https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/2797227/toxic-media-of-early-2000s-hasnt-changed/

I loved this so much. I was pretty young during the 2000s and sometimes either was very confused why these women were being treated the way they did, and other times joined the hatred/misogynistic bandwagon. As I’ve aged and come to realize just how poorly the media handled these women’s lives, I’ve found myself wanting to know more. Ditum provides so much context and information and really places you in this 2000s world. Highly recommend.

Coming off the heels of reading Britney’s memoir, I really enjoyed the way this book analyzed celebrity women in the 2000s and the things that the media (and the public) did to them. There were one or two of them whose stories I didn’t know, so I enjoyed getting a deeper dive into their histories and honestly am so grateful that I was young in the 2000s and wasn’t a public figure.

📚: Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s by Sarah Ditum
⭐️: 3/5

In another life, had I become some sort of sociology teacher, I would use Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s as a textbook to show the time that I came of age to those that didn't have the blessing (curse?) of living through it.

So does that mean I spent a day or so reading essentially a textbook about my high school and college years? Yes. 

It's hard to rate this one, as from living during it, I found myself yelling (silently, mentally) corrections as I read. (How does one cover Brad & Jen's divorce and miss the correct "sensitivity chip" quote? How does one not tie Abercrombie & Fitch as a key player in early aughts American culture? So much was packed in here, but also so much was missed - a little less biographical detail about some (the Britney chapter felt like a biography with redundant information that simply sets the scene of her life at a superficial level) could have been done to plug in more nuanced cultural bits from this era.  

Thanks to @abramsbooks via @netgalley for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s is out later this month on January 23rd.

This was a fascinating look at six women and how they were treated during the early aughts. The author looks at these women through the lens of tabloids and paparazzi and how the limelight either broke them or how they managed to not be broken.

Sarah Ditum brings us a provocative deep dive into the lives of nine women across various pop culture dimensions who's names flooded the headlines of the 2000s. A few were musicians, a couple reality TV stars, actresses, and even a WWE star. While it can be read in any order, the chapters do build on each other, almost like episodes in a series. Ditum touches on important aspects of sexism, racism, classicism, as well the impact of modern technology to the start and 'end' of the so-called Upskirt Decade.

For a book focused about women in the tabloid 2000s, I feel that Ditum frequently sidestepped their stories with a focus on the roles other famous males had on their lives. This is seen in the Aaliyah chapter (heavy focus on R. Kelly), the Britney chapter (we get a whole career background on Justin), Jen Aniston (another career background on her partner at the time, Brad), and so on. I'm not sure if the male focus was particularly on topic, but it was interesting enough that it didn't bother me too much.

Speaking of strange contextual information, I felt like drawing connections between tabloid 2000s, the Upskirt Decade, and 9/11 was too much of a reach for me personally.

All in all, I did enjoy this book and give it a solid 4/5. Quick, easy read that provides some interesting facts about a traumatic period in pop culture. Thank you NetGalley and Abrams Press for the opportunity to read an advanced reader's copy in exchange for my honest review.

This is a new look at 9 celebrities in the 2000s. They are part of how women are seen today, the good an the bad. Sarah Ditnum writes a great look into how things are shaped by celebrities and their lives and how we all look at things through the lens of celebrity.

I’m so glad this era is being reexamined! This was done so well and I think it would be so great as a documentary or docuseries. Incredible that we tolerate the treatment of anyone like that and called it entertainment. As a millennial woman, it was also fascinating to think of how much these stories and portrayals shaped the way we thought of ourselves as well. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

A fascinating look at the lives of nine celebrities who rose to prominence in the early 2000s - which, wow, there's a lot I've forgotten or repressed or straight-up ignored at that time!

I really liked the book's organization and how it took a deep-dive approach, focusing on one woman per descriptive, rich chapter. And I'm obsessed with this framing in the introduction: "For the public, tearing these women to pieces was both a social activity and a form of divination. In the entrails of their reputations, we hunted for clues about what a woman out to be, and this has always been one of the functions of celebrity women ... The cast of this book - four singers, two actresses, two reality stars, and a pro wrestler - were the two-way mirrors of the Millenial era." Yes!

However, I was surprised when I hit the end! It felt weirdly abrupt to me; I was craving more reflection. I know there was a conclusion - and it was interesting and provocative! - but it felt to me more like a standalone, kind of rushed chapter focused on Robin Thicke/Taylor Swift/the 2010s than a true tying-together and looking-ahead. I wanted more, and when I hit the acknowledgements, I wondered whether I'd accidentally skipped the last chapter.

I'm also not sure how I feel about the fact that SO much of the book was about ... men. In particular, the Britney Spears and Janet Jackson chapters could almost have been renamed Justin Timberlake, and Aaliyah's could have certainly been renamed R. Kelly. I totally understand the tension here - these men DID have significant impact on these women - but it felt weird, at times, for a book about women to give as much spotlight if not more to men.

