While watching Celebrity Fit Club last night, I turned to the bride and said, “You know, I think I’d get along with him just swimmingly.” Twasn’t talking about Bobby Brown or the guy from Skid Row, though it’d apply to them as well. Nope, twas Kevin Federline I was thinking of. Just strikes me as a chill dude, even though she probably thought I was out of my mind. Well, it reminded me of a column I’d written a few years back that I like for how I took K-Fed and Brit-Brit and turned it into a look at how there’s a wee bit of both in all of us. Here it is…
One day, an unapologetic piece of white trash looked around the hovel where he lived with his pregnant girlfriend and decided that he wanted a change. So he set out on a journey through dance studios and the Hills of Beverly. He climbed over other suitors and under the public’s radar and kept going until he reached the woman for whom his entire gender lusted.
In her plaid schoolgirl skirt, she was fit and sweet, so the man tried to work his inexplicable lady-killing magic, all the while hoping that he wouldn’t have to turn back toward pitiful life as he knew it.
“Hellooo Ms. Schoolgirl,” the extraordinarily virile chap said. “Would you be so kind as to hop into my arms and let me carry you across the threshold of marriage?”
Schoolgirl batted her eyelashes and, in a Cajun drawl, responded, “Well now, Mr. Trash! How do I know that if I marry you, you won’t knock me up twice and try to milk me for all the money I done got? Burp.”
“Because, baby,” he replied, “you make me the man I never thought I could be. Besides, I could never leave you, for if I did, my future would drown and I’d be left with nothing.”
“You say that now,” she responded, “but what if you change your mind once you slide a diamond ring — ya know, the one I’ll likely pay for — onto my finger? Burp.”
“Because,” he concluded, “I will be so grateful for your unconditional love that it would hardly be fair to reward you with bastard-blooded children and a soiled reputation, now would it?!”
So, Schoolgirl marries Trash and has two kids — “You had me at Popozao,” she’ll say — but about two years later, she’ll feel the sting of rejection when she finds him in a hotel room with some daggum tramp. Before she makes the rounds of the talk shows and sees her smilin’ face on all the tabloid covers, she’ll ask him, “Why on earth did you do that?” After he does a little jig on a stage in Chicago, he’ll croak, “I could not help myself. It is my nature.”
The moral of the story? We owe K-Fed an apology.
There, I said it. And I meant it: Kevin Federline can’t be blamed for fulfilling his destiny as the sperm-flinging dirtbag we the people decided he’ll forever be before we could even spell his name. And by mocking him now, we’re really just mocking ourselves.
Bear with me for a couple minutes; gossip-rag celebrity breakups are hardly my forte. But, in thinking long and hard about this Britney/Kevin thing all week (we all deserve an occasional mental break, no?), I’ve been trying to figure out what makes a whore a whore these days.
I concluded that it has nothing to do with writhing around on a stage with phallic props, moaning about being a slave 4 U. It takes much more —like hopping onstage for a Tijuana donkey show — to rate.
Nor can it be defined merely as leeching onto a rich mate and riding her lingerie-tails to fortune and unearned fame. For if we’re going to base it on that alone, what to make of Main Line trophy brides who do little but look pretty and spread their toned legs for sugar daddy? I hold firm that they don’t top the whore charts either — until they start banging the tennis instructor. (Plus, in this case, the leech at least tried to make a name and career for himself. It’s just that even if he held a tune better than Bocelli, he would never be afforded a chance to shed the Mr. Spears label. If dude were a court case, the ACLU would be defending him.)
So, are America’s Top Whores those who can’t get enough of In Touch stories headlined “Exclusive! Britney and Kevin’s Divorce Gets Ugly” or News of the World articles that read, “Kevin has told Britney she should comply with his demands otherwise the whole world will see her having sex, which will be devastating”?Wouldn’t be that devastating for me, kimosabe, but I digress: The gossip hounds are just looking for a little diversion, some vicarious living. No fluid, no foul.
So the question becomes this: If prancing about the stage half-naked, scamming one’s love for $30,000 a month for the next year, or getting off on those that do both of the above doesn’t make one a whore, what exactly does?
Then, the answer hit me one more time:
The Chinese government is currently rounding up pet dogs and killing them indiscriminately; it’s a horrific animal cull that’s managed to get less attention than the real genocide in Darfur that America has shamefully enabled. Well, U.S. companies, having already eroded a nation’s manufacturing base, continue to have wet dreams about profits to be made as China’s market opens up. So lucrative is the potential that they’d just as soon stay silent than make a stink about a government that murders its puppies and, in the past, its people.
All of which is to say: If that’s not the true definition of whore — ahem, Wal-Mart and Google — even K-Fed and Brit couldn’t figure out what is.