-ed state school illustrates:

Justine: I hate Nikki Webster … but I’d love to be like her, be like 14, 15.
Paulina: Who?
Justine: Nikki Webster.
Clare: She has a career in singing but that’s not the only aspect. She can do whatever she wants now.
Justine: Yeah, but being 14, 15 and famous all over the world.
Clare: Not all over the world. They cut her part out of the Olympic Ceremony in America. They couldn’t be bothered explaining all this Australian background and everything.
Justine: But she’s like a millionaire at 13, 14 whatever it is.
Maggie: But like all her fans are eight years old.
Justine: Yeah, but I would love to be like her, famous.

Teenage girls are also highly aware of the downside of celebrity: an invasive scrutiny of the celebrities’ bodies and their private lives. Indeed, any mention of the subject inevitably returned to the question of how such scrutiny apparently results in female celebrities developing eating disorders. Here’s what a group of 12 and 13-year-olds from an inner-city single sex, state selective school had to say on the subject:

Eleni: I think a lot of them are way too … skinny, but I don’t think everyone should then assume that they’re anorexic, because that’s like a big assumption to make of someone. I mean Calista Flockhart …
Susanna: My mum, whenever she goes on the TV, she’s like, “Oh she’s so thin”.
Eleni: You’ve got to admit, her baby looks like it’s bigger than her. She looks like a lollypop, with a big head. Really quite scary … also like Geri Halliwell … Madame Tussauds made a wax figure of her, and now they have to keep shaving lumps off her because practically her butt’s disappeared, and she’s got no chest to speak of anymore, and she used to be really big-busted, and everything.

Talking with young women, it became increasingly clear that a core element of their enthusiasm for Big Brother’s bunny-eared Sara-Marie centres on their perception that she was able to negotiate the high level of scrutiny that goes with instant fame without feeling the need to pander to her audience. And, contrary to concerns expressed in popular discourse about the show, it was precisely the young women’s awareness of the contrived and performance-oriented nature of Big Brother that heightened Sara-Marie’s “reality” value. Young women commented on her flagrant self-assurance despite her context - a house filled with cameras - and the stereotypes that shadowed her performance of femininity - she was fat, she was “slutty”, she was sloppy, she was stroppy.

Our research suggests that Sara-Marie is a refreshing reality check for young women who, rather like the Big Brother housemates, feel under constant surveillance from a variety of sources  their peer group, men, the popular media, parents, teachers and “experts”. They see Sara-Marie as someone who has the sass and the wit to return those gazes and to do it without conforming to other people’s expectations. Sara-Marie knows people will be talking about the fact that she has a big bum and rather than skulking around and trying to hide it, she invents a “bum-dance”. Guys like her because she’s warm, down-to-earth and open. Her opposite, according to many of the same teenage girls, is Gemma, another Big Brother housemate, as this exchange between 12 and 13-year-olds from a co-ed rural state school illustrates:

Ashley: It was interesting to see who actually won and who actually stayed there the longest because the majority of viewers were teenage girls. It’s interesting to see that they kept Sara-Marie in because she wasn’t really skinny or like a model or anything - she was just very, very honest and nice.

Holly: I think Sara-Marie liked being herself …
Ashley: Gemma was really nice but she was always putting on her make-up. She wasn’t really going anywhere, just inside the house but she was always putting lip-gloss on. Really frustrating.
Gabrielle: Sara-Marie, she made you laugh - she was just funny to watch.
Kate: I think Gemma was trying to act like she thought that everyone in the outside world would want her to be like.

It’s critical to see that teenage girls aren’t saying appearances don’t matter or that you can pretend that the size or shape of your body is irrelevant to other people. What they like about Sara-Marie is that she had found a way of turning this fascination with appearances to her advantage. Gemma emerges, in their eyes, as someone who is hampered by her role as the pretty skinny girl. She’s afraid to move a muscle in case she changes the drape of her T-shirt. Sara-Marie, on the other hand, is a performer who takes up a variety of social roles with gusto and who understands that “being yourself” also involves being many things to other people. The role the girls cited included a confidante, a “mum”, a mate to the boys and a vixen. Sara-Marie knows people like to look and she gives them something to look at. To borrow a phrase from a reality-television producer, she improvises on the theme of being herself.

The contemporary experience of fame, from this perspective, is an extension for young women of life in an image-focused world. It’s a world whose new economy they understand and whose pitfalls they are hyper-aware of. As Susan Hopkins writes in her book Girl Heroes (Pluto Press, 2002), there is far more to the story of girls, pop culture and celebrity today than some feminists want to know. She writes: “If we are moving toward a society of image logic, then girls and women may be positively advantaged in this new media age. After all, it seems the most powerful icons of contemporary culture built their careers not on any ‘true’ ‘authentic’ talented self, but on their successful management of media images and illusions.” It’s an argument that runs counter to some conventional and increasingly contested feminist arguments that are premised on the juxtaposition of “real” women and appearances, on the notion that the truth about ourselves lies in an essential inner core.