It’s Not Gossip Anymore, Girl
With the revelation of a purported sex tape, Gossip Girl‘s Leighton Meester becomes the newest young actress to have her very private life exposed to the world. The starlet-sex-tape is becoming so common that, rather than simply being mailed in a manila envelope to a seedy website, it gets shopped around to potential buyers like a movie script. People don’t even bother with blackmail or lawsuits anymore. In a few years, an unpublished sex tape will simply be part of the curriculum vita:
Producer: “Hmm, says here you went to New York Film Academy, you’ve done several commercials, some stage work, and—Oh! A sex tape. Anything really weird, like animal molestation or a UCLA lacrosse team gangbang?”
Potential Starlet: “Nope. Just gave my boyfriend a footjob in a jacuzzi.”
Producer: “Wonderful! We’ll put you on our reality show Outer Banks, get you on the cover of some teen magazines and People, then we’ll leak the tape. You might lose your Revlon deal, but iTunes downloads and DVD sales will triple.”
But Leighton was supposed to be different: born in prison to a convicted drug dealer, she was supposed to be an inspiration, or as much of an inspiration as a young woman can be who overcomes a troubled childhood to star in a show that centers around entitled, backstabbing rich kids. More inspiring for young women would have been becoming, say, a social worker or non-profit organizer or doctor or engineer or Xerox CEO or Secretary of State.
Instead, inspiration will have to take a backseat to damage control. This is getting ridiculous: there has never in the history of famousness been a sex tape that stayed buried. So ladies and guys—OK, ladies—if you think you’ll ever become even remotely famous, even local-weathergirl or pawnshop-commercial famous, don’t make the tape if you don’t want it to go public. But given what it did for Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian—they went from being simply rich to being richer and famous for being rich—maybe that’s the point.
