ive been learning some fascinating 00s celebrity gossip that i missed out on due to being a little bitty barely sentient being back then and also having no interest in the world of celebs at all for basically my entire life. i want to tell you bc youre the only person i think who would find it as oddly compelling as i do
anyway i was listening to the backlog of this podcast called youre wrong about and they read jessica simpson's autobiography for it. i did not know who jessica simpson was until i listened to this podcast. she seems to be the type of celebrity that ppl like me boo and hiss at but i found myself empathizing with her unfortunate run of luck through life when it comes to relationships and health. the 2000s were a lot more fucked up then a lot of ppl care to remember. i was also really struck by how her relationship with her husband was so horrendous and she was so isolated from the normal human world that, when filming the dukes of hazzard movie, she fell in love with johnny knoxville of all ppl bc he was nice to her and didnt treat her like she was stupid. he was basically her manic pixie dream boy bc he talked to her about hunter s thompson and the ramones. i cannot imagine how dogshit her life was at that point that the guy with 16 concussions from jackass was the only man around that treated her with basic common decency. insane. absolutely insane. what was in the water back then?
it is always interesting to hear the perspective of young folks on the 00s. the near-universal perception seems to be that it was a brutal environment for a girl child to be raised in, and i suppose that’s true, but i wasn’t cognizant of it. i of course felt bad about myself, but i let it roll off my back. it’s funny, because i feel much more impacted by the culture now, and i am made more miserable by it. i think being an immature kid who didn’t take anything seriously, didn’t think too deeply about anything other than my books and fandoms, protected me. i was a late bloomer, not really caring about my own personal image until college because i was so depressed and miserable in my home situation, as i’ve alluded to before. perhaps if i was a more feminine and culturally engaged child i would felt more connected to and hurt by the rampant cultural misogyny, but i simply wasn’t. i do think young women and girls have it far worse now, with the threat of technology being used to sexually harass them.
as for the specifics of jessica simpson and johnny knoxville, i can confirm that she was seen as an idiot and was a punching bag. i thought she was hot and i liked one of her songs, but i also assessed her as the most worthless female popstar of the time (and, to be clear, she is absolutely an F-tier popstar) so i didn’t give her much thought. i remember thinking it was funny when she gained a bunch of weight because her entire image was so tied up in being sexy. that shows you how much i internalized the vicious cultural commentary surrounding her. looking back, i can’t imagine how it felt to be one of those starlets … so worshipped and reviled at the same time with a cruelty we hadn’t seen before. fandom culture going back to the 1920s had always been toxic, but something about the tone of y2k pop culture is uniquely mean-spirited. again, i think things are worse now due to social media, but for the time it seemed unprecedented to the adults who were paying attention to the ugliness.
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