The Beast Of Both Worlds
I'm not usually an Esquire man, but their May 2008 Jessica Simpson cover disgusted me so I found myself unable to resist buying it. The annoyance stems from the fact that Esquire has already recast their famous Angie Dickinson lower-bleachers nude with Britney Spears and then recast that same image again for an anniversary cover. Now, they're using Jessica to reinvent (read: copy exactly) their iconic March 1965 cover illustrating "the masculinization of the American woman." It's also reminiscent—thanks to the bad, bad hair—of New York's laughable effort to transform Lindsay Lohan 2008 into Marilyn Monroe 1962.
I wanna shave you forever.
I'm glad I sprang for the issue, though, because Chuck Klosterman has a fascinating story called "MySpace.com/Doppelganger" which argues successfully that Miley Cyrus is, in the same mold as Ricky Nelson, Brooke Shields and Britney Spears before her, a lucky recipient of her generation's adulation due to "social evolutions [she] a) could not have possibly anticipated and b) played almost no active role in creating."
For Miley's popularity, the turbo-charging social evolution comes via the Internet, with its offer of not anonymity, but self-reactualization. Kids can log on and be someone else...and they do, they do. This mirrors the double-identity plot of Miley's TV series Hannah Montana, and is what is behind her propulsion from big star to the biggest star of her generation.
"Like all techno-media advances, the Internet is good for the world in the short term and bad for the world in the long term. But its most meaningful impact is neutral—it provides an opportunity for average people to create identities that are entirely their own vision."
"There's no way," Klosterman sums up, "this doesn't end badly."
I was thinking this applies far beyond the realm of teenage dreams; for gay men, I would say that BigMuscle.com and other online hook-up sites offer ways for us to be our ideal selves, or not our selves at all, in exchange for validation that goes much deeper—probably back to the beginnings of our sexual psyches—than just the momentary relief of good, bad or neutral sex. A career in porn is the same; it's a way to show to yourself and your peers that you can be that impossible ideal, that the ideal is very possible.
Unholy dalliance.
But more interestingly, I think the concept of role-playing (which is what this boils down to) applies to Esquire (a magazine that thinks aping its former glories in the form of a badly conceived copycat cover constitutes proof those glories are ongoing) and to Jessica Simpson (a marginally talented singer who aped true stardom via reality TV, an outspoken Christian who advocated pre-marital virginity before willing herself to be a blue-collar sex icon simply by wearing two or fewer articles of clothing in photo shoots).
There's no way Esquire (or publishing in general) or Jessica's career aren't going to end badly, either; for now, they're both in fantasyland, just like those with phony online identities, and all will be well until enough people notice they are not what or who they would like us to believe they are.
