PARIS HILTON HAS A BABY. I didn’t think this news would interest me. It’s been two decades since I watched her and fellow heiress, Nicole Ritchie, pretend to do “real jobs” — the kind other people do to survive — on The Simple Life.
I quite liked the two of them. They seemed to have a sense of their own ridiculousness and of the injustice of their social position. Unlike today’s nepo babies, they were willing to play their privilege for laughs.
Now, at the age of 41, Hilton has become a mother. But not in the way most women do: getting pregnant and giving birth, or adopting. Instead, she has followed in the footsteps of fellow celebrities such as Grimes, Rebel Wilson and Kim Kardashian by hiring another woman to bear a child for her. According to the Daily Mail, Hilton even turned to Kardashian for advice, getting a recommendation for a doctor for the egg extraction process who would ensure the new baby was biologically hers.
Mainstream feminist opprobrium has been muted. That this story has flown under the radar might seem surprising, given the type of transgression that does get picked up. Today’s feminist is hyper-conscious of privilege, constantly asking “if your feminism isn’t centring the most marginalised, what is it even for?”
Employ a cleaner and you’re offloading your dirty workUse your wealth and status to claim ownership of the contents of another woman’s womb, though — positioning yourself as the Biblical Sarah in relation to the slave Hagar, or ’s Serena Joy in relation to Offred — and you’re fine.
