Salon writer Rebecca Traister examines why today’s most prominent young female role models seem to be “jiggly video stars, boobie-flashing twits, half-clad clotheshorses and label-whoring anorexics.” (Reg. or advert. req’d.)

Salon:

May 19, 2006 | During the last week of April, Ellen DeGeneres welcomed Paris Hilton and her four Chihuahuas to her daytime talk show, ostensibly for a special episode about dogs. Once the host had the hotel heiress sitting down, however, she pressed her on a non-canine issue, asking whether she was hurt by Pink’s video for “Stupid Girls,” which mocks Hilton and her shopping-zombie peers for their essentially somnambulant behavior, and which two weeks earlier, DeGeneres had praised on her show. “I haven’t even seen it yet,” said the hotel heiress, in her flat monotone. “But I think … it’s just a form of flattery.”

Any thinking person who has seen Pink’s video, in which she sends up Jessica Simpson’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking” video by humping a soapy car, imitates an Olsen twin in Montana-size sunglasses and Wyoming-size handbag walking straight into the plate-glass door of a boutique, and savagely mocks Hilton’s appearance in a dingy night-vision sex tape, would not confuse the clip with any known form of flattery. Especially if that thinking person heard the “Stupid Girls” lyrics, which go, in part: “They travel in packs of two or three/ With their itsy-bitsy doggies and their teeny-weeny tees/ Where, oh where, have the smart people gone?”

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