Britain's Barbie Doll Reveals All

Yes, I’m famous for my boobs. So what? Modelling is just my job, and there’s more to me than that. There’s a person inside this body. So who am I?
— Katie Price

The British tabloid press is fixated on the glamour model Jordan, a.k.a. Katie Price (or should that be Katie Price, a.k.a. Jordan? I’m not sure). Barely a day goes by without a paparazzi shot of the UK’s home-grown Pamela Anderson appearing in the pages of The Sun, The Mirror, The Star or The Sport.

Being Jordan: My Autobiography came out in May and it immediately hit the bestseller list. What interests people about this woman, I suspect, isn’t simply her celebrity status, but the intriguing relationship between her two identities: Jordan, the pneumatic gob-shite glamour model, and Katie Price, the single mum of a disabled child, the cancer victim and horse lover.

I want to make it clear that Being Jordan is not a good book. You probably won’t want to read it. It is well ghosted and pacy, but the copious explicit accounts of sex with various footballers and pop stars is strangely uninteresting. This book has proved popular, I imagine, because it combines the global fascination with celebrity with the peculiarly British fascination with the Page Three Girl.

The Sun began Page Three in 1970, and it soon became an institution, as widely known and quintessentially British as the Bond movies, the Royal Family and queuing. Like the busty wooden carvings perched on the prow of seventeenth-century galleons, the Page Three Girl is the figurehead for the British tabloid press, symbolising its irreverence, explicitness and, some would say, misogyny. When Rebekah Wade became the first woman to edit The Sun in 2003, rumours circulated that this self-proclaimed feminist with flaming red hair would drop Page Three. She did not, however, because Page Three is the key to The Sun’s brand identity.

Katie Price recounts her difficulties finding love and her endless problems with men, who mistreat and abuse her. But what comes across most clearly is the complicated relationship between Katie and Jordan. She tries to maintain that Jordan is a persona only revealed at work. “Jordan is who I am when I’m working,” she says. The problem is that the distinction between the two personalities has become blurred.

Whenever she goes out partying with friends she plays the part of Jordan; she meets men as Jordan, and, in a form of identity striptease, gradually reveals the Katie Price who, she claims, “lies beneath.” She confesses that she fears men only want to “shag Jordan,” but she also makes it clear that she loves being Jordan. “I’ve never been one for the ‘natural look.’ I like the ‘fake look,’ she says.

The most obviously fake parts of her life are her famously silicon-enhanced breasts. She says that everyone tried to persuade her not to have implants, if for no other reason than it would spell the end of her career as a Sun Page Three Girl. In a bid to retain a somewhat spurious moral high ground based on an idea of ‘natural beauty,’ The Sun has a strict no-silicon policy, which means Jordan now only ever appears fully clothed in the UK’s best-selling daily newspaper. The more Jordan artificially enhances her body, the less keen she is to reveal it. She now rarely appears topless in any tabloids or Lad Mags. This coyness seems odd.

She defends her decision to have implants in the face of criticism by saying she can’t see the problem with them. They’re no different to tattoos or piercings, she claims, adding, “I draw the line at piercings.” In a blurring of the inside and the surface of the body, she presents surgery as surface ornamentation.

Like many celebrities, Jordan/Katie desperately tries to maintain a clear distinction between her public and private lives. Her breasts are largely in the public sphere. Like many glamour models, she made this most clear when she said she did not breast feed her baby. Her breasts are for public consumption only. In contrast, she expends much energy keeping the press out of her family and love life. She wants to have her cake and eat it, by courting the media to boost her profile, but then turning them away when she pleases.

I was secretly hoping that Being Jordan would reveal an independent and unapologetic woman who has cannily exploited the media to make a fortune. I was sorely disappointed. We come to realise that beneath the LA-style exterior is an old fashioned Brit who still buys into the Madonna/Whore Complex. At the end of the book Katie Price declares that it is time to move on: “Jordan is going to have to take a back seat,” while Katie launches her pop career. I suspect Katie will find she needs Jordan to stay on top.

Madonna’s advice to young women is to “dress like Britney Spears and think like me.” If she is to successfully reinvent herself, Jordan/Katie would be wise to take this advice and create some kind of postmodern persona that combines her two identities. Sadly, I don’t think she has the wherewithal to pull it off.