'I was worried Lindsay, Paris or Britney would die': why the 00s were so toxic for women

https://www.vox.com/culture/22350286/2000s-pop-culture-misogyny-britney-spears-janet-jackson-whitney-houston-monica-lewinsky

In the 2000s, it was open season on young women. “It was blatant, horrifying misogyny,” says the former New York Daily News gossip columnist Ben Widdicombe, author of Gatecrasher: How I Helped the Rich Become Famous and Ruin the World. He welcomes our soul-searching about the period. “I’m glad it’s being re-evaluated,” he says. “I think it has to be. The media was incredibly cruel to Britney and other women at the time. It was a great moral failing of the tabloid press, that we did that. And I unfortunately was a cog in that machine.”

Widdicombe tells me that, even back then, the press treatment of Spears was horrifying to watch. “It was clear to us reporting staff at the time that we needed to leave Britney alone,” he says. “Her mental health required the media to step back. But this voracious capitalist engine wasn’t going to do that.” While Widdicombe didn’t personally report on Britney’s breakdown, he says he was powerless to stop his editors from splashing it on the front page, because there was simply too much money to be made from it.

Widdicombe says he feared that starlets would come to harm: “I was seriously worried that either Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton or Britney Spears would die. Britney had mental health problems, Lindsay had a drug problem and Paris was known to drink and drive. And the media would pretend to hand-wring in sorrow, but actually their deaths would make a lot of money for them.”