It’s easy to understand how Kim Kardashian — then just two years into her reality TV career — might have seen Katie Price as a media role model. Price had been turning her life into television content since 2002. But what Kardashian learned from Price’s body is probably just as significant. Like Price, Kardashian built her fortune around a vastly exaggerated body part, though in Kardashian’s case it was her butt rather than her breasts, and according to her, no surgery was required.
However, Kim Kardashian’s public embrace of waist training and restrictive diets—such as the drastic weight loss required to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s Met Gala gown—led to intense scrutiny of her body. This scrutiny fueled speculation that more radical procedures might have been involved, and this, in turn, increased her presence in the public eye. Her appearance was fascinating, but the question of what she might have done to achieve that look was even more so.
Katie Price’s embrace of the idea of the body as business was prescient. Her journey to stardom charted a path that would, in many ways, be followed by the person who would become the most famous person alive. Although Price emerged in the now-obsolete economy of Page 3 and men’s magazines, her approach was perfectly suited to the age of social media self-commodification. Filters and Facetune normalized the reshaping of one’s image. Price was simply ahead of the curve by taking it a step further: she reshaped her own body to become the image.
All that matters for the perfect object is what appears on the screen. The swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated remains one of the last bastions of virile heterosexuality in the press, now that Playboy has closed. Yet in recent years it has sought to show inclusivity in its objectification: In 2023, its cover stars included trans woman Kim Petras and Martha Stewart, 81. The fact that both of these women can be portrayed as desirable could be seen as a victory — neither age nor birth sex are barriers to sexy attitude!
But there’s also an implicit threat. If you can be this sexy as a man or as you get older, what’s stopping every woman from achieving that perfect body status? What parts of yourself, or even bodily organs, do you stubbornly keep hidden, to the detriment of becoming the ideal image? You, too, could have a body like that. All you have to do is let go of the idea that your body exists for anything other than to be looked at.
The problem for the body entrepreneur is that she must constantly reinvent herself. Jodie Marsh, Katie Price’s Page 3 contemporary and rival for the title of “biggest implants,” reinvented herself in 2011 as a bodybuilder, boasting of dropping four dress sizes in seven weeks. Photos of her, chestnut-tanned and showing off ripped muscles, secured her a fresh wave of publicity at a time when she was in her thirties and in danger of losing her sex appeal by the standards of men’s magazines, which were themselves sinking into redundancy.
