Paris Hilton is like a fart in a mitten

Because people have been talking about celebrities and American culture in general, I thought this magazine article (taken, again, from BUST) would be appropriate.

In the Pop Tart section, Wendy McClure tackles the issue of “Why do we obsess over Paris Hilton?” And, to be honest, for as much as I hate Paris Hilton, I find that I’m also obsessed with her. Maybe it’s because I love laughing at her, or thinking about how many ways I could make better use of her money, but in any case, I keep tabs on the girl. McClure writes: “Every time I’ve considered writing a column about Paris Hilton I’ve talked myself out of it. Because one day soon, I figure, she’s going to drop off the pop-culture radar. It’s inevitable, right? She’ll just disappear into a puff of pink smoke- gone, forgotten, nothing left but a bittersweet memory and a T-Mobile Sidekick.” But no matter how much we belittle Paris, tell her that she’s like “a fart in a mitten” (someone actually said that, how genius?!), she sticks around, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. McClure writes that we need to stop blaming Paris for starting a trend of celebrities who are famous for no apparent reason, and start looking at why we’ve produced a culture which values this sort of person. “Maybe we ought to stop wondering how we should feel about her and wonder instead how we got to this particularly fucked-up place in time- where being young and female and famous seems to mean becoming somebody most other people would love to pelt with dog shit.” As McClure rightly points out, perhaps the reason that Paris is sticking around for so long (and the reason that another Paris will pop up on the scene when this one is done and gone) is because of the sort of fame we’ve created.

I thought long and hard about why I waste my time reading about celebrities crashing their $1,839,283,918,292 cars again, or who is sleeping with who, or whose throat Paris stuck her tongue down last night, and I just can’t figure it out. I mean, I shouldn’t care, but every time I get bored while on the internet, I find myself typing in www.people.com or www.eonline.com. Anyone else wonder the same thing (I hope I’m not the only one out there who admits to reading celeb gossip…)?