Celebrity Culture's Sexy Problem Children

Lindsay Lohan’s teens and twenties amount to but one example of a Hollywood cliche: the woman who can’t be trusted with herself. In this analysis of that trope, “the sexy problem child,” and Lohan’s particular “deviation” from its usual course, Tess Edmonson tells us “a parable ultimately about women and power, often bearing associations with desire, value, narcotics, mental-health pathology, sex, celebrity, and control.”

The infantilization of adult women celebrities has another exemplar in Britney Spears, who in 2007 was placed under “conservatorship” by a court ostensibly concerned for her well-being, legally rendering her only the rights of a child. And yet the flipside of this perceived helplessness is desirability, says Edmonson — a fragile, naive woman who needs to be on suicide watch is apparently the kind spectators find most compelling on-screen or stage.

But Lohan, for one, went off-script in a surprising way. She read the Quran and met the Turkish president, seems to have absorbed a new accent in her speech, has taken up a vague humanitarian interest in the plight of refugees. Is she undermining the various roles society allows of its famous women? Or simply absorbing them all?