Battle of the Attention Whores

It's the title bout between the two most accomplished social climbers of the century: Baldwin v Markle. Who will take the belt?

Gentle reader, I bring you this week some serious news from the land of the Internet.

In the last few weeks we have been witnessing an epic battle between two formidable forces, two female phenoms of celeb culture, two absolute queens of marrying up: Hilaria Baldwin and Meghan Markle. They have podcasts, television shows, books and jars of jam to shill — I mean share with the world. So they are generously offering their pearls of wisdom, their hard-earned life experience, their cooking tips and secrets to a good marriage, with us, the plebes.

Which one of them will be crowned Queen of the Attention Whores? That’s a tough call. But I — a longtime observer of female behaviour — will take a shot at deciding. In the red corner, Hilaria Baldwin. In the blue corner, Meghan Markle! Let’s get ready to ruuuuuuuuuuuumble.

I am an aficionado of female celebrity culture and I make no apologies for that. But in case you spend your free time in other ways, let me explain. The most important thing to know is, women who have the good fortune to be famous, beautiful and rich, must strive to show the world that they also have inner beauty, and spiritual wealth. This is a time-honoured rule. If they don’t, they will be hated for being outrageous hussies, and get the mal occhio.

When you are rich, famous, and beautiful it’s a very fine line between projecting your virtue onto an adoring public, and crossing over into public scorn and being mocked. Only women who can really read the room will achieve it. The rest will be deemed attention whores. And that’s the arena in which Baldwin and Markle meet.

Pound-for-pound, these two are evenly matched. They are both bony brunettes of indeterminate ethnicity — not too white, not too dark.

And of course they parlayed their various assets into matrimony with very rich and very famous men. Men who were both safely ensconced in rarified worlds: Harry, the British royal family. Alec, the New York A-list acting scene. Neither of these men needed women to elevate their profiles. And yet, here they are, seemingly enjoying (?) their new roles as tired-looking appendages to very ambitious and fame hungry women.

First into the ring: Hilaria Baldwin, formerly known (or not known, as the case may be) as Hillary Thomas. She was simple girl from Boston who spent a lot of time doing yoga and perfecting her Spanish accent, because growing up her family vacationed there. I’ve followed her on Instagram for some time. She used to contort her tiny, lingerie-clad body — with inexplicably huge and firm boobs — into impossible yoga poses, often while cooing over one of her many infants.

Major fame-whore points for this. Women instinctively intuit that fertility is power. It’s queen behaviour. A woman who pops out kid after kid is an object of awe to other women. To do so while also being sexy and rail thin (except, again, for those aforementioned knockers) will immediately put you in an even higher category. However! This is a risky move. You want women looking at your perfect life with longing and admiration, not hating you for being such a shameless show-off. Hilaria has clearly accepted this risk. Go big or go home, right?

Since those yoga pose days, though a few things — ahem — happened. A PR crisis and legal firestorm caused by her husband, who hasn’t made a goddamn movie in years, took the sheen off her carefully curated image. So she goes into overdrive with a book (two books if you count one she did with her 11 year old kid about skin care, or something) and a reality television show, inviting all the world into the fun chaos of the Baldwin home. While I have no doubt that having your husband accidentally end someone’s life is, very stressful, Hilaria was canny enough to recognise an opportunity when she saw it. Now was her chance not to just be that lady doing a vinyasa in lace panties and heels. It was her chance to be the virtuous, long-suffering, brave, and caring wife.

As she says in her book, Manual Not Included, “I am very caring.”

So, extra points to Hilaria for being so enterprising.

But I watched 15 minutes of the tv show, and it’s an elaborate humiliation ritual meted out to her husband. Apart from shooting someone, I’m not sure what Alec did to Hilaria that was so bad, that it deserves such treatment. Nonetheless, Hilaria refuses to let her sons ride in the car with their dad, despite his request that they be allowed to do so. She makes him eat the pizza that their youngest child has thrown on the patio. “She changed, and she started calling all the shots,” he says with weary resignation, as she denies him what he wants for the umpteenth time.

To give them credit, the Baldwins are fairly upfront about their deeply uncomfortable dynamic. And lots of people hate Alec, so they probably enjoy watching it. Smart move?

Nonetheless it’s something akin to torture, watching Alec Baldwin try to overcome his rage-parenting Long Island Irish roots. He says things like “that’s not helpful,” as his many children run riot. I mean, I guess it’s better than that time he called his first daughter a “thoughtless little pig,” when she was 11 years old, but at least that was the authentic Alec.

The show does give Hilaria the opportunity to show her maternal side, weeping after the birth of her first baby. And how naturally the Spanish language comes to her, whispering through tears to her newborn “non te preocupe, estas bien.” This is Hilaria pulling off the absolute power move of the American upper middle class mom: ostentatiously speaking Spanish to her Anglo child. I have seen this done many times.

And her spiritual side! The adversity they share is the perfect excuse for her to come over all Catholic. She hands him a trinket for their anniversary: “This is St Michael, the saint of protection,”she tells him, sounding very much like my Puerto Rican friend’s mom. “I think one of the most important things, when we are facing challenges, is to know that there’s something bigger than us, regardless of what you believe. Because, faith will guide us out of this dark period.”

The show is an obvious ploy for sympathy for Alec Baldwin, following the death of Halyna Hutchins, the 42 year old woman he accidentally shot on a movie set, who left behind a young son. But Hilaria is so unpleasant to watch that my husband, who was in and out of the room as I played clips of the show, said, “well, now I feel sorry for him, so it’s working.”

Mega points to Hilaria for that one.

So, I hear you ask, how is Meghan Markle going to come at the lean, clean, be-titted fighting machine that is Hilaria Baldwin?

Well, Meghan is a different type of fighter, but she has many tricks up her billowy sleeve. First off, she is a duchess, which immediately puts her above Hilaria.

And while Hilaria is going for a let-it-all-hang-out strategy, Meghan strives for demure, and ever so thoughtful.

There was the story a couple of weeks ago, about David and Victoria Beckham’s estranged son Brooklyn going to the Markle’s house for dinner. “Sources” — maybe with the initials MM? — told People Magazine: “Brooklyn and Nicola had a wonderful time and found Harry and Meghan to be particularly kind, caring and generous.”

This lady does not do things by halves. People don’t just have a good time at her house, do they? They have THE BEST TIME. I, for one, always refer to the hosts of dinner parties I attend as “particularly kind, caring, and generous.” It’s just how real friends be.

Where Hilaria fights with paparazzi, or barks at her husband in red carpet interviews, Meghan never slips. She never founders. She “daydreams about rosé cupcakes”. She always delivers the one-two punch of love and light.

But the thing about Meghan is that she always, as Maureen Callahan said, “needs to prove to us that she’s winning.”

In order to win this heavyweight bout, though, Meghan had to add some new technique to put some extra power behind her punch. So she went with Girl Boss. That’s right, M (as her husband adorably calls her) is now enlightening us on how to do business, with a podcast entitled, Confessions of a Female Founder. You see, she recently started selling jam on the Internet. So basically, she’s a corporate titan.

Here is some of her invaluable advice: “running a business is a lot like gardening. Some seasons are for blooming, others are for planting seeds, but most of the work