ERIC writes:

Your post on the women reclaiming lost identities as Southern Belles was a fine counterpoint to the stories about the untimely death of singer Amy Winehouse. I have a hunch that Winehouse’s unhappy life and wretched death are a watershed of sorts, a point at which the tide begins to recede. I think (and hope) that women of the present and future will look at Winehouse and see an anti-idol, a person not to be emulated in any way. In the past they may have seen her death as romantic and artistic; in the clear light of day, they will just see it as a waste of a talented human being. I can’t put my finger on it – any number of rock stars have come and gone, dead in hotel rooms or hot tubs or the back seats of cars – but I have a feeling that the lights have come down on this show, and nobody is singing along any more.

Laura writes:

Let’s hope so. The commenter Daniel H. at VFR made these excellent observations about the slow, torturous suicide of the gifted Winehouse:

Here is a picture of Amy Winehouse from her prep school days. A quite pretty (not extremely pretty) young girl. 

Here is a promotional picture of her when she started to try to turn herself into a star, at about age 20 or so. Note that her provocative outfit, while still not as obscene as the worst stuff out there, evokes “little girl” images, with her pink chiffon skirt, her colored-bubbly top, and her bright plastic bangles. It’s a common thing these days: the sexualization of youth. In this picture, despite the obvious attempt to arouse, she is still fresh-faced and youthful, with no horrid whorish make-up or tattoos.

Here is Amy Winehouse at her “peak” as a star. She embraced a somewhat trampy look, with her ratted-out hair or wig, and her exaggerated eye make-up. She’s also begun to cover herself with tattoos. While she is still attractive, it’s now completely sexualized–an attraction of pure animality. That’s very unappealing to some men, but one can see how she was still “attractive” by modern pop-culture standards.

Finally, here is a picture of Amy Winehouse on the eve of her 25th birthday. It is not a technically obscene photo (no nudity or such), but please be warned it is a very, very ugly picture, and apparently genuine.

Drug and alcohol addiction are very serious problems, among the most serious problems a human being can face, and they consume the lives of countless individuals every day. And it is not false that some people are genetically predisposed to be more vulnerable to addiction. But genetics or no, it’s not an insurmountable problem, or at least it doesn’t have to be.

How much of Amy Winehouse’s ultimate submission to the horrors of addiction is attributable to the way she progressively sexualized herself? Humans are not meant to do this to themselves, to treat their own selfhood as an opportunity for whoring in exchange for fame, money, and adulation. It eats away at the core of potential goodness that resides in every human soul. When Amy Winehouse became addicted to drugs, she was at the same time in the process of denying her own basic worth as a woman and a human. What then did she have to fall back on in the midst of her addicted hell? Although of course I do not know this person, and may very well be wrong, it seems very plausible to me that her inability to pull herself out of the death-spiral of addiction had a lot to do with her progressive embrace of a sexualized existence.

                                     — Comments —

A reader writes:

I happened to meet Amy Winehouse when she was in her mid-teens, about 16.

It was memorable because AW was such a very dislikeable young woman, vacillating between extreme (embarrassing) childishness and defiant resentfulness. I can’t recall many details (the evening had a somewhat nightmarish quality), but the impression left was of someone destined for trouble, someone with ‘personality disorder’ type behaviour. She also seemed much less intelligent than would have been expected from her family background.

Of course, such a personality in combination with massive public attention, wealth and the continual temptations of show business, gave an inevitability to her demise. For several years there has been a strong sense that the media had this scripted and were just awaiting the end. The obituaries were already written. The media can sense such people, and make sure that they never get off the track to destruction.

As for her talent – that is subjective. In my opinion she had a better than average bluesy voice for our era but nothing special if you are familiar with the genre from a few decades ago. Essentially, she was a pastiche of earlier singers, an impersonator. Without her trademark self-destructive lifestyle she would have been merely one of scores of similar (skilled but unknown) singers eking out a living in the peripheral jazz scene.

But, her trajectory is appealing to many nowadays. For the shallow, nihilistic, self-mutilating and self-degrading young women of today; even an early, ugly and lonely death seems a price worth paying for being the centre of so much public attention for five years.

Mrs. H. writes:

For several years there has been a strong sense that the media had this scripted and were just awaiting the end. The obituaries were already written. The media can sense such people, and make sure that they never get off the track to destruction.

I didn’t follow Miss Winehouse’s career, and don’t consider myself a fan, although I like her music. I agree with the above comment, though; when she died, it felt like watching the predictable conclusion of a morality play, or a train wreck in slow motion. Unlike Marilyn Monroe or even Kurt Cobain, Miss Winehouse’s ugliness and self-destruction were not latent, but part of her identity. There was no romantic or sexy veneer. She was a cartoon. Wikipedia reports two “art” pieces inspired by Amy Winehouse, both displayed well before her actual death: 

London’s Mall Galleries opened an exhibition in May 2008 that included a sculpture of Winehouse, entitled Excess. The piece, created by Guy Portelli, had a miniature of the singer lying on top of a cracked champagne bottle, with a pool of spilled liquid underneath. The body was covered with what appeared to be tiny pills, while one outstretched hand held a glass.

A sculpture by Marco Perego, entitled “The Only Good Rock Star Is a Dead Rock Star”, that depicts Winehouse lying in a pool of blood with an apple and a bullet hole in her head after being shot by American novelist and beat poet William S. Burroughs.

I, of course, did not know the singer, but my impression from news reports is that she was insane, or at least lacked intelligence. Why any parent, friend or even associate would support such an apparently weak and immature person’s pursuit of fame is beyond me. That was the lesson I took from her death. Not “don’t do drugs,” but “mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be pop stars (or movie stars, or sports stars).”

No one shows the same concern (or disdain) for Miley Cyrus, or even Brittney Spears anymore (she seems to have “cleaned up”). But all of these ladies were oversexualized before they were 20, presumably with their fathers’ blessings (or encouragement). Perhaps Miss Cyrus, Miss Spears, Miss Lohan and the Olson girls are clean of illegal toxins (or at least are relatively moderate in their use), but they are still self-destructive train-wrecks, no matter how “fresh-faced,” for the reason Daniel H. says– they are whoring themselves, and have been for some time.

I disagree with 16th-century English Puritan and 20th-century American Fundamentalist doctrines, but maybe they were on to something, banning theater and burning rock n’ roll records. Showbiz certainly devours its stars.

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