Katie Price - page 3 to role model

Sir Tokyo Sexwale · August 16, 2010

There are, broadly speaking, three schools of opinion regarding Katie Price. The first, quite common among Guardian readers, is incredulous dismay at her fame. How has some trumped-up Page 3 girl turned into a national icon? The second basically boils down to lust – usually found in hormonal lad-mag fans, for whom the glamour model's famously inflated breasts represent a pinnacle of pornographic appeal. But it is the third and last camp that makes Price interesting. To large numbers of young girls and grown women – and to widespread surprise – Price has become an inspirational role model; a collective ideal of modern femininity made flesh.

The first time I saw Price she was outside a Mayfair nightclub three years ago, posing in sequins and killer stilettos for a rabid paparazzi scrum. When we meet this time, at the Dorchester, Price arrives unrecognised, and indeed is almost unrecognisable – bare-faced, hair scraped back, in baggy white linen trousers and Ugg boots. In her natural state she is truly beautiful, her face fresh and mobile, and surprisingly undistorted by the nose job and Botox and collagen. Later on she will appear on the red carpet of a Leicester Square film premiere, reworked into a full-throttle sex-kitten vision of thigh-high boots and babydoll dress. "But this is how I dress normally," she shrugs, sprawled on the hotel bed, gesturing to her T-shirt. "This is what I look like. I don't think I'm beautiful. I just think I can scrub up OK."

If there is a single explanation for Price's popularity with women, I would guess this is it. After so many cosmetic procedures, she seems to regard her own body as a commercial enterprise from which she is almost entirely detached; a professional tool, to be deployed when necessary, but no more emotionally meaningful than a laptop. She refers to her beauty with neither vanity nor insecurity – and to most women today, mired in the anxiety of body image, that probably looks a lot like empowerment. To some, it may even pass for feminism.

Candour about her cosmetic artifice has, paradoxically, earned Price a reputation for being "real". And certainly, in person she is unaffected, friendly and talkative. But having commodified her body so successfully, something else has happened, for Price's dissociation from her physical self seems to extend to her internal world as well. She filters every question about emotions through a calculus of commercial success – if she's making money, she's feeling good, QED – and it's practically impossible to work out what, if anything else, is going on inside her head. And strangely, for one so famously hard-headed, there is often quite a discrepancy between Price's self-perception and external reality.

etc

she's fecking awful, what's she a role model for? Young girls to opt out & get their kit off and generally act like slappers?

Tosh · August 16, 2010

This post is not viewable to guests.

You can sign in to your account at the login page here