By Jeanine Tan, TODAY | Posted: 04 August 2006 1059 hrs
Poor Lindsay Lohan. Last week, the 20-year-old actress got a
dressing down from James G Robinson, the head of Morgan Creek the
production house behind her new film Georgia Rules for partying
so hard that her publicist had to make up excuses for her absence
from the set.
It became even more embarrassing because his letter to her was
leaked to the press and made public.
As expected, the media picked up the news, and not without a little
glee, it seems.
There's no question Lohan deserves a dressing down for being
irresponsible at work it is what happens in real life, to real
people, after all.
But is the media actually sniggering because Lohan finally got
caught for her hard-partying ways?
In other words, she who parties hardest must be punished. Note the
use of "she", though, because "he" who parties hardest gets away
with it and is, in fact, seen as a really cool cat.
The proverbial wild child Hollywood starlet has a long history,
from flapper era It-girl Clara Bow to Marilyn Monroe to Drew
Barrymore, all the way down to her current incarnation in the
Lohans of today. What these hard-living women have in common
aside from a love for the fast life and handsome men is
disapproval from the powers that be.
When Bow's promiscuous ways was leaked to the newspapers back in
the 1930s, Paramount apparently punished her by limiting her films
and cutting her pay.
We are living in a different day and age now and for a studio to
treat its actress in such a manner would be unheard of. Of course,
these days, studios also don't own their actresses, but the
disapproval is there all the same.
Photographs of young starlets partying hard are a favourite of the
tabloids.
In fact, visit any celebrity blog and news of Nicole Richie heading
out to a club, a tipsy Paris Hilton draped over her boyfriend
Stavros Niarchos and Lohan drinking from a martini shaker is
commonplace a bit ironic because these are the kinds of things
that ordinary people do.
On the other hand, hard partying actors really need to fight for
tabloid space. Passing out drunk in a hotel lobby is one good way,
as Kiefer Sutherland learned.
By plastering pictures of every inebriated starlet doing her thing
on the pages of tabloids, the media is actually sending out a
message that this is the kind of thing that young women should not
be doing.
(And maybe they shouldn't, if only for reasons of health or
safety.)
Yet at the same time, this is a society where women also get the
message that anything men do, they can do too.
Suddenly, the fame game and with it, gender politics got a lot
more confusing. Take it like a man, but that does not mean you are
going to be judged like one.
And by the way, it's not men who do the judging. Every woman who
clucks her tongue at such apparently delinquent behaviour from
fellow females should also question just whose long-entrenched
rules she's basing her opinions on. - TODAY/fa
What a thought provoking piece.