This week I spotted a picture of Paris Hilton at some party and realised that this was the first I'd heard of her for a few months.
The notorious heiress is not the gossip rag fixture she once was. Lo and behold, the Guardian ran a story over the weekend, wondering why the world seems to have lost interest in Hilton and her contemporaries.
When was the last time your favourite celebrity weekly carried relentless coverage of the very public 'meltdowns' of Tinseltown's 'party princesses'? You might say it all started with Mary-Kate Olsen’s anorexia in 2004. From then until last year you just couldn't escape Paris and her partners in crime Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie and Mischa Barton with their all night-partying, hard-drinking, head-shaving, weight-fluctuating, knicker-free antics. We were following them through their divorces, jail terms, mental health problems and drug busts.
The drama surrounding them reached such a level that certain events even acquired their own moniker. Remember 'Hostage Brituation 08', the night of mayhem that started with Britney refusing to hand the kids over to K-Fed and ended in her being carted off to hospital strapped to a gurney? Or 'Pariscarriage 07', when Paris’s personal belongings and medical records were pictured online for the entire world to see? The momentous 'Breaking News' moment when Britney filed for divorce? Don’t forget the night Lindsay and Nicole stepped out together, looking so gaunt that they inspired dozens of ‘Save Lindsay!’ and ‘Save Nicole!’ t-shirts.
Fast forward to 2009 and Britney's given up umbrella-wielding rampages - she's on tour and looking glamorous. Lindsay's been to rehab and Nicole's a mother of two. And they're no longer splashed all over the media. So when did people stop caring? Some blame the recession, saying that people now have more important things to worry about. Others blame the backlash against the paparazzi, with photographers having restraining orders slapped on them and their activities curtailed by privacy laws.
Both are certainly true. Now the boom years are behind us, people are more concerned about their finances than which starlet has chalked up another DUI. We've had a landmark US presidential election and are gearing up for a general election in the UK. There are problems in the EU, ongoing war and uproar over US healthcare. ‘Serious’ issues are now at the forefront of peoples' consciousness in a way they weren't in 2006.
Besides, some people had already started to wonder if the interest the media took in the problems of these young women was a bit too gleeful, a bit too smug. Some commentators were practically taking bets on who was going to die first. The endless pieces on troubled celebrities had started to take on more unpleasant undertones, such as those mocking Britney’s love of fast food or showing contempt for her approach to motherhood. They insinuated that her misfortunes were nothing more than a case of 'once trash, always trash'.
The same outlets incessantly moralised about Nicole and Lindsay's 'scary skinny' bodies, seeming to forget that a couple of years before they'd been slating them for being 'chubby'. Nothing like bringing a successful woman down, right? Eventually people started to question all this, condemning paps and gossip websites and their constant intrusion into troubled women’s lives.
Did it get too much and leave 'ordinary' people sick of it all? Have we tired of the excesses of the rich and famous? Yes and no. People may no longer care about Paris et al but there's always new drama to focus on. In the UK this year, the tabloids and magazines have obsessively covered the meltdowns of homegrown stars such as Kerry Katona and Katie Price.
In the US, the breakdown of the Gosselins’ marriage has inspired a thousand headlines. The gossip may have moved away from LA, but it still seems like a lot of people delight in the misfortunes of those on a downward spiral.
Image via RogueSun Media's Flickr