Overall, I enjoyed this book, read it quickly, and it gave me a lot to think about. I could see Anne Helen Petersen (Culture Study) profiling it, which is a high compliment!

Thanks to NetGalley and Abrams Press for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

A look into the lives of nine female celebrities and how fame/celebrity impacted them in negative and toxic ways.

I thought this one was fine but didn’t live up to its potential. I found that a lot of the chapters ended up focusing a lot more on what was happening to the men in these women’s lives than actually analyzing the toxicity of celebrity. I also don’t know why Jennifer Aniston was included because her chapter didn’t really fit as well with the others. I also think Ditum could have been more analytical of the role of paparazzi in all of this.

I received my copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Intended audience is perhaps the most important part of understanding the background of Sarah Ditum’s Toxic. This book has a very specific target, women who experienced the decade at a certain age. Younger millennials will not have been old enough to experience the decade and an older generation X may be less aware of the havoc wrecked by the tabloids.

Being a year younger than Ditum, I fully saw the effects of overt sexualization of young girls during that period and the detrimental impact it had upon them. However, retrospection is obvious. When comparing then and now, I agree progress has been made. I also feel that just stating this is not enough. That’s the thing with progress, if we simply compare the past to the present, we will always see the past as shortsighted.

From an intersectional perspective, the book could have delved more into the work of Crenshaw and focused on more diverse backgrounds of women adding to more thought-provoking context. Overall, I found the nine women’s stories to be relevant, important, and worth the read.

Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s is a semi-academic look into the aughts (allegedly) and uses the framework of nine separate female celebrities to discuss different ways the decade was problematic. This was very well researched, and done in a form that blended theory with tabloid resources, making it accessible to a more casual reader.

I say "allegedly" in regards to the decade, because Ditum's choice of women do not all fall neatly into the decade. For example, there is a chapter on Aaliyah, who passed away a little over two weeks before 9/11 took place. Further, this chapter deals significantly with R. Kelly, and it is clear that he is who Ditum wanted to discuss more in-depth. Do I think the chapter made excellent points regarding the decade, particularly in contrast with her conclusion chapter? Yes. Was it frustrating to read 90% of a chapter named after Aaliyah about the man who groomed her? Also yes.

I really enjoyed this book and give it a solid 4 stars. However, Ditum dead-names three separate trans individuals, which made me uncomfortable. The third was Caitlin Jenner, and Ditum notes that Jenner herself has stated she is ok with being deadnamed/misgendered when discussing the period before she transitioned, and Ditum therefore does the same. While I would personally still choose not to deadname her, I understand this decision. The other two trans individuals, however, did not make similar statements, and I cannot ignore that. Therefore, I dock a star from this book. Particularly because this could be very triggering to some.

Thank you to Abrams Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

"...Pop culture fans, particularly Millennials, will be drawn to Ditum’s engaging writing and thoughtful observations. Pairs well with a viewing of The Most Hated Man on the Internet." - full review to appear in Booklist.

Toxic, a nonfiction book, examines the paradoxical relationships of multiple famous women of the late 90’s to early 2000’s. A good description could be famous women, the men who wrecked them and the public who devoured them.
As a person who was already of age when all of these scandals played out I can say that at times this was a difficult book to read. Granted there are a few of these women who I had no interest in and had no desire to consume the voracious content of their lives, but there are some who I admit I was absolutely swept into the frenzy. I was proudly #teamjen and admit to still feeling so horribly for Britney Spears and what has happened to her. How much guilt do we all have for what has happened to some of these women in their lives.
The only issue I really have with this book is just how much time was spent on the men in their lives as compared to the actual women. In particular R. Kelly, Brad Pitt and Justin Timberlake are so prominent in some of the chapters it’s easy to loose focus on who is actually important here.
Thank you to NetGalley and Abrams Press for the opportunity to read and review this book. It was a good read and eye opening. Hopefully others will read it and reflect on the damage done and continuing to be done on such a massive scale thanks to social media these days.

There was something that made me uncomfortable about Ditum's coverage of female celebrities during, what she calls the "upskirt era" of the early 2000s. Her citations are uneven, giving a slap-dash feel to the research, hinting it may be incomplete. The ethics of Perez Hilton and TMZ have been the topic of books, articles, and opinion pieces for over a decade; Ditum adds little new to an ongoing conversation. Ditum makes some missteps, some of which are more slight, like criticizing a post-9/11 romcom set in NYC for not being gritty (?) enough, but others are more odious.

Admittedly, I didn't finish Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s. I made it through the Aaliyah chapter. It is immediately clear that Aaliyah isn't the focus of the chapter, R. Kelly is. Ditum suggests R. Kelly became a "hero" of Chicago's Black community and was able to escape consequences because of the two-fold belief that "women lied to hurt Black men and the belief that if Black men did hurt women, that mattered less than the fact of racism." Ditum does not address the race of the women, a baffling oversight for someone trying to support their argument by citing Crenshaw and invoking Emmett Till. That's when I called it quits.

