When viewed “in period,” Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 film Showgirls was deemed badly acted, soft-porn trash only. Today, his tale of a young woman’s quest for fame, and how she is simultaneously rewarded and derided for her ambition, feels prophetic: an oddly familiar world in which rhinestone-encrusted dance sequences are cut with brutal rape scenes. It’s Instagram on acid pre-Instagram. Or, as Alexander Cavaluzzo wrote recently in Hyperallergic, “We needn’t crack the sequined shell to understand Showgirl’s importance, simply look at the shiny, plasticized surface [...] which parallels the larger fallacy of the American Dream.”
It makes sense then that showgirls – albeit with a lowercase s – frequently appear in It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me (2025), a new essay collection from cultural critic Philippa Snow. A deep dive into the lives of fourteen women bludgeoned by fame, each one is contextualized through their relationship to a star from another era – Aliyah and Britney Spears for instance, or Amy Winehouse and Billie Holiday. Sometimes, showgirls feature literally, rooted in European music halls; elsewhere, as metaphors for societal ideals as Hollywood defines them (i.e., in James Truslow Adams-style prosperity). Yet, in every case, they represent a carefully choreographed performance of femininity, twirling beneath the spotlight of late-capitalist commerce.
Philippa Snow, It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me, 2025. Courtesy: Virago, UK. Photo: Philippa Snow
The book’s title comes, not from Verhoeven or Vegas, but from a courtroom statement made by former Playboy model-turned-reality-TV-star Anna Nicole Smith (whose favorite Halloween costume happened to be a pink-plumed showgirl outfit). As Smith tried, and failed, to inherit her late husband’s fortune, she attempted to convince jurors that she “deserved all that money as repayment for the effort that it took to be Anna Nicole [...] She put that work in for her husband, yes, but she also put it in for us.”
The “us” Snow refers to, of course, is the same “us” that consumes gossip mags, TikTok, Reddit, and all the other filthy forms of social media. The media amplification of Smith’s grinding commitment to stardom, no less than of her concrete-balloon breasts, junk-food binges, and benzodiazepine addiction, epitomizes the plastic surgery, eating disorders, and gross-out humor normalized by the tabloid journalism of the early 2000s – the same era that Kim Kardashian’s ass established a new metric of female success, and the phrase “famous for being famous” reached new heights.
Yet It’s Terrible’s relationship to celebrity remains a nuanced one, despite numerous descriptions of the physical and emotional toils it takes. The lives of the women Snow depicts may be complicated by the performances of self-commodification necessary to achieve their statures, but these performances are rarely what destroy them. In fact, several of Snow’s subjects even emerge victorious from tribulations like non-consensual pornography (Pamela Anderson) and coming out as gay, despite prior success as the archetypical cool girl with hot boyf (Kirsten Stewart). Indeed, such aspects of female celebrity are presented as ones that allow women to, if not exactly reclaim their agency, then at least subvert its established expectations.
Her body is at once her own and society’s, one in which capitalism and image-making are virtually indistinguishable.
For example, the book’s opening chapter recounts feminist writer Gloria Steinem’s damning assessment of Nicole Smith’s counterpart, Marilyn Monroe. Steinem claimed to have walked out of the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which Monroe played a forever smiling-pouting showgirl-cum-sugar baby, because she believed this other woman “was a joke, she was vulnerable, she was so eager for approval. She was all the things that I feared most being as a teenage girl” – a performance of femininity supposedly designed to please men and men alone.
What Snow goes on to highlight, though, are the similarities between this cinematic performance and Monroe breathlessly, quaveringly singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to JFK in 1962, at a time when her married lover had purportedly iced Monroe out for being needy. Rather than a simpering doll who repelled the “proper feminist,” Snow suggests that Monroe, who deliberately showed up late, was perhaps enacting revenge. That she was determined to sabotage the image of the perennial chorus girl that celluloid had tied her to, by revealing an unpredictability entirely her own.
The duality, or perhaps mutability, that being a woman in the public eye requires, as well as the reactions it provokes in both the performer and her audience, runs through other chapters, too. Anderson and Tula – the stage name of trans model and activist Caroline Cossey – are presented as “literally self-made women whose tireless embodiment of beauty standards drags them into unwanted scandal.” One page describes Anderson telling journalist Ronan Farrow “When I was little, I wanted to be a nun or a showgirl,” before following up with “Why can’t women be both?” The next covers Tula’s performance work mirroring her “own transition, an inborn understanding of what might very broadly be termed the feminine assignment.”
In short, both have created characters that acknowledge and destabilize traditional gender expectations; first, to become famous; then, to survive what being famous entails. They thrive because, regardless of their actual nationalities, they have become living embodiments of the American Dream, and like Verhoeven’s Nomi, have achieved success through sheer determination, regardless of whatever labels they may have been born under. It’s typical of Snow’s approach, in that it avoids normative judgements as to whether celebrity is good or bad. Instead, she examines how fame is established and maintained, and what this means in terms of gender and autonomy, and the politics thereof.
This focus on the process – as much as the price – of constructing fame is a natural extension of Snow’s previous book, Which as You Know Means Violence (2022). Here, she unpacked the relationship between gender and physically grueling performance art, arguing that the way we perceive performers’ self-injury is always shaped by the way we perceive their identity. Whereas, last year’s extended essay, Trophy Lives, made a case for expanding our definition of art objects to include celebrities, on the grounds that human beings are inevitably drawn to beauty as the art market is to money, and that celebrities' monetization of beauty is a form of artistry in itself.
Throughout It’s Terrible, the performer is rarely referred to as either artist or art object, and her body is at once her own and society’s, one in which capitalism and image-making are virtually indistinguishable. As a result, images are central to the construction of Snow’s subjects, and her subsequent deconstruction of them. Plentiful pages are devoted to Joan Crawford’s “brand new wound Baboon-like [lips...] as precise in their doubled geometry as theatre masks of Thalia and Melpomene.” Or, as one might expect, from a self-proclaimed “Lindsay Lohan Scholar,” to Terry Richardson’s “dangerous, acuminated” photographs of the sultry starlet. These include an analysis of Lohan dressed as a semi-crucified Jesus, and setting fire to gossip magazines already emblazoned with her own face: a woman “capable of a kinky, perverse form of resurrection [who is...] able to play with fire without getting burned.”
Joan Crawford looks at the 6 February 1946 issue of Picturegoer, featuring her own cover portrait
Lindsay Lohan burns the a September 2006 issue of PEOPLE, featuring a story of her breakup with restauranteur Harry Morton
Verhoeven’s Showgirls presents us with a post-modern Frankensteina, comprised of several innocently knowing, fresh-faced, and lipliner-ed-to-fuck parts, all of which are always moving. Snow’s showgirl-constructs (and the women who construct them) are often like this too. Yes, they make “bad” decisions, such as sleeping with the US president, or wearing a short skirt and no knickers near paparazzi. Snow’s point, however, is that these decisions are exactly that: (often) aesthetic choices, aka fuck you’s to societal expectations (albeit in a manner we can’t stop watching and paying top dollar for). Female fame, she argues, should therefore be judged on whether it creates images of social hierarchies or individual freedoms, if it should be judged at all. The result is a cool, glittering showstopper of a book, filled with empathy and intelligence as well as dirt.
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Philippa Snow’s essay collection It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me is out now from Virago.