Nerve Counsels: Forget Paris

I'm late in blogging it, but Nerve's Rachel Shukert has a great piece on America's failure to compete in the celebutante sector:

They are the Three Graces of the British tabloids, products of a country that has managed to yield both Dame Maggie Smith and Jack the Ripper. They are women so ferociously exhibitionist that Paris Hilton could post a film of her own pelvic exam on YouTube and seem positively demure in comparison. I am speaking, of course, of Jodie Marsh, Jade Goody, and the incomparable Jordan.

Paris Hilton catches a lot of flak for not having some kind of marginal music or film abilities like her celebrity sisters. It seems to annoy people that she isn't famous "for something," as if her genius for staying in the pages of US Weekly weren't enough. Shukert's insight is that Hilton isn't even that good at being pointlessly famous. Compared to her British counterparts, it's as if she isn't even trying. Jordan Katie-Price is an illustrative case study in how American celebs are underperforming:

Jordan's notoriety quickly grew, along with her bra size (after a series of augmentations, she grew from an estimated 32B to a mind-boggling, 34 FF). When questioned, she was typically philosophical: "Some people may be famous for inventing the pencil sharpener. I'm famous for my tits." She entered into a series of surprisingly high-profile relationships with footballers and TV gladiators, and perhaps most famously singer Dane Bowers of the British boy-band Another Level. Their relationship ended with a highly publicized abortion, and a suicide attempt she later admitted to…

Her son Harvey, from her volatile relationship with footballer Dwight Yorke, was not only biracial, but blind and autistic (take that, Angelina!) She was diagnosed with finger cancer. She resumed using her given name, Katie Price. She married the Australian singer Peter Andre after they fell in love on the U.K. version of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! (during which she also irreversibly alienated John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten — ah, how the mighty have fallen!) She gave birth to their son, Junior, via televised C-section on their subsequent reality show, When Jordan Met Peter, and sure, while that sounds tacky, it was actually kind of sweet.