Greetings, Meteor readers,

Black History Month is underway, and it behooves me to share this eternally relevant thought from Imani Perry:

“I don’t think of Black History Month as more or less important based upon the political moment. I guess I would say it will be important indefinitely, because we live in a white supremacist country and world, and counter-narratives that value freedom and dignity and resilience will always be necessary as long as stratifying people on the basis of identity is the norm.”

In today’s newsletter, we talk to author Sarah Ditum about the early-aughts trend of “upskirting.” And while we’re talking about decades past? The new season In Retrospect starts today, and your hosts Jess and Susie dive into the backstory of the late 80’s Golden Girls’ joke that will echo into eternity: Lebanese lesbians.

But first a little news.

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

• During a Senate hearing yesterday on whether social media platforms have been negligent in protecting children from abuse, Meta founder Mark Zuckerburg did something nearly impossible for a Taurus: he apologized. His apology was directed at a group of parents whose children died as a result of social media “challenges,” bullying, and overdoses from drugs they purchased via social platforms. “I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” he said, adding, “This is why we invested so much and are going to continue doing industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families had to suffer.” But have you really?

• Florida’s restrictions on what kinds of history are taught in schools are putting a strain on how educators can acknowledge Black History Month. Speaking to Axios, one teacher said, “I try to tie in as much Black history to the material we’re supposed to be using already, but a lot of teachers won’t. No one wants to be fired.”

• The House has voted to expand the child tax credit just ahead of the 2024 tax season. The bill is off to the Senate, where it stands some chance of passing and helping half a million impoverished children. The catch? The credit won’t be available to families with no income (only to those who make an income that is below the poverty line), nor will it be made available to undocumented workers. The deal would also restore tax incentives and breaks to businesses operating with significant debt.

• A new report from the FBI found that hate crimes at schools nearly doubled between 2018 and 2022. The report also found that of hate crimes reported, the most targeted groups year over year were Black, Jewish, and LGBTQ students.

BACK IN TIME

Remember “Upskirting”? 

A new book unpacks this unsettling practice, and the decade it inspired.

BY SCARLETT HARRIS

SCREENSHOT VIA INSTAGRAM

​​​​​​Early on in Sarah Ditum’s new book, Toxic: Women, Fame & the Tabloid 2000s, she shares a quote from actress Emma Watson reflecting on how paparazzi treated her on her 18th birthday: “One photographer lay down on the floor to get a shot up my skirt,” Watson is quoted saying “The night it was legal for them to do it, they did it. I woke up the next day and felt completely violated.”

Ditum has dubbed the aughts the Upskirt Decade—a period when tabloids were ravenous for images of young women in compromising positions.

We spoke to her about those strange years and the nine women she says defined the era: Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Aaliyah Haughton, Janet Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Kim Kardashian, Joanie “Chyna” Laurer, and Jennifer Aniston.

Scarlett Harris: How did you establish the timeline for what you call the “Upskirt Decade?”

Sarah Ditum: I think almost exclusively in pop songs! In the case of [Britney Spears’] “…Baby One More Time,” it’s such an epochal pop culture moment. Although it was released in 1998, it was really definitive of what the noughties (what Brits call the aughts) were going to look like: provocative, layered with irony, suggestive of this sexy female empowerment that’s actually exploitative and sexualizing a young girl.

It took me a while to realize [the “Upskirt Decade”] was a little bit longer than the noughties, [ending with Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” in 2013.] There was a grassroots feminist response to the song, and everything flipped completely against Robin Thicke.

I thought Aaliyah was an interesting choice because she wasn’t around for much of the “Upskirt Decade” [Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001]. But her history of being groomed and sexually abused by R. Kelly very much reverberated throughout the aughts and into the #MeToo era. Can you talk a bit more about her?

SINGER AND STYLE ICON, AALIYAH. (PHOTO BY CATHERINE MCGANN VIA GETTY IMAGES)

With Aaliyah, I wanted to tell a story about posthumous fame, and I wanted to tell a story that was connected to how a woman’s reputation can be revisited when we understand what a man has done to her. When you look at something like the Harvey Weinstein case, what happened to a lot of the women that he victimized was that they disappeared because he was that powerful. But [now] you can see how she’s trying to negotiate rejecting this man who abused her, who damaged her reputation, and how she was trying to write him out of her own music and establish herself as an independent artist in her own right over her last two albums.

And what about Chyna? As a wrestling fan, I was tickled by her inclusion, but she might not necessarily be familiar to many readers.

If you happened to have watched wrestling, Chyna’s not an obscure figure; she was one of the biggest women of the WWE’s Attitude era [the raunchy, uber-violent period of the late 1990s and early 2000s]. She was on the cover of Playboy, had guest roles in NBC sitcoms, and was tipped to cross over and be a big mainstream star. Chyna’s story is operatically tragic—the way she crossed from wrestling to reality TV to porn is such an archetypal noughties story.

EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD AND WWE HALL OF FAMER, CHYNA. (PHOTO BY SPENCER PLATT VIA GETTY IMAGES)

After she left WWE, Donald Trump entered it. I don’t think you can understand Donald Trump as a president unless you’ve watched Donald Trump in WWE because that’s where he worked the crowd and refined his persona. There’s so much about wrestling that is so important in shaping the [later] political landscape.

You write that, “In the aughts, victimhood won no consideration… In the fame system of 2020, though, trauma had become an asset.” Can you elaborate a little more on that?

If you look at the way Paris Hilton had to navigate her sex tape, there was no language for her to explain her victimhood in it. The term “revenge porn” did not exist. The public attitude to it was that it was funny, [and] something she deserved because she was an attention seeker. Her only options were to pack it in, go home, and live in shame, or to lean into the joke and make it part of her image, which she did. That came at a great cost to her, but she knew that that was the price of entry to celebrity.

That’s not the world that we live in now. People enjoy stories of survival now, and women reclaiming their narratives. In some ways, this is very good, but I also think that the public’s appetite for it speaks to the same desire for images of Britney having a breakdown or upskirt photos. It’s this desire to see inside women, to enjoy their destruction and pain. If they’re serving it up “consensually”—because there is pressure to produce “good content”—then we can feel okay about consuming it.

Do you think things are any better today?

Celebrities now have more control over their image and their relationship with the media. Taylor Swift is never going to have to sit down and do the equivalent of Britney’s Diane Sawyer interview.

[But] all this misogyny, all this intrusion, is still out there. I thought it was interesting to see the reporting around Megan Thee Stallion testifying against Tory Lanez for shooting her in the foot, which was largely supportive. But if you looked at social media, there was a huge amount of victim-blaming against her. Revenge porn is rampant [in] locked text messages or social media groups where men can circulate these images. Pornography is more ugly, exploitative, and pervasive than ever before.

In the period I’m writing about, we go from a few people being famous and experiencing this incredible trauma to all of us who are on social media being a little bit famous and experiencing a little bit of trauma.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

WEEKEND READING 📚

On film: David Dennis Jr. chronicles his viewing of one of the year’s most polarizing films, Ava DuVernay’s Origin. (Andscape)

On the record: A lost manuscript from “the father of Black history”—found in 2005—holds truths that apply today. (The Washington Post)

On liberation: Black faith leaders joined forces across the country to deliver a unified message to President Biden: We need a ceasefire. (The New York Times)

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