Manic Pixie Blogger

I know I'm no longer part of a site's target audience when all I can do, with enough anthropological distance, is sit back and enjoy the ride.

Sorry if that sounds a little flip, but a lot of the comments on this thread leave me a little flummoxed and really feeling my age. I'm not here to dissect Cat's writing (what she wrote in light of Whitney Houston's death was excellent, by the way), or judge her lifestyle, but it's incredibly naive to ignore that the image she's projecting, or the one bestowed upon her, is not something that's available or achievable to all, or even most, women, which makes her "relatable-ness" a little less, er, relatable. As commenter miamaya  succinctly put it, "Would Cat be “fascinating” if she weren’t conventionally attractive? She makes me think of all the gushing over Edie Sedgwick and how magnetic and charismatic she supposedly was. I searched to find out what she actually accomplished and found out she had no notable accomplishments aside from being an addict who hung out with the cool crowd and wore funky clothes."

No, she wouldn't. And to be certain, this isn't an attack on her looks or her background, but romanticizing the "self-destructive little rich girl" image is a pretty damaging thing. That kind of charisma and charm only works when paired with looks and money.

When I was younger, I idolized Edie Sedgwick -- or, at least, the idea of Edie Sedgwick. It was a pretty fucked-up thing to do, but her life seem so glamorous and so unlike mine. Even after several viewings of Ciao! Manhattan, I still have no idea who she was other than this cool chick who did tons of drugs and hung out with Andy Warhol. Years later, I came across the same trope reading Prozac Nation and Thing of Beauty, the biography of supermodel, Gia Carangi. I could never be those girls, not because of nagging self-esteem issues, but because if I did a smattering of drugs or partied it up, I'd end up in prison or in a ditch, and frankly, not that many people care if I do. I welcome honest conversations about addiction, but not to the point that it's exclusively the domain of economically privileged, attractive white girls. It's not the only face of addiction, but it's the one that's most romanticized.