Sluts and teddy bears

Dingy divas and their benign boy toys have got new clothes and lots of attitude, but their message is old and in the way.

By Janelle Brown

Feb 5, 2001 | In the opening episode of "Popstars," the WB's newest reality-TV show, a camera slowly pans a line of girls waiting patiently for their chance to belt out a few bars of a song for a panel of judges. The girls gaze coyly at the camera and strike poses -- in their skintight pleather pants and last season's snakeskin print halter tops, soft bellies exposed from there to there, eyes crusty with mascara -- hoping that this brief moment on film will help launch them toward girl-band stardom.

"Popstars" will, over the next few months, take a handful of these girls in their late teens and early 20s and attempt to turn them into a cookie-cutter pop group modeled on bands like Dream or Britney Spears or a whitewashed Destiny's Child. The TV show is a female version of "Making the Band," a semisuccessful reality show from last season that turned a parade of fresh-faced boys into a five-man Backstreet Boys pastiche called O-Town (a band whose CD debuted on the charts on Jan. 23 at No. 5).

But where "Making the Band" took a handful of clean-cut boys next door and turned them into fuzzy, desexualized plush toys that you'd feel safe leaving with your 14-year-old daughter, "Popstars" is assembling a collection of precocious sexpot tartlets hellbent on titillating men twice their age (and striking fear into the heart of any teenage boy who has ever had an inopportune erection) while selling pop pablum to prepubescent girls.

The teenage pop starlet boom of 2000 has given rise to a passel of virginal sluts -- navel-exposing divas who proclaim that they are saving themselves for marriage while they shimmy across stages in second-skin white leather and spangled sports bras and the tiniest of belly chains. Crooning their come-hither lyrics from behind bleached-out tresses and blackened raccoon eyes, Spears, Christina Aguilera and their ilk have become style icons for a generation of teenage girls who acquire -- before they're even ready for training bras -- a somewhat misguided education about fashion's sexual message.

The world according to these painted pretties is a place in which good girls can pretend to be bad girls without having to worry about bad boys. And while these dingy divas sport a lot of modern "attitude," their message is as old as their mothers' mothers: It's all about gettin' yourself a man and, girls, he is gonna looove what those stretch bell-bottoms do for your butt.

Aguilera embodies this frightening lollipop aesthetic, with her strawlike Barbie hair peroxided to a glow-in-the-dark hue and her Skittles-bright tight leather with cutouts and brass studs. The most distinctive thing about Aguilera is her stomach, which is never, ever covered up -- even when she's dressed down, her T-shirt's knotted precisely 5 inches above her bellybutton. She is Kmart grafted to Versace; if her clothes were made from vinyl and polyester instead of leather and satin, she would be pure trailer trash. Instead, she's merely a high-class hooker.

But if Britney, Christina, Mya and Dream are sex on toast, their boy-band counterparts are pure milquetoast. 'N Sync, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees and their faux homeys are so sexually whitewashed as to be more like teddy bears than men. In voices just this shade of falsetto, they croon lyrics that read like the longings from a schoolgirl's diary. These are guys who dress in identical outfits and perform perfectly synchronized dance moves onstage -- moves that, when performed by anyone but a soulful '70s quintet, look more silly than sexy.

Next Page: Clean-cut, effeminate white and Latino-looking boys, all pink cheeks and peroxided tips

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