Katie Price at the Cambridge Union. (Nordin Catic / Getty)
When I heard last year that Sky was making a documentary series about Katie Price, my first thought was that they were taking a risk: on her social media posts, she looked so frail, it seemed possible that she might die before broadcast. My second thought was that I couldn’t imagine what there would be to fill the episodes: surely Price, relentlessly self-exposing as she is, had already revealed everything there was to know about her. I was wrong on both counts, and the series — called Katie Price: Nothing to Hide — is as riveting as a horror story.
In the first scene, Price is looking at magazine covers from her glamour model heyday in the late Nineties and early 2000s: Loaded, Maxim, Front. Back then, she went by the pseudonym Jordan, and doesn’t like what she sees. “Ugly. Absolute ugly,” she says. The only time she softens is when she picks up some photos of herself at five and seven. “Ah, she’s quite a pretty little girl. Gentle eyes. Innocent. No idea what was coming ahead of me.”
Her words are slurred and nasal, because her teeth — glaring white and fitted in Turkey, in exchange for an Instagram post — are too big for her mouth. (She’s said that she doesn’t recommend anybody have fake teeth: “I can’t eat a chocolate eclair now in case I pull one out.”) After innumerable tweakments, her face today looks alien, like a Bratz doll’s. She recently had surgery to remove scar tissue from migrated filler. Her breasts, of course, are enormous, absurd. They almost distract from how tiny the rest of her body is: take away the implants, and she would likely be underweight.
All of this, Price insists, is how she wants to be. Back when she was a Page 3 girl with unaugmented breasts, The Sun ran a poll asking its readers whether she should have a surgery. (Headline: “MY BOOBS ARE IN YOUR HANDS”.) 80% voted against. Price ignored them. She also ignored the fact that implants were banned from Page 3, meaning that getting them was potentially career-ending — especially the ostentatiously fake, “stuck-on” ones she wanted.
In one sense, Price made the right decision. Her new body coincided exactly with the needs of the booming lad-mag market. “My pictures,” she says in the series, “were pornographic without being pornographic.” The artificial extremity of her figure turned her softcore poses into obscenities, and the precocious innocence of her Bardot-ish face (the face she now considers ugly) layered on the perversity. Every title wanted her as a cover girl because, simply, she shifted copies. Something about her mix of innocence and artifice made her into a provocation: men want to pick her up and possess her.
From when she was a teenager, she says in the documentary, she understood how to incite male attention, and she loved it. None of this sounds like it’s about sex for her: the pleasure was all in the power she had to make men look at her, without giving them what they wanted. She explains that liked to be looked at — and she knew her sexuality could guarantee that — but not to be touched. She traces this impulse back to an incident that occurred when she was seven years old, when a strange man molested her in the park near her home.
Maybe as traumatizing as the abuse was the invasive way the police treated her when they investigated, taking away her underwear. “There’s habitual abuse of men against me. Taking advantage of me from a young age for their own self-benefit,” Price says. (In her adult life, she’s revealed that she’s been raped twice, once by a celebrity and once during a carjacking in South Africa. Unsurprisingly, she has PTSD.) There seems to be a direct line between the powerless victimhood she experienced as a child, and the deforming insistence on absolute bodily autonomy that has shaped Price into what she is today.
In 2000, against the backdrop of Price’s vertiginous rise to fame and her cultural dominance, Michel Faber published the novel Under the Skin. It’s about an alien called Isserley who has been sent to Earth. In order to pass as human, her entire body has been surgically reconstituted, causing her constant pain: under daylight, she looks obviously freakish, but in the dark it’s enough (or anyway her gigantic bosom is enough) to captivate men. “The rest of her was a funny shape, though,” thinks one of the hitchhikers Isserley picks up. “Long skinny arms with big knobbly elbows — no wonder her top was long-sleeved. Knobbly wrists too, and big hands. Still, with tits like that…”
Isserley’s reconstruction means she can’t have sex (“The tangle of knotted flesh between her legs she didn’t touch or examine; it was a lost cause”), making her the epitome of the woman who can be lusted for but not possessed. That doesn’t matter, because she isn’t seducing these men for intercourse: she’s bait, luring humans so they can be processed for the meat market on her home planet. Whatever debased things these men think about her as they sit in her car, Isserley is the one abusing them, not the other way around. Her modified body grants her supreme power.
