Paris Hilton's Dystopian Motherhood as Metaphor
While Hilton is an exaggerated caricature, her actions are the logical conclusion of what our culture encourages in motherhood and it is NOT hot.
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This essay on Paris Hilton’s surrogacy and subsequent reality show around being mother to a newborn is one of our most popular pieces. LUCKY YOU!
When I was watching the show (wincing throughout) and while writing this post I tried to constantly use my vast reservoirs of empathy to give Paris some grace as she made one horrifying decision after the next.
Throughout the show, Paris took almost every opportunity to detach herself from her newborn—paying for surrogate, baby ‘nurses’, nannies,— anything to avoid the pain and transformation motherhood brings about. I tried to ‘center’ her past trauma and use it as frame to understand her inability to form a traditional bond with her baby.
But a year later, I hereby revoke a bit of the grace I gave her to shame her for working non-stop. Yes, you read that right, I’m fully shaming Paris Hilton for being a working mom!! I watched her on her last reality show feel guilt for leaving her newborn baby less than 48 hours after she brought him home. She justified it by saying that the photo shoot she was attending was “scheduled before baby got here”.
Look, millions of American women bemoan the hard reality of sending their kids to daycare for financial reasons. I’ve listened to the heartbreak in the voices of these women (it used to be me) and cursed the patriarchy countless times. With the release of the rebooted Simple Life with Paris and Nicole, she can’t use the “well this was scheduled before he was born!” excuse anymore. Paris, why do you keep working? You’re a millionaire!!!! You now have TWO beautiful babies at home! Although my millennial blood is screaming for this reunion, I can’t continue to make excuses for her. Enjoy this previously paywalled article!
If you’re a millennial you know who Paris Hilton is. She’s epitome of the millennial low rise, bleach blonde, peek-a-boo thong aesthetic.
For me she represented what I should look like to be “hot” in high school. To my dismay, with my thick and curly brown hair, curvier body and inability to wear low rise jeans without my body forming a muffin top this was an aesthetic ideal that I could never achieve.
Hilton is many things but chief among them is a savvy business woman--did you know that she’s a middle eastern perfume magnate? She’s also a public relations performance artist who knew that her clueless heiress with a pocket chihuahua and criminal driving record image needed a rebrand. Hilton has always had complete control of any of her creative projects but she loosened the reins a little to participate in a YouTube documentary that detailed her traumatic experiences in hellish reformatories. The documentary has racked up 76 million views and successfully added a level of depth to a woman who was typically considered a pop culture punchline.
The rebrand continues in her Paris in Love reality show which chronicles her marriage and using a surrogate to have a baby. After binging TOO many soul-shredding episodes of the show I can finally say I have something now in 2023 that Paris Hilton does not have: the knowledge that pregnancy, birth and motherhood is a transformative, spiritual journey that forces you into the deepest, most painful personal development journey of your life—and there’s no buying your way out of that.
Hilton’s journey into motherhood is a modern dystopian horror story that’s over-the-top with it’s details but the baseline theme of Hilton’s behavior reflects the disconnected way so many women approach motherhood today. Paris Hilton as Mother is a macrocosm.
Hilton announced that her first son, Phoenix was born via surrogate in January of 2023 and a second baby, her daughter, London, came 11 months later--that’s two babies, from two different surrogates, in less than one year. That means Hilton rented the bodies of two women at the same time--more on that later.
I found myself physically recoiling watching the footage of Hilton’s baby being wheeled in immediately after being born. All I could think about was the surrogate mother, sitting there bleeding and leaking with empty arms.
In the recovery room, Hilton keeps her hands covering her chest as she quizzically gazes over the baby’s bassinet. The nurse announces that her newborn’s has already been changed and she responds,
“That’s hot.”
Maybe you guessed it, but Paris Hilton has suffered a lot of trauma. She has also access to an unfathomable amount of money that has given her such a rarefied and insulated existence that even the primal pull of a quivering, pink infant can’t quite puncture the bubble of wealth. This is a bad combination of circumstances for all the players.
The first problem here is, of course, the surrogacy itself. We here at the Radical Moms Union, are largely opposed to all forms of surrogacy (even under “valid” circumstances, not just the rich not wanting to gain weight). Without diving into a whole thing about it, at its core surrogacy commodifies and then destroys the motherbaby dyad. There is a hormonal dance that flows back and forth between the dyad, surrogacy stops it short with possibly devastating consequences. A contract or a paycheck to ameliorate that a baby is being ripped away from the only person on earth whose body was designed to protect and nourish them. It’s bad for women, mothers, and babies. We recognize that most women who use a surrogate do so as a last option after a typically long, and painful process that comes with many losses. Still that doesn’t change the fact that we find the entire enterprise of renting a woman’s body for pregnancy to be utterly unethical (to say the least).
Next problem, Hilton expresses a sentiment, I think, many women share: "It’s just the physical part of doing it. I’m just so scared… childbirth and death are the two things that scare me more than anything in the world.” While many of us at one point felt something similar, particularly in our pre-crunchy days. Hilton attributes much of her dread to the traumas she suffered as a teen and young adult.
In her YouTube documentary Hilton recounts psychological and physical abuse she endured at the Provo Canyon School, a reform institution for wayward teens, “It was all day screaming in my face, yelling at me, continuous torture.”
The children were forced to take pills, something Hilton claims she tried to get out of and was “put in solitary confinement for 20 hours with no clothes, food or water.” Hilton also alleges that she suffered sexual assaults disguised as medical “examinations” from staffers. In her memoir, Hilton revealed she was drugged and raped at the age of 15 by a man she met a a mall, and also that she had an abortion at the age of 20.
