|
Friday, September 23, 2005With all the earth-shattering news out there, it's not easy to decide just what is most important to address. Still, the TurkeyBlog can't help but feel there's something especially important about The Kate Moss Story.Admittedly, this one's a little hard to blame on George W. Bush. But other than that, it has it all: sex (implied), drugs, rock 'n' roll, models... And, at the center of it all, a still young woman very screwed up by the very people who are now disavowing her. It's not surprising that Moss is on drugs. You can't look 14 for 20 years without having a few things in your system that don't belong. It's more surprising that she got caught. But what's really disturbing is the way teenage girls and young women keep buying magazines with her like and swooning over the waif look. And the way the rest of us act like Kate should change her behavior when we keep opening up our pocketbooks to encourage it. Had Moss become a supermodel at the age of 22 after finishing her bachelors in child psychology, say, we might have it in us to criticize a little. But she was in her mid-teens when she got whipped up in the fashion whirlwind. Even those who made a later entry into the modeling scene deserve a little sympathy. They're only selling what they themselves were sold on. And what we keep buying. As for the drug side, the phrase "heroin chic" gave the drug warriors something to get into a lather over. But all the moms and dads who are so distraught that little Sally or Susie wants to be like Kate seem to be more than willing to buy their little darlings YM, CosmoGirl and more and, worse, the grown-up editions of these mags. Unless 13 year-olds suddenly got the earning power to sustain a multi-million dollar segment of the magazine industry when I wasn't looking. Kate Moss represents, more than anything, an abdication on the part of the so-called grown-ups of the world. If the grown-ups were watching their tweeners and providing a good model to imitate, there'd be a lot less to worry about here. But when mom gets a boob job, pop takes up with a younger woman and the Baby Boomer cult of youth is too busy celebrating its hipness to live out what it tells its children about self-esteem and everybody being good enough and special in their own way, things get mucked up. Including a gorgeous, glamorous young woman who is taking the rap for being what they and their children were buying. About drugs and addiction: A dozen years ago or so, I had my first episode of ulcerative colitis. One of the fun parts of this disease is they load you up with corticosteroids to keep your body growing and going faster than the disease breaks it down. When my system stabilized and it was time to get the drug out of my system... hoo boy. It saved my colon, possibly my life. It made me feel human when I otherwise wouldn't have. And it was murder adjusting to the idea that from a certain point on, getting the metabolism going, keeping the body healing and all the other good stuff that goes with a happy, healthy life was going to be up to my body and my body alone. Whether it's Rush on oxycontin, Kate on coke or a nobody in Harlem on heroin, I can't really begrudge anyone whose lives got messed up on these things. Certain drugs are addictive. That doesn't mean that Satanists who don't love Jesus think they're cool. That doesn't mean bad people do them just for fun. It means that the drug does things for the psychology and/or physiology of the person taking them that make it hard to do without. You read alot in the papers about Kate Moss. One thing we haven't read is about how her manager Lenny that she met at Denny's took her money to Bermuda. She's a smart girl, at least in some regards. To do something so stupid as to keep at the drugs when there's been so much chatter about it implies one of two things: Either the drugs are too powerful for the poor lass to resist, given other possibly related circumstances; or the message was never really sent that the worried whispers about drugs were serious, not just to shut up the rubes so they wouldn't pull Glamour - Tots! from the local library. There is much in The Kate Moss Story that is harmful to our culture, starting with the idea that a woman close to my age (I'm in my early thirties) should look like a teenager, and that even budding teenagers should like dandelion stems with breasts. But I can't really buy into the coke thing. Nobody's shocked that Kate was on coke. They're just tittering because she got caught. And drug use in the modeling community is something to be winked at, not actually acknowledged. Just as calls for healthier images and role models for our youth are something to be blathered about. Not something we would take so seriously as to alter our own magazine buying habits over or the messages we ourselves send about youth and thinness to our kids. Were the Baby Boomer youth culture (whose finest exemplar bagged a twenty-something in the Oval Office) to act as though maturity, as well as youth, had its place. Were it to eschew the latest, thinnest, raciest for something solid, realistic and affirming. Were it to grow up and again let kids be kids, instead of vessels through which to live out its dreams of neverending youth. Were it to do this, the Kate Moss lookalikes would disappear from the magazine racks, the world would wonder, "Britney who? Mischa who?" and the whole Kate on coke, what message do models send nonsense would disappear. Because there'd be no there there. Given the Baby Boomer knack for growing up, I have confidence in one thing only: This season: Mary Kate anorexia horror. Next season: anorexia chic. If you really care about Kate on coke, heroin chic, etc, turn off the television and leave Cosmo on the counter. Until you're ready to do that and risk the embarrassment of advising your hipper friends to do the same, leave Kate alone. 
posted by gbarto at 10:24 PM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
