Toxic by Sarah Ditum: Reappraising the noughties through a feminist lens makes for an uncomfortable read

Toxic, journalist Sarah Ditum’s takedown of noughties misogyny as exemplified by nine female celebrities, starts with an anecdote about an anonymous 16-year-old girl in the US in 2006. The girl was looking at greeting cards in a branch of Target in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when a 33-year-old man, Riccardo Ferrante, crouched beside her and used a digital camera to take pictures up her skirt without her consent or knowledge.

CCTV footage caught Ferrante in the act, “an open-and-shut case of voyeurism”, in Ditum’s retelling. His defence to police was that “he was a leg man” and had intended to take pictures of the girl’s legs. A watertight argument, clearly, because the following year a judge dismissed his case on the grounds that the person photographed was not in a place where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy. This is a smart, galling example to begin with, indicative of the fact that women’s bodies were, back then, considered fair game once in a public space, while also pointing to the advent of digital media that would make the recording and sharing of such invasive imagery alarmingly easy.

Moreover, it gives Ditum a name – the Upskirt Decade – for the timespan of her book, 1998-2013, or in pop culture terms, from the release of Britney Spears’s debut Baby One More Time to the backlash against Robin Thicke’s hit single Blurred Lines 15 years later. Ditum labels this period the “long noughties”, years in which “the world became so altered, it is hard now to recapture what it meant to live through them”.

The sheer level of hostility towards these famous women, and by proxy all women, to be found within these pages is astounding

It’s a broad statement that risks being too catch-all, or too self-selecting, but for the most part the subsequent nine chapters work to fill in the details. Crucially, Ditum gets the tone right: critically engaged, well-researched, colourful without seeming exploitative. While the use of the celebrities’ first names as chapter titles – Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Aaliyah, Janet, Amy, Kim, Chyna, Jen – initially comes across as too informal for a book of serious reportage, it does at least succeed in imposing a clear, concise structure on the very messy events that follow.

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The way these women were shamed – relentlessly, needlessly, gleefully – by a voracious media and public is the book’s overarching theme. Each chapter begins with a quote from its subject, an inclusive touch, but also a reminder that this is yet another book speaking about and for these women rather than directly to them. To be fair to Ditum, it is a story that merits telling, a period of time that merits scrutiny. Reappraising the noughties through a feminist lens makes for strange, difficult reading, evincing a sense of incredulity that these things happened, and barely over a decade ago.

The sheer level of hostility towards these famous women, and by proxy all women, to be found within these pages is astounding. Ditum painstakingly brings us through the highs and lows of the careers and private lives of the women, who were held to totally different standards than their male counterparts, and indeed their older, male “guardians”. She highlights the double bind the women found themselves in, as objects of obsession and titillation, who were themselves expected to be devoid of sexuality and desire.

The lawlessness and vitriol of online media in its early days is well documented, particularly celebrity blog sites such as Perez Hilton, TMZ and the charmingly named Hollywood Tuna

Then there’s the double bind of being held responsible yet afforded no power. On the leaked sex tapes of Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson, Ditum asks, “What kind of woman ended up in a sex tape? As far as the noughties were concerned, it could only happen if she either wanted it or deserved it ... sluts don’t get to say no.” It’s a world where all moral agency rested with the woman, the victim, but “copyright was held by the person who took the photo, not the person in it – meaning that if your boyfriend filmed you, the footage was his to dispose of”. Or not.

Ditum is excellent on the downside of celebrity, the price of fame. With three of the nine women deceased, it is clear that the stakes couldn’t be higher. She explores how they were at times complicit in their own destruction – “‘Half victims, half accomplices, like everyone else,’ in Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation” – but also shows how some, notably Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and Jennifer Aniston, were able to outsmart the media and take control of the narrative.

The lawlessness and vitriol of online media in its early days is well documented, particularly celebrity blog sites such as Perez Hilton, TMZ and the charmingly named Hollywood Tuna, whose dehumanising, misogynistic shtick passed for “journalism” for far too long. For readers interested in real celebrity journalism, which is to say, a broad-minded and incisive take on what it meant to be famous and female in a time where “the more she hurt, the greater the entertainment,” then get off the internet and into a bookshop and ask for Toxic.