3.5 This book is extremely interesting and I am glad that I requested it. I was not old enough to witness all of these things in real time but since everything is so iconic I knew of these instances. This novel is extremely thought provoking and shows the toxicity that women have to endure. Specifically those who are in the limelight. Every woman that was examined deserves an apology and much more. The only gripe that I had with the book was the issue of pacing. I felt as though the pacing was lacking and the first half moved really fast and kept you interested but then it started to fall flat. 

Thank you so much to the publisher and Netgally for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book!

I'm giving this book 3 stars because 2 feels too harsh, but I must admit I thought I would enjoy this book more than I did. I think my disappointment derives from what I felt to be the dry style of writing. Ditum is a journalist and this is a non-fiction book, but as a millennial woman who came of age during this period, I think I wanted the writing to match my emotion regarding this period. I'm. not saying I'm right in wanting this, but nevertheless, I found the approach a bit dull. The author is clearly very knowledgeable and credible, but I think I was bored because, for the most part, I didn't really feel like I was learning anything new or getting a perspective I hadn't really considered before. I think a lot of people will like this book and although I didn't dislike it--I wasn't really jammed on it and had to really push myself to get through it.

this was SO interesting to read, especially having witnessed so much of it in real time, and painted such a full, clear picture of the toxicity of pop culture (then AND now). it made me feel more deeply connected to my womanhood and the experiences that come with it, the ways they shape us -- both as victims, witnesses and survivors of it.

definitely an important & mind-opening read, without being too dense or heavy.

TOXIC is an excellent, thought-provoking, enraging, sobering read and one I immediately dove into the moment I received that approval email.

Whether you watched it happen in real time or are a pop culture junkie, you know the stories of these celebrities, women so famous you only need their first names to know exactly who they are: Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Kim. Each chapter focuses on one woman and the moment that changed everything. Ditum then breaks down and explores how the media -- and the emerging World Wide Web -- reacted (spoiler: it wasn't a great look for humanity).

One aspect I wasn't a huge fan of was, despite this being a book whose entire purpose was to focus on these women, so much of each chapter was spent on a man. In the case of Justin Timberlake, *two* chapters (Britney's and Janet's).

Apologies to and redemption for these women came embarrassingly late and they all deserved so much better.

Popular culture has recently turned the mirror on itself. Re-examinations of the way society devoured famous (or infamous) women for LOLs in the not-so-distant past have become a popular form of entertainment. Examples include the miniseries "Pam & Tommy" on Hulu, the several documentaries about Britney Spears & her conservatorship, the rehabilitation of Paris Hilton as a crusader against child abuse, "American Crime Story: Impeachment" (which tells the Monica Lewinsky story from her point of view), & the like. This book is a continuation of that theme.

Each chapter focuses on a different woman who achieved fame in the 2000s & examines the ways in misogyny (& often its favored companion, racism) informed her story. Each woman is probably famous enough to be known by one name only: Britney. Aaliyah. Paris. Kim. Lindsey. Jen. If you read "Star" magazine, TMZ, or Perez Hilton in the aughts, you know exactly who these women are, & you probably remember at least the rough outlines of the scandals that surrounded them. In many cases, their stories overlap & feed one another.

Ditum casts the aughts as a particularly fraught & disgusting time to be a woman, going so far as to name it the Upskirt Decade. She has a compelling story explaining the moniker, but even so...It felt a bit polemical to me. I'm a woman, only a year or two older than Ditum, so I lived through this entire period in tandem with her in terms of cultural consciousness. I can attest to the fact that the world is different for women now than it was twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. But often when people do these looks back at recent history, they fall into the Steven Pinker trap of perceiving That Time as Bad & Now Things are Better. There's an assumption that there's an inevitable march toward progress. Acknowledging the obvious issues of the past lets us off the hook for addressing the obvious issues of the now.

Obviously addressing the misogyny of the now is not the remit of Ditum's book. As a history of the way the extraordinarily misogynist tabloid culture of the 2000s impacted the lives of the nine woman featured in this book, it does what it says on the tin, & is impressively well-researched & extensively footnoted. I greatly appreciated the examination into how race often played an unspoken role in shaping some of these women's stories. Ditum asks some diffiult questions about this topic, which is great. The overall tone of the book was a little bit ginned-up for me--kind of like someone trying to sustain the energy of an outraged Nextdoor post for 300 pages. Ditum had to make a few leaps of logic & really focus on the negative to get there. But as her footnotes show, everything she cited really did happen. To real people, often young women who didn't understand what they were getting into. For an audience of other young women & girls who were consciously or unconsciously absorbing the narratives as a guide on how to be a woman in the 21st century. I was there & it truly was a toxic situation.

A must-read for anyone interested in feminism, modern media, the cultural currency of fame, tabloid culture, or any of the celebrities featured within.