A few months back in one of my columns I said some quite laudatory things about Paris Hilton. Some people thought I was joking. Other people basically gave me major shit. I wasn't joking and I use shit to fertilize my garden. Other people simply didn't understand. For months now in between work commitments, I have been trying to get my exact thoughts on the subject of Paris Hilton onto paper. Finally, this is exactly what I think about Paris Hilton.

Alex Rieneck.


Saint Paris.

What is it, exactly, that Paris Hilton has done? When I was younger I was driven home by a really drunk woman. She stopped the car at the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth streets, opened the door of the car and genteelly vomited on the road. The lights changed. We drove off. We were both laughing. Other cars avoided us. Did we deserve to go to jail? According to the law, yes. As luck had it, no. If we had gone to jail though, I am sure of one thing, the story would not have made front-page news worldwide and resulted in every humorist this side of Baghdad taking the time for a few quips.

So. It isn’t the crime then, is it? It is the person. Look at Paris Hilton for a second. She was born rich. Lucky her. Even though most of the rich people I have ever known have been far less happy than the poor ones. She grew up wild and, because she was rich and wild, the media made a story out of her. The media arrived about the time she was really cutting loose with the rush of youth and of being pretty. I find myself wondering exactly what I would have been like if even poor I had been followed everywhere by the media back when I was young and full of life, and pretty. (Well, prettier than I am now.) I know that that the things I got up to in boring old Sydney in the early 1980’s were far, far, worse than anything Paris has been photographed doing, or even been accused of. Nothing very illegal though. Mind you, back in the early 1980s it was illegal to be gay. But it was also illegal to drink and to be underage and all the other stuff that young and wild people get up to. Well, get up to when they are not under the lenses of the worlds media, anyway.

No. Paris was wild, and drunk. I imagine that like most wild drunk young people she was boorish, dead stupid and deeply full of herself. I know I was. I was lucky though; being poor I was allowed to grow out of these traits without being pilloried every day in the worlds media. Then, horror of horrors, Paris “appeared in” a porno movie. Well, Paris and a lover made a film together for their own fun. The film was then stolen. And then made public on the Internet. Now to be perfectly clear, I don’t think that anyone who owns a video camera hasn’t filmed themselves having sex or masturbating or something. Period. Everyone. It’s a given. For most people it’s WHY you buy a video camera and for most people if the tape got stolen and then put on the Internet, it would be funny at best and at worst embarrassingly unattractive. Paris though, was beautiful.

It was here that Paris committed her great sin in the eyes of the world. She was not sorry. Worse than that, she didn’t pretend to be sorry, either. She could have cried, said that she was hard done by. Abused. The media would have gathered her into their arms and turned her into a martyr and a symbol of fallen woman redeeming herself. Instead Paris said that she had the right to live her life the way that she wanted to and that it was a disgrace that criminals were making money out of a tape of her that had been stolen and that if people were going to watch the tape anyway, she wanted her cut of the money. As far as I am concerned, from that moment Paris Hilton was the very personification of modern womanhood. She was Women’s Lib incarnate and I was a fan for life.

Of course, the powers that be don’t like Woman’s Lib. I mean if they did, women would be paid the same as men, and if Paris had been a guy; a drunk, porno-starring “EFF you, I want my cut of the money that that tape is earning” type of guy the media would have cast him as a anti-hero, a misunderstood, misused, troubled, kinda-young-kinda- Johnny-Depp-good-guy. And if that guy had, down the track, produced a music album it would have just been proof of all of that, wouldn’t it? I know I got even more arty as I started to sober up and, as it happens, I like Paris’s album. It’s classy.

The problem though, is that Paris Hilton is a woman and society does not like their misunderstood, drunk, wild, sexually proud and active creative heroes to be female. For example, look at the stuff that was thrown at Madonna before she mellowed out. For that matter look at how long it took the media to really, properly, finish up with Boy George. In this society today, women get paid less and accept it. They have babies and shut up, or they just shut up. Witness Mr Heffernan, Julia Gillard, and John Howard. They are either saints, or sluts. If they are sluts they had better be (by all that’s holy) suitably contrite ones. After all, that is the way it always has been. Just ask Cardinal George Pell, Sheik al Hilaly , Bill Heffernan and all the other… men.

So lets hope that Paris is becoming contrite in her jail cell. If not, society itself may well come apart at the seams.

Alex Rieneck