Sweary’s Jaw: Kim Kardashian’s Glass House

Do you lot know who Kim Kardashian is? There’s no shame in admitting you don’t; if anything, I’m rather mortified that I do. I blame it on an unfortunate addiction to bonkers/offensive celebrity gossip site, The Superficial, and having once shared a house with a Heat subscriber. Knowing who Kim Kardashian is may well be taking cranial space from much more important and rewarding snippets - how to hotwire a tractor, for example, or how to home-tattoo myself with a crochet hook and half a bottle of hair dye. I take no pleasure in knowing who Kim Kardashian is. In fact, after her latest patronising public-service announcement, I take even less than ever.

Kim Kardashian is a famous American socialite. She has enhanced curves and an oddly proportioned arse. She keeps trim on a never-ending promotional circuit for all manner of snake oil cosmetic and diet solutions, and also from the physical exertion of always carrying half a stone of make-up on her face. She first came to public attention when her sex tape was released - up to that point, she was an unknown entity growing out of Paris Hilton’s mossy shadow. She appears in many reality TV shows with her sisters, each more confusingly pointless than the last (the TV shows, I mean. Or the sisters. It’s interchangeable, really). And … no, that’s about it. That’s the gist of Kim’s CV. She does seem to get away with the fact that she’s just a golden-light-moocher by being rather gorgeous and about as classy as a girl can be with her own sex tape. Her skirts don’t tend to be that short, in other words, so crass “mistakes” like sex tapes that crowbarred her out of Paris Hilton’s shadow have been forgiven and forgotten. As female celebrities go, Kim is safe as houses: sweetly inane and willing to endorse any old shite for a brown envelope.

Earlier this month, Kim posted on her blog, denouncing MTV’s Teen Mom show for glamorising teen pregnancy.

“It seems that shows like Teen Mom are all of a sudden making teen pregnancy seem cool in the eyes of young girls. The kids from these shows are all over the news, even on the covers of magazines, and have been become almost like celebrities, but girls, these are not people you should idolize!”

This wrecks my head on a number of levels. First off, having seen Teen Mom on numerous occasions (and having gotten quite attached to some of its “stars”), I can confirm that the only way anyone would think the lives of the featured teen parents glamorous is if they themselves lived at the bottom of a toilet, subsisting on limescale. The Teen Mom girls face financial hardship, relationship problems, family problems, custody battles, and the necessary shelving of their ambitions so that they can focus on their babies. The difficulty, the uncertainty, and the mundanity of caring for someone else, 24/7, is never glossed over.

Secondly, claiming that a TV reality show, featuring regular teens with no wealth or status impressionable viewers could aspire to, is somehow to blame for a rise in American teen pregnancies is a crudely composed hypothesis, at best.

Thirdly … this is Kim Kardashian, for fuck’s sake. A woman made famous by a sex tape. A woman who is plumped, scooped, and enhanced up the wazoo and yet denies the amount of creative license taken with what God gave her, thus fortifying the dangerous myth that Hollywood beauties are naturally better, so you best get to spending and starving so’s you can trot, all ashamed, behind ‘em, yeh fat fucking sow yeh. A woman who may have admirable talents, but reduces herself to a body-for-hire rather than share them. Oh, back up, Ms. Kardashian. You didn’t just call out teen mums as people not fit to idolise.

I might chance to suggest that Kim’s heart was in the right place, if I wasn’t so sure her heart had been sucked out and its fibres redistributed to better lift her bottom; there’s merit in asking your young fans to consider the consequences if they have unprotected sex. Is there merit in putting down other young mums for managing to capture the public’s interest, though? Is there, fuck.

I would much rather admire Teen Mom star Maci Bookout, for taking to her new responsibilities with immense grace, humility, and strength of character, despite an appalling lack of support from her son’s young dad. Or Catelynn Lowell and Tyler Baltierra, who chose to give up their baby daughter for adoption so as to give her a chance of a better life, despite depressingly hostile opposition from their parents (according to Tyler’s father, who spends more time in prison than Elmer Fudd spends in tweed, giving up his baby for adoption wasn’t an action becoming of a “real man” - Tyler was seventeen at the time). It’s difficult to admire Kim Kardashian, apart from on a superficial level. I mean, them’s nice teeth.

Teen Mom glosses over none of the difficulties of rearing a child, nor does it gloss over the complexities of working-class America - for example, Tyler’s dad, the jailbird, seems more lost in the legal system than a genuine threat to public order, and his wife lacks the financial capacity to get appropriate advice. Kim Kardashian, on the other hand, is gloss incarnate: glossy lifestyle, glossy hair extensions, glossy sisters, glossy script. If you’d rather your teenage daughters look to her for inspiration, I would suggest that you’re a right Missus Cynicism Breeches. Either that, or there’s something very wrong with you.

That the public’s imagination has been captured by a cast of ordinary girls facing ordinary challenges is perhaps indicitive of a renewed interest in looking to our peers for inspiration, rather than gawping at the glittering lives of money-born brats. I would suggest that that’s no bad thing.

By the way, yes, not your usual Sweary’s Jaw. From here on in I’m aiming for longer posts about pop culture waffling points. I got tired of doing the five line gossip snippets. It made me feel grubby, and working for Darren is grubby enough as it is.