Toxic
- Author
- Sarah Ditum
- Published
- 2023-10-26T00:00:00.000Z
- Format
- audiobook
- Finished
- 2025-09-24
- Rating
- ★★★★☆
I enjoyed reading this one; it covers such an interesting time period, the author describes as the “upskirt decade,” beginning with Britney Spears and her breakout hit …Baby One More Time and ending with Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines. Growing up in my early teens, I was really into this kind of pop culture. I engaged with the music videos, photoshoots, and magazines, as well as the gossip blogs, without really considering what might have been happening to the people on the other end. I was always a fan; I never hated anyone. But how much of the way I consumed this media, so normalised at the time, was toxic?
Toxic tells the stories of nine women who defined the hell of celebrity in the 2000s and explores how they were devoured by fame, how they attempted to control their own narratives, and how they succeeded or (more often) failed. These women come from all walks of fame—pop music, acting, reality TV, and WWE wrestling. Some of them you think you know already, and others will be less familiar, but Toxic reveals these women neither as pure victims nor as conniving strategists, but as complex individuals trying to navigate celebrity while under attack from a vicious and fast-changing media. Their portrayal has shaped the way that all women—famous or otherwise—are viewed today, and their experiences preempted the now-universal condition, especially thanks to social media, of living under the public gaze.