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IN an
article I wrote in July about the
media coverage of Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson’s
romantic relationship, I posed the question of
whether Lohan would parlay the novelty of her lady
liaison into a payday from one of the big gossip
magazines. They were all approaching her, after all, so
it appeared that Lohan would be the latest to profit.
Like Jamie Lynn Spears did with her
pregnancy and Brangelina has done with their
babies.
Back
then, I asked—in the context of her calling in to Ryan
Seacrest’s radio show and using only gender-neutral
words to describe her current partner, such as “the
person I care about”—“Is Lohan getting closer to more
specific nouns and pronouns, particularly if one of the
celebrity magazines will pay her a big check to do so,
as has been rumored?”
LINDSAY LOHAN and Samantha
Ronson at New York Fashion Week.
But that
so has not happened! Not only has Lohan eschewed
capitalizing on an interesting story that people (not to
mention
People) might be willing to pay for, but she has
actually done the opposite. She has plainly and simply
written about Ronson as “the
girl who means the world to me” (along with other
references) on her
MySpace page. On the Internet, the land of the free.
For
that, I owe her this rowback/clarification.
Lohan
first began blogging in late July. She wrote that she
had just found out the log-in for her MySpace page, “so
i can be more involved.” Since then, she’s written
pretty frequently, checking in about what music she’s
listening to—loves
Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass,”
hates “Ladies of the Canyon” by Joni Mitchell: “So—I
don’t like the one person that requested this song once
and they have ruined the song for me forever
more....Those who know me and care about me will
understand why...I love the artist, but dislike this
particular song for my own reasons....” (Sidebar: Who is
this person so horrible that he/she could make someone
hate “Ladies of the Canyon”?)
But
what’s gotten more attention have been the rants, and
there have been a bunch. Against the
suggestion that her 14-year-old sister, Ali, has
gotten breast implants; against her
troubled father, Michael; against Sarah Palin. The
most recent Palin post was, in fact, a
joint one with Ronson, with the peg being an AP
story about Palin’s church promoting the conversion of
gay people into straight people.
The
celebrity blogosphere’s reaction to Lohan’s political
blogging has been one of interest, of course. TMZ
commented that Palin “may have trouble getting the
rehabbed and rumored-to-be-gay vote come November.” And
Perez Hilton, who is himself obsessed with Palin and all
campaign matters, has excerpted all of Lohan’s blogs.
As has
been true for months in the tabloids—and continues to be
the case on MySpace as well—the Lohan-Ronson
relationship is simply there for the public to see, with
Lohan throwing random shoutouts to Ronson at the end of
posts (“this
song is for sr... ILY.”) But as opposed to a big
coming-out party as paid for by a gossip magazine,
Lohan’s self-presentation is the less predictable route
for a celebrity these days. She’s mad at her dad, she’s
wishing her mom a happy birthday, she’s trying to
remember the name of an ice cream she liked when she was
a kid, and she’s obsessed with the election.
In this
case, at least, stars really are just like us. |
