The subject that Sarah Ditum addresses in Toxic is why the early part of this century was ‘such a monstrous time to be famous and female. It’s about how the concept of privacy came undone and why that was a catastrophe for women’. The concept of privacy was actually undone by a judge in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2006. A 16-year-old girl was browsing through greetings cards in a shop when a man crouched down beside her and took photographs up her skirt. A security guard saw him and called the police. The whole scene was captured on CCTV, so there was no shortage of evidence. But the judge ruled that ‘the person photographed was not in a place where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy’ and an appeals court concurred. Just by going out, it seemed, women had given everyone permission to look up their skirts.

Just by going out, it seemed, women had given everyone permission to look up their skirts

Ditum calls this period the ‘Upskirt Decade’, though she makes it a long decade, from 1998 to 2013. This was the heyday of gossip blogging, when websites such as Gawker and Perez Hilton subsisted on snarky stories about celebrities. Gawker had an offshoot called Fleshbot which was almost entirely devoted to upskirting, but it claimed:

We always had a suspicion that when Britney, Lindsay, Paris et al ‘accidentally’ flash their lady business to the paparazzi it’s a lot more calculated than their publicists would want you to believe.

Ditum says her subjects are nine women ‘so famous, you know them by their first names alone’. They are Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Aaliyah, Janet, Amy, Kim, Chyna and Jen. Well, I know who Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Kim and Amy are, but it took a while to discover that Jen meant Jennifer Aniston and Janet meant Janet Jackson. As for Aaliyah? Chyna? It turns out the former was a pop singer who had three hit albums before dying in a plane crash in 2001 and the latter was an American professional wrestler who slid into soft porn, hard porn, drink, drugs and overdose. Presumably she was more famous in the States than here, but hardly a household name.

Britney Spears is the most obvious victim of toxic culture but Lindsay Lohan suffered similar persecution. She’d been modelling and acting from the age of three but she became a star at 12 with the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, which showed her immense acting talent. Naturally, the gossip websites kept a keen eye on her adolescence. Was she anorexic? Bulimic? Had she had breast enhancement? Why did she need to spend five days in hospital with ‘exhaustion’ when she was just 18? Was she partying too hard? She was often late on set or even failed to turn up. In 2007 she was arrested for driving under the influence and possession of cocaine. In 2010 she spent two weeks in prison for cocaine possession and the following year was sentenced to 120 days for stealing a necklace. Her films flopped and she became pretty much uninsurable – she made three low-budget movies in 2013 and then no more films for six years, though she has recently resurfaced on Netflix.

Kim Kardashian is in many ways the most interesting of Ditum’s subjects because she was the most knowing. She came to the fame game quite late, in her twenties, and already knew about notoriety from childhood. Her father, Robert Kardashian, was a friend of O.J. Simpson’s and made his first television appearance reading out the note O.J. left when he set off on his infamous 1994 car chase. Kim, as a teenager, would have watched the car chase and then the trial and would have tasted some of the backlash when anti-O.J. demonstrators turned up at the Kardashians’ house.

Later, she became friends with Paris Hilton and made a brief appearance in her TV show. Then she started her own blog on MySpace as ‘Princess Kimberly’ with the strap line ‘I’m a princess, you’re not, so there!’ though it only attracted 856 followers. So she was just about known but hardly famous when rumours started circulating of a sex tape made by ‘Paris Hilton’s BFF’. Some people have claimed that it was her mother Kris who suggested it because Paris had reportedly made $14 million in the three years since her sex tape was released. So Kim filmed one of her own, Kim Kardashian, Superstar, and then expressed predictable shock horror when it was released in 2007, just in time for the launch of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. In the very first episode her sister Kourtney asked her ‘Why did you make a sex tape?’ and she answered: ‘Because I was horny and I felt like it.’

After that, she really was a star. She joined Twitter in 2008 and soon had 2.7 million followers, meaning she could command $10,000 per tweet for endorsing products as well as promoting her own. ‘I realised pretty quickly that social media was going to be used as my marketing tool and my free focus group,’ she said in 2019. She now has 364 million followers on Instagram. (Incidentally, the thing that always puzzles me about Kim Kardashian is why she is perceived as bi-racial when her father was of Armenian ancestry and her mother Scottish-Dutch. But she had black boyfriends, and seemed to tailor her body to suit ideas of black booty. Paris, no longer her BFF, described her bottom as ‘gross!… like cottage cheese inside a trash bag’. Kim denied that she had ever had ‘the Brazilian butt lift’, but her bottom did seem to get larger and larger, culminating in the famous photograph of her balancing a champagne glass on it.)

Kim, like Paris, seems to have navigated the toxic years extremely cleverly and to have built a lucrative career on being famous for being famous. So it seems unfair of Ditum to put Amy Winehouse in the same league. She only ever wanted to be known as the massively talented singer she was, and didn’t care at all about celebrity. She was the victim of her own addictions, not paparazzi attention.

Ditum’s argument is sometimes a bit muddled but I found it convincing. There was something particularly evil in the way celebrity women were treated in the early part of this century. Ditum believes that toxic culture is over now:

I lived through the noughties. I read the blogs. I listened to the music. I laughed at the jokes. And yet, in writing this book, I haven’t felt like I was revisiting familiar territory: I have felt as though I were entering an entirely alien landscape… Sometimes the register of progress is only in how utterly remote the past has become.

Let’s hope she’s right.