Nine iconic women including Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Aaliyah, Janet, Amy, Kim, Chyna, hen, whose fame in the early internet years of the century came at a price. Journalist Sarah Ditum in Toxic: Women, Fame and The Noughties reveals how each of the women changed “celebrity” forever, despite often falling victim to it, during what we now view as one of the most hostile eras in which to be female. The pop-culture era, characterised by misogyny and abuse, Ditum who now in her 40s explains” the register of progress is only in how utterly remote the past has become, the era-specific fork of sexism, often accompanied by the open abuse of girls, which was the cultural miasma of her teens and early twenties”. She reveals the corrosive effect on the young women who lived through that time. The noughties were the “Upskirt Decade”, a motif she returns she highlight nine famous British and American women as common threads appear: many were children when they became famous: many had overly involved parents, most had powerful, unpleasant men directing their careers. Their bodies were held up for public scrutiny, often via smarmy DIY gossip blogs and sites such as Gawker, which was “entirely unserious and wholly without mercy”. Some careers were all but destroyed notably Jackson’s. Ditum focuses on the start of the cultural decade as February 1999, when she first saw  then 16-year-old Spears’s turn as a sexualised schoolgirl in the video for “ Baby One More Time” . It ends in blurred lines , the 2013 hit by Robin Thicke featuring TI and Pharrell which by that time BuzzFeed was describing as “rapey” . The media’s preoccupation with Spears’s virginity; R Kelly’s lyrics about his R&B prodigy Aallyah, who was 12, when she met the then 24-year-old Kelly in 1991. Kelly waw convicted of multiple child sex crimes and is serving 31 years in prison. Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001.

Harvey Weinstein, orchestrator of actor Lindsay Lohan’s career, which she defended him after his sexual crimes were exposed in 2017. Most brutal is Janet Jackson’s mauling after her “Wardrobe malfunction” during her 2004 Super Bowl performance, in which her breast was exposed. Her co-performer Justin Timberlake, who hands had in fact yanked her  corset away, escaped unscathed, but Jackson was thrown to the wolves. Ditum points to a certain glee at the downfall of a black woman who had dared to assert control over her career. The incident led to an oddly righteous moral panic in the US.

Samantha Fox began her career as a topless model in the UK’s biggest selling national paper the Sun,  at 16 in 1983, but

 Russell Brand  with accusations of rape and sexual assault  and emotional abouse by women who knew and worked with the comedian at the  height of his fame, didn’t end his career in 2013. At the beginning gossip magazines and tabloids controlled narratives, with help from websites that pumped out relentless snark. By the end of the decade social media had allowed famous women to take control of their relationships with fans, Whether that amounts to progress is questionable. Women are still scrutinized and shamed. With a strict collective vigilance. A new public mood described by her as “ a hard-edged moral clarity” can ruin careers for an actual or perceived offence. The misogynists outrage is amplified by algorithms.

Through Paris’ ambivalent relationship with her blogger namesake Perez Hilton, to Britney’s paternalistic governors, Jen’s attempts to control her career and image and Janet’s betrayal at the Superbowl, these celebrities of The Noughties were presented with the riches of early social media and market opportunity, as long as they abided by the new rules of engagement. Some of these high-profile women were hypersexualized and Upskirted by the press, some were shamed by their advertising sponsors others where contracted by shady management companies and industry figures such as Harvey Weinstein and R Kelly.

Toxic: Women, Fame and The Noughties by Sarah Ditum, Fleet £22, 352 pages.