When Did Perez Hilton Become More Famous Than Paris Hilton And Why Were We Not Informed?

Tom Scocca: Is your Fashion Week over?

Choire Sicha: Is it ever!

Tom Scocca: Did anyone there notice that Perez Hilton is now more famous than Paris Hilton?

Choire Sicha: I’m not sure if anyone besides the publicists noted that!

Tom Scocca: But the publicists showed they’d noticed?

Choire Sicha: Well there is some anecdotal evidence, such as the post-show release from the horrible gay Canadian twins of “DSquared,” in which they touted the appearance of Nicky Hilton and… Perez Hilton.

Choire Sicha: Also anecdotally? He was everywhere… and Paris Hilton was in, like, Stuttgart and Venice? She was actually busy being sued for canceling appearances. Her big fashion week headline? “HILTON FACES CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT OVER ALLEGED EUROPE NO-SHOW.”

Tom Scocca: We spend all our time second-guessing publications’ output. Time to second-guess the input, isn’t it? Shadow Assignment Editors! WHY ALL OF YOU NO HAVE?

Choire Sicha: That is a good point. They were eager, historically, to cover Paris, but they are exceedingly less eager to cover Perez. In part, I think because he has a platform via which to castigate, undermine and rebut? I think publications dislike both Hiltons equally. But they were never afraid of Paris, because she had no editorial product of her own.

Tom Scocca: “Both Hiltons,” you say. Apologize to Nicky!

Choire Sicha: Oh I would never. Although! Hilton mania reached such a fever pitch not long ago that I was conscripted to actually write a Nicky Hilton potential cover story for a large New York-based magazine. (One that fortunately never came to… fruition.) And by “not long” I believe I mean 2005 or 2006. Even I, as much as I love the celebrity industrial complex, found this a bit suspect.

Tom Scocca: Possibly Nicky is the Interesting Hilton. At least, there’s still a job opening for that slot. But: Perez Hilton is a bigger name that Paris Hilton. Am I the only person who is freaked out by this?

Choire Sicha: I have a metric for you! Paris Hilton on Twitter: 631K followers. Perez Hilton on Twitter: nearly 1.5 million followers.

Tom Scocca: It is like when George W.S. Trow wrote about how contestants on Family Feud were trying to guess what the survey participants had guessed that the average height of an American woman was. Perez Hilton has derived greater fame from Paris Hilton than Paris Hilton had herself derived from being famous for famousness’ sake.

Choire Sicha: That is accurate, I think. He leeched it out of her in a really fantastic way! And often he did it by going where she went, and doing what she did… except not by revealing his chest and being what a delusional teen boy would think of as “being sexy.” Somehow he didn’t need to! That credit goes to his editorial product. Unfortunately, Paris Hilton’s editorial product is a failing, disastrous MTV reality show.

Tom Scocca: I only have about 87 GB of open memory here, and that’s not enough to hold all the scare quotes that need to go around the word “’[“’(reality)’”]’” in that sentence.

Choire Sicha: Well sure. Here is another interesting bit of fact! Perez Hilton is having a very bad income week.

Tom Scocca: Why is that?

Choire Sicha: I do not know why? It may be just the general ebb and flow. But he is only receiving $28,000 worth of ad income this week. [UPDATE: According to the wonderful honcho of BlogAds, there were also some takeover sales this week, though in checking Perez’s site I didn’t see them. So $28,000 sounds like Perez’s floor income. As in, that is basically what he found in quarters on the floor.] Often he rakes in upward of $50,000 a week. Math will tell you that that is $2.6 million a year. So he has only sold small ads this week; most weeks he has also sold ads up top, for $25,000 a week.

Tom Scocca: So what does this combination of fact and cultural observation give us? Who are the advertisers?
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Choire Sicha: Well, the advertisers this time of year, throughout the 4th quarter on the web, are typically entertainment products. Though he also often does well with music products, the end of the year always has an upsurge in movie and TV marketing.

Tom Scocca: What does “product” mean in this context?

Choire Sicha: Oh, you know, “Where the Wild Things Are” or “GI Joe,” any kind of product.

Tom Scocca: (This “[“{“con/text”}”]”.)

Tom Scocca: I’m sort of surprised the chat program didn’t turn some of that into emoticons.

Choire Sicha: There are many kinds of products! There is the Perez Hilton Music Tour. Which actually sounds kind of great? Says MTV: “Last-minute surprise act Little Boots hit the stage sans her band mates (they were stuck across town) and performed solo with only a piano to accompany her. She thanked Hilton with a run through a haunting cover of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”… Self-proclaimed “filthy party band” Semi Precious Weapons killed it. “This is rock and roll — pull your f — -ing tits out!” beckoned frontman Justin Tranter…””

Tom Scocca: YouTube.