All of these factors combined to convince Hilton that she needed to avoid being vulnerable in a medical situation, so she used a surrogate. Like we said, not ideal but rich people be rich people-ing. Surely she wanted this baby badly and will now spend much of her time working on her trauma and trying to undo the damage of the broken attachment by spending as much time with him as possible, RIGHT???
Not so fast, Hilton returns home from the hospital (wheeled out in a wheelchair for some reason) to none other than her very own “baby nurse”, who surely takes care of her son all night long while his parents get a full 8 hours sleep.
The following day she goes on a full day shoot for Glamour Mag when her son is 48 hours old.
In a later episode, it’s revealed that Hilton had not changed Phoenix’s diaper. On day 32 Hilton makes her first attempt. She fumbles with the diaper, trying to figure out which is the front and which is the back while the baby nanny stands in the background with a look that says “this bitch….”
I almost forgot! In order to ‘prepare’ for the baby’s arrival on the day the surrogate goes into labor, she goes to Party City and spends $785 on baby shower decor so baby Phoenix can “feel the vibes.”
This may all be very easy to brush off as the shenanigans of weirdo heiress. “The rich have always paid other people to raise their babies, Paris also paid someone to have hers,” was a comment I saw on TikTok. You could also scoff at how sad and empty the delusion of someone buying decorations from Party City to prepare for a baby might. Who in their right mind would think THAT is what you should be worried about??
Despite living in two totally different realities, one reserved for the mega rich and one for everyone else, there’s much more commonalities than differences.
She has a surrogate and we have the epidurals and c-sections in order to avoid the unknowns of physiological birth.
She has a baby nanny and we have the robot bassinets.
She buys frivolous decor at Party City so her baby can feel the vibes, we spend thousands on a vibe-y nursery we see on instagram.
She doesn’t change diapers for 32 days and we buy electronic socks that tell us if our baby is alive so we can put him in a room down the hall at night.
Hilton “gives her authority away to the baby nanny” but it’s normalized for us to give away our authority to doctors and “experts” rather than our own intuition.
While Hilton is an exaggerated caricature, her actions are the logical conclusion of what our culture encourages in motherhood: outsourcing, consumerism, convenience over biology, experts over instincts, separation over attachment.
The biggest difference is that Hilton has more money to outspend and outrun her trauma. In the show, Hilton sees a therapist for the first time. The therapist notes that she’s worried that the baby nurse/nanny will become the child’s primary attachment figure. Additionally, she says that individuals who have been through trauma like Hilton’s already have trouble forming an attachment to their children. She mentions that Hilton may be unconsciously not attaching to her baby because she’s scared to bond and have it be ripped away from her.
At some point, Hilton may realize there’s no bypassing your trauma in motherhood, because that shit is going to rear its ugly head at some point. And when you don’t deal with your demons, you manufacture generational trauma. In motherhood, you have to deal with uncomfortable emotions, experiences from your childhood that pop up that you’ve tried to repress, and work through trauma in order to be a present, connected and capable parent.
Parenting is nothing but the expert level of some sick and twisted self-help video game and those who choose not to play pass on the same traumas and mental health issues they are carrying themselves.
In the opening episode, her favorite dog has gone missing and she solves that emotional quandary by revealing she preserved the dog’s stem cells and has the ability to clone her dog in order to just get a new one. That may work for dogs but not for babies. You can’t effectively buy your way out of the more uncomfortable feelings and realities of motherhood without negatively impacting your baby.
I believe that Hilton wants to be a mother and have a family, but I’m not entirely sure she knows exactly what that entails. She speaks of pregnancy like it’s a fun game, of babies as if they’re accessories similar to the dogs that fit in her purse. She says things like “I have my boy and now I want a little girl to make the perfect family”. She sounds like a little girl playing house. And to a degree I sympathize with her desire to skip all the hard parts and just go wild at Party City, pay the nanny, and sleep 8 hours. But of course, the hard parts--up all night nursing, afternoon naps on a pile of unfolded laundry, caring for a kiddo with a fever-- are some of the most tender and indelible moments of motherhood. Do I think, in a culture like ours, if more women had Hilton’s means to spend their way out of the hard parts of motherhood, that they’d do it? You bet I would.
Dude, this whole thing makes me so sad. Of course, the kid misses out the most, but Paris doesn't realize that she's ALSO missing out hugely.
This attitude that kids are accessories and that being a mother is like a hat you can take on and off is an ick of mine. She IS a caricature but her mindset represents how the majority of modern mothers approach their duty. I wrote about this, maternal detachment and the crowd went wild, throwing tomatoes and ofc, attacking me...all for observing a phenomenon as a sociologist. So, the cognitive dissonance and denial is real.
This is one reason you'll find me lamenting over all the tech 'advancements' that Americans overuse and wrongfully prioritize. The vast majority of these gadgets are money pits that just help us all be lazier, more entitled and somewhat useless, IMO.
Paris was not born to a surrogate herself, but she clearly missed out on that vital attachment that babies need for normal development. My guess is that she was raised by a series of nannies and caregivers who may have been paid well, but you can't pay someone to love your baby. She does not know how to be a mother because she never had one herself. (This is not any sort of excuse for her appalling neglect of her own children.)
Surrogacy is the deliberate creation of a new human to satisfy the wants of adults who don't care about the trauma this causes babies (and of course, who cares about the "gestational carriers"; they get paid, don't they?) I have written extensively about the many harms of surrogacy including here: https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/telling-it-like-it-is-without-the
This man spent his life studying the mother/baby dyad and he knew what causes maladjusted babies: https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/donald-woods-winnicott It's women like Paris who are happy with the role of "mother" in her play pretend life.