Britney, Paris, Kim. Poor Jen, messy Lindsay, talented yet tragic Amy. If you were an even vaguely young woman in the 00s, these celebrities’ first names alone probably conjure memories. They were our cultural wallpaper, female icons made and too often broken by mass media, in whom we hunted “for clues about what a woman ought to be”, as the journalist Sarah Ditum writes. Sexy, but not too sexy; empowered, but still unthreatening.
Ditum’s hotly anticipated book brilliantly captures the prevailing millennial mood of anti-nostalgia, or looking back through newly appalled eyes on the past – in this case an era of prurient, tech-enabled misogyny she christens the “Upskirt Decade”, elastically located between 1998 and 2013. “I lived through the noughties. I read the blogs. I laughed at the jokes,” she writes. “And yet, in writing this book, I haven’t felt like I was revising familiar territory. I have felt as though I were entering an entirely alien landscape.” The nine modern feminist fables here are perfectly timed for readers still blinking in disbelief at what Russell Brand got away with saying about women in broad daylight so very recently, but she’s surely right that this mood of reckoning dates back to #MeToo and the way it encouraged so many women to re-evaluate their own pasts. Her thesis – that toxic celebrity culture hurt both celebrities and ordinary women encouraged to make “sense of our own existence” through these manufactured stories – was one I couldn’t wait to read.