Whether Faber was directly inspired by Price or not, her image was predatory too. That perception was solidified by the fact that she had a relationship with Pop Idol contestant Gareth Gates when he was 17 and she was 24. His agent told him to deny they were together — Price, they said, was career death to a teen idol like him. She sold the kiss-and-tell story of taking his virginity while she was pregnant with her first baby, conceived with the footballer Dwight Yorke.
In the documentary, both she and Gates talk about their time together with tenderness and respect: he doesn’t seem scarred by his fling with an older woman, but it’s clear from the way he talks about the coverage that her scorched-earth strategy hurt him personally. Meanwhile, it gave her profile a boost. The more outrageous Price could be, the more the press ate her up. She was a Noughties succubus: a female demon who could be portrayed as seducing men to their destruction.
And in the same way that Isserley’s unnatural cleavage distracts men from everything that should be disturbing about the rest of her, Price’s ever-expanding chest seemed to distract from the fact that there was something not quite right about her. Only occasionally did anyone seem to notice that she might not be OK. Nothing to Hide includes striking archive footage of the comedian Frank Skinner interviewing her in 2001, after she revealed her pregnancy, and — with kindness that belied his new lad image — telling her that she seemed vulnerable.
She was: a year before she had attempted suicide following a break-up. But there was no room for weakness in her public image. When her baby, Harvey, was born, she commodified him as she’d commodified herself, selling photos of them together. In the documentary, she explains her thinking. The level of press interest in her meant that someone was going to make money from pictures of them, so why shouldn’t she be the person to profit?
Similarly, the documentary explains how she cut a deal with a favored paparazzi. She would tip him off so he always got the killer shot of her falling out of a nightclub (now even more disgraceful since she was a new mom), and he allegedly kicked back a share of his fee to her. Price was exploiting the system that sought to exploit her. Later, she would use reality TV to monetize every aspect of her life, including her marriages and her children.
It was clever, and it seemed to give her the thing she’d always wanted: attention and control combined. But her power was illusory. Price was being publicly broken down for mass consumption, and drawing some profit from that process could not stop it from harming her. As the series follows her career, her disintegration escalates — physically (Price has dealt with multiple complications from surgery), emotionally (her private life, lived in public, is painfully chaotic) and financially (she has been declared bankrupt twice).
Price wanted to be desired, and when men desired her, she was hated for it. The tabloids cheerfully had their cake and ate it, first running the salacious details of the Gates affair from Price’s account, and then using his denials to paint her as a liar. In the documentary, there’s footage of her being booed at an awards show when she makes a jibe about the situation. Her actions were calculated to provoke, but the backlash to her provocations still wounded her — especially when it touched on her capacity as a mother. Maybe the nadir of Price-hating came in 2010, when the comedian Frankie Boyle made a joke in his Channel 4 series Tramadol Nights about Price being raped by her son, who was eight at the time.
Price’s fortunes fell with the old-media structures. The lad mags are gone, the tabloids weakened. But her approach to fame was prescient. Total self-commodification is now the rule of social media. The porn stars Bonnie Blue and Lily Philips have followed Price’s path of seeking maximum outrage (for example, through their viral gangbang stunts) in exchange for maximum attention. Blue even, horrifyingly, found a way to market her pregnancy, by arranging a “baby shower” where she invited men to urinate on her belly.
Blue and Philips make the same arguments as Price: their bodies, their choice, and they choose to extract maximum profit from themselves. But as Price shows, when you make yourself hard, you make yourself brittle too. Perhaps her successors will be spared the damage that Price has gone through. Perhaps they will be better at protecting themselves, even while they are selling themselves off piece by piece. Perhaps they are able to inoculate themselves against the hatred they inspire in others, in a way that Price was never able to — there is an argument that having access to social media, rather than needing to rely on an often-hostile press, gives this generation of self-exploiters an unprecedented level of control.
I think this is a false hope. However rapacious the media was before the arrival of the mass internet, social-media audiences are even more hungry for drama and liberal with their viciousness. The incentives to flog yourself are as strong as they ever were, and now there are no intervening editorial layers between you and your audience to act as a moderating force. The impulse to extremity goes unchecked, and competition for attention pushes everyone to go further. After all, you could hardly say that social media has been good for Price: just think about her teeth.
For a while, it looked like Price truly had found a way to turn her objectification into a successful cottage industry: her degradation was the means of production, and she seized it with alacrity. Price was the perfect creature for the sexual culture of the Noughties: an effigy of femininity, who existed to be hated. Price has been made to pay and pay for wanting to be wanted.
