At the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in May of 2015, Kim Kardashian was launching her latest book, Selfish, a collection of selfies and nudes.
It was more than 400 pages of Kim staring into the camera, pursing her lips, looking sultry and suggestive. It was Kim, naked in a bedroom mirror, clutching her naked breasts, leaning naked over a bathroom sink, sticking her famous behind up in the air; Kim leaning naked over a bed in the grainy dark, Kim in lingerie and bathing suits, lounging beside electric blue swimming pools, doing “leg shots”.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” said a 13-year-old girl waiting in the line snaking through the store.
There were pictures of Kim from 2006, when she was still an LA party girl and friend of Paris Hilton, to 2014, after she had become one of the most famous women in the world. In those eight years, which had seen the introduction of smartphones in 2007 and the global spread of social media through mobile technology, Kim had become social media’s biggest star. In 2006, she had just 856 followers on MySpace – where she announced in her profile, “I’m a PRINCESS and you’re not so there!” – and now, she had 61.5 million followers on Instagram. She had 34 million followers on Twitter, where she posted more selfies daily, most of which got tens of thousands of favorites and retweets.
“I love her,” said another girl in the store.
What was the meaning of Kim Kardashian? Why was she here, and why wouldn’t she go? Why did anyone care about her, and how had she become so ubiquitous? Throughout the years of her ascendance, people had been trying to figure this out. Some seemed furious at her success, which in 2015 included TV shows, endorsement deals, makeup, fragrances, clothing lines, one of the most popular of all mobile apps – in which a Kim avatar showed you how to become as famous as she – and a net worth of $85m. Still, she was called “vain”, “shallow”, “frivolous”, “egotistical”, “materialistic”, and many other more vulgar insults in endless media pieces and online rantings.
“I have never heard more anger and dismay than when we announced that the people you are about to see were on our list,” Barbara Walters told viewers before airing a segment on the Kardashian family in her 10 Most Fascinating People show of 2011. “You are all often described as famous for being famous,” Walters leveled at sisters Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, and their mother Kris, who sat before her in sleek couture. “You don’t really act, you don’t dance, you don’t sing, you don’t have any – forgive me – any talent.”
The Kardashians tried, in their mild way, but they couldn’t quite seem to explain to Walters, who had come of age at a different time, that this was actually the point – talent didn’t matter much in becoming famous anymore. Or perhaps what served as talent had transformed. It was now enough to know how to become famous purely for the sake of fame.
“She’s amazing,” said another girl in Barnes & Noble.
The Kardashians, a family of American girls, had come upon the scene, swept forward by the gown of Princess Kim, in a kind of perfect cultural storm: there was the fascination with fame that had always danced at the edges of American identity, and now, with the explosion of a celebrity news industry fueled by internet blogs and TMZ, had taken over the aspirational longings of the young. A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 51% of 18-to-25 year olds said their most or second-most important life goal was to become famous. 64% said their first or second goal was to become rich.
A girl waiting in line for Kim said, “I want her life.”
There was reality television, which stoked a thirst for more and more intimate details of the lives of celebrities and newly minted reality show stars. And there was princess culture. For a generation of girls raised on the Disney corporation’s multi-billion dollar line of “princess products”, the five sisters of Keeping Up With the Kardashians were real-life princesses who lived in a Calabasas, California, castle, unabashedly focused on the pursuit of beauty treatments, expensive fun and luxury brands. The latter is a national fixation spawned in the “luxury revolution” of the last thirty-something years, in which most of the wealth of the country traveled into the hands of a few, with the rest of the population looking on longingly as the beneficiaries of a new Gilded Age flaunted their high-end stuff. And entertainment media, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to Keeping Up With the Kardashians, provided them with ample opportunities to do just that.
“I get letters from little girls begging me to adopt them,” Kim once told a reporter. The Kardashian lifestyle was the fulfillment of a new American dream which had been embraced by many girls and young women, unsurprisingly enough, at a time when everything around them supported it as an ideal: it was to be beautiful, famous, rich, have amazing clothes, bags and shoes and tens of millions of followers on social media. It was to get tens or even hundreds of thousands of likes on all your selfies.