Choire Sicha: Quite so.

Tom Scocca: So where are Perez’s magazine covers?

Choire Sicha: Hmm. On the cover of what magazine would he move newsstand?

Tom Scocca: None! He is repulsive. Yet he is only the elaboration of the logic that put Paris Hilton on the covers.

Choire Sicha: Oh sure, except he doesn’t have boobs.

Choire Sicha: Hmm, let me correct that.

Tom Scocca: Yes.

Choire Sicha: Well.

Choire Sicha: Less said the better.

Choire Sicha: I actually don’t think Paris Hilton moved magazines either, besides perhaps Us Weekly, for a brief period. I wish Janice Min still worked in the industry right now, she could explain all of this in two sentences.

Tom Scocca: People don’t like celebrities. It’s more about people feeling compelled to honor the idea of celebrity.

Choire Sicha: But people also actively dislike celebrities. And where Perez succeeded is in being outrageously dislikeable! I think that is his secret.

Tom Scocca: That seems correct. It was a great crossover move to pit himself against whatsername, Carrie Pre-Op, Miss Culture-Wars Martyr of 2008. Or was it 2009?

Choire Sicha: Yes!

Tom Scocca: An incident in which the most substantive person involved was Donald Trump.

Choire Sicha: Yeeessss. That was wonderful for him. Also a great “news” “peg” for publications. Unfortunately for Perez, he will always have the sort of editorial product that announces that Jaclyn Smith is offing herself in Bulrgaria or something. Honduras. Whatever.

Tom Scocca: I don’t even know what incident you’re talking about.

Choire Sicha: Exactly! How would you! But every tween in Norte Americana does. Amusingly,this involved a bad reading of a Spanish language newspaper.

Tom Scocca: Death is the obstacle on the way to the perfect celebrity-news future. We are about 20 minutes away from being able to gossip about completely computer-generated avatars, which can do almost everything that our current celebrities can do, except for dying awkwardly.

Choire Sicha: That can be overcome. Avatars can expire.

Tom Scocca: Wow, that is great. Now Sandra Franklin is a name in boldface. But Perez still put the strikethrough on “This is so tragic!”

Choire Sicha: In this respect he is perhaps more journalistically advanced than the New York Times, which apparently simply removes untrue stories.

Tom Scocca: But by keeping it up, with Sandra Franklin now as the name involved, Perez makes the untrue story a true story. There is an event that did happen, which eventually made its way into the post. The first AND second drafts of history, right there for you.

Choire Sicha: The Internet wins again!

Tom Scocca: I’m hung up on the tragedy thing. It’s not a tragedy if it didn’t happen to a famous person, but if the person is now being written about on the Perez Hilton site, doesn’t that person become an entity in the gossip-sphere and therefore famous? Perez Heisenberg!

Choire Sicha: I believe that is correct actually. She has been enfamed. For instance there may be tabloid follow-up! (This is not so dissimilar from how Lady Gaga came to pass.)

Tom Scocca: Maybe the avatars can die over and over again.

Choire Sicha: Well. Do you really think we are rid of Paris Hilton? Of course not.

Tom Scocca: That is the other assignment we have, naturally, for a publication too squeamish to plaster Perez’s mug on its front cover (though one could of course rationalize up a design for a cover about the fact of Perez surpassing Paris in which Paris was in the foreground — one could do it with a wee, darkened, troll-like Perez lurking in the shadow cast behind a big cardboard cutout of Paris, with eye-friendly breasts and everything — or, hey: Perez’s face all but hidden in the iris of that eye of hers, the one she shelters from the camera ).

Tom Scocca: (Perez staring out of Paris, if you look too closely.) But the other assignment: yes, what is Paris Hilton doing? Is her absence part of a long-term plan to establish herself as a new and better brand? Or to establish herself as a human being? The where-are-they-now story has not really adapted to the pace of the contemporary news cycle.

Choire Sicha: That’s right.

Tom Scocca: Where is Joe the Plumber now? Where is that Cambridge cop now? Where is Michael Bay now?

Choire Sicha: Editorially, purely, what Paris Hilton is doing now — spreading her brand throughout non-American parts — is actually far more interesting than paying attention to her when she is being shoved down American throats.

Tom Scocca: Is that what she’s doing? Taking a Continental tour?

Choire Sicha: She is apparently back now in Los Angeles, taking voice lessons, after an extended trip to points foreign. Milan! Frankfurt! Venice!

Tom Scocca: Is that like how Gwyneth Paltrow had a completely different persona in that British magazine profile you showed me?

Choire Sicha: Everyone’s different in Europe. Ask Madonna! Oh also Paris went to the U.A.E.

Tom Scocca: Poor Madonna got it backwards, though, and chose a less vivid persona abroad. And I say this as someone who has found Madonna’s U.S. persona as boring as boring can be for two and a half decades now.

Choire Sicha: And then there is this Perez Hilton takedown in… Newsbusters: “The mainstream media aided Hilton’s rise to the top of culture corrupters. Since 2006, he has been the focus of 49 television news reports”

Tom Scocca: Forty-nine! In more than three years. This piece is a thrilling bit of contortionism.

Choire Sicha: It’s most impressive in that it is laying out a bunch of “facts” that are actually “interpretations” and critiques.

Tom Scocca: He is a misogynist because he allows Sarah Palin to be attacked by . . . Margaret Cho.

Choire Sicha: Well that’s just outright distortive, yes.

Tom Scocca: That is not to say that he is not a misogynist! Nor to say that a misogynist man (or woman!) cannot use a woman’s attack on another woman — even an attack from a feminist perspective — to indulge in misogyny.

Choire Sicha: Well this is also dishonest from the first sentence. “Perez Hilton has proved that demonstrable talent or skill is no longer a prerequisite for fame.” In fact, didn’t he do the opposite by taking the fame mantle from Paris Hilton? His talent was creating an editorial product that succeeded. Her talent was… ?

Tom Scocca: It seems very important to this person to establish a victim-class of right-wing women, attacked for their gender by this distasteful and bullying person.

Choire Sicha: But also lumping in those poor closeted gays, who are also victims! That’s unusual.

Tom Scocca: Well, OK, but let’s back off from the question of what it says about a person that the person has produced an editorial product that succeeds (Tucker Max? Michelle Malkin? Andrew Sullivan).

Choire Sicha: I will happily back off!

Tom Scocca: What is this underlying premise, that until horrible Perez Hilton came along, it was still possible to believe that one needed a talent or skill to become famous? Perez Hilton isn’t — I don’t think? — drawing semen dribbles on pictures of Stephen Hawking.

Choire Sicha: Not yet!

Tom Scocca: Carrie Prejean is famous because of what talent or skill? And don’t say tits, because she bought those, didn’t she?

Choire Sicha: I believe she is famous only because of Perez.

Tom Scocca: Yes. They had a little culture-skirmish, and everyone won, except gay people, only maybe also gay people too, who knows? Sad face versus angry face, which makes angry face sad, which shows how bad the enemy is, so let’s fight this thing, the intolerance. How can you tolerate what this person is doing to us?

Tom Scocca: And Elisabeth Hasselbeck?

Tom Scocca: Elisabeth Hasselbeck is a poor dumb animal who is put onto a fame-pedestal strictly for the sake of having a dumb animal say dumb things in public, on television, to upset or rally other dumb animals. PETA should storm the set and rescue her and let her paddle out to sea with a friendly lobster.

Choire Sicha: But that animal is famous.

Tom Scocca: Because it whimpers in a crowd-affecting way when it trembles helplessly in the light of fame. They could have got a baby llama, if they could have taught a baby llama the right political talking points.

Tom Scocca: Speaking of confused whimpering, this piece! She’s trying to posture as feminist from the right culture-flank, and so she has no idea what sort of authority she should be appealing to.

Tom Scocca: As far as Hilton’s rage at Prejean went, CNN’s Kurtz echoed exactly what Ficera said three years ago about where Hilton should direct his efforts if he was truly interested in change.

Tom Scocca: Kurtz told him, “Your anger and your emotions should be directed toward the politicians and the judges who make these laws, not necessarily at one beauty pageant contestant, who happens to have an individual view that you don’t agree with.”

Tom Scocca: Howie Kurtz! I am not confident in this writer’s ability to accurately render the thoughts and arguments of others, but if that is an accurate rendering of Kurtz’s position — why, yes, Perez Hilton should be angry at the California legislature and judges for passing Proposition 8… Oh, wait.

Choire Sicha: Well, yes, it is sort of down a remarkable rabbithole isn’t it

Tom Scocca: The enemy of my enemy is just another asshole.

Choire Sicha: I think that actually articulates Perez’s working theory as well.

Tom Scocca: And though we wish Perez Hilton really stood for everything that’s wrong with America, clearly he only stands for some of it, because look at these other people.

Previously: Hands Off That Rumpus, Dave Eggers