“I want to take a selfie with her,” a girl in Barnes & Noble said excitedly.
Behind the Kardashian’s lifestyle, there was a mother, but it wasn’t Kim; it was Kris Jenner, Kim’s own mother and tireless manager, who took 10% of all her daughters’ incomes. “My job is to take my family’s 15 minutes of fame and turn it into 30,” Kris once declared. That her family’s 15 minutes had begun with a leaked sex tape of her daughter and the singer Ray J didn’t seem to give her pause; in fact, it was just after the release of the tape that Kris started shopping her family’s reality show, a move she likened to turning “lemons into lemonade”. The scandal that Paris Hilton had already endured wasn’t much of a scandal anymore. Porn stars were writing best-selling books and appearing on Oprah. For the biggest, darkest cloud in the perfect storm that brought Kim Kardashian rising out of the ocean of wannabe celebrities like Venus on a flip phone was the widespread consumption and normalization of online porn. In 2014, PornHub reported in its “Year In Review” Kim was No 8 in the top 10 most searched “porn stars” in the world.
“Kim, you’re doing amazing, sweetie,” Kris said in an iconic moment on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, in which Kim, naked except for jewelry and heels, is on her knees, arching her back and posing as a photographer snaps pictures – as does Kris, with a little personal camera.
The moment is striking in its representation of another element of the cultural tempest that delivered us Kim: the hypersexualization of American girls and women.
“She’s hot,” said a boy waiting in line to see her.
“Is Kim Kardashian a feminist role model?” asked Jezebel in 2013. The website answered “no” and “noooooooooooooooo”. But already the worm of popular opinion was starting to turn. Kim was being touted as a “businesswoman”. She was being called “powerful” – and didn’t achieving power, any kind of power, by any means, make a woman a feminist? So blogs and think pieces argued. Was it Kim’s marriage to a powerful music industry player and self-described “creative genius”, Kanye West, or their joint appearance on the cover of Vogue in 2014 – a nod from establishment media moving Kim on to the A-list – that began to mute her haters? Or was it that Kim’s true talent, her skill at using social media – the real secret of her success, all along – was finally being recognized for the power it commanded?
“Something about Kim is very appealing to digital natives,” Wall Street Journal tech columnist Kara Swisher told Rolling Stone in 2015. Yes; and that something was becoming very clear: Kim used the technological tools now available to almost everyone to get what everyone wanted. What she’d been doing relentlessly since the introduction of smartphones and before, now everybody was doing – using social media to self-promote, to craft an idealized online self; and girls coming of age in the second decade of the 21st century were using it to present a sexualized self.
“My little cousin, she’s 13, and she posts such inappropriate pictures on Instagram and boys post sexual comments, and she’s like, ‘Thank you.’ It’s child porn, and everyone’s looking at it on their iPhones in the cafeteria,” said a 17-year-old girl in New York.
Presiding over the pornification of American life was Princess Kim, who’d been crowned the “Selfie Queen”. Posting selfies, once thought to be embarrassingly narcissistic, was now as common as brushing one’s teeth – or putting on makeup, the subject of many of the selfies in Kim’s new book.
For the last and loudest thunderclap in this perfect storm, the precipitous rise of narcissism in the American psyche – charted in studies since the 70s, and accelerated by social media, according to some psychologists – was glamorized in the image of a dewy, contoured Kim staring into her iPhone screen.
Slate called Selfish “a masterpiece”. The Atlantic, in a review entitled, “You Win, Kim Kardashian”, gushed: “In declaring herself, against all common sense, as art, she mocks and dares and provokes. She rejects what came before. And with her candor about who she is and what it takes to make her that way, she might also, against all odds, move us forward.” Whatever that might mean.
At the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan, Kim, then 34, was wearing a tight, high-necked white lace dress, and glistening with products. She sat behind a table signing books for her hundreds of awaiting fans.
“You’ve inspired me to be hot and famous,” a teenage girl told her, blushing.
“Aw,” said Kim. “I love you.”
Though there had been a ban on selfies at the signing, Kim stood up and took a selfie with the girl. They posed together, staring into the girl’s smartphone, pursing their lips.
“You are a role model for my daughters,” said someone’s mother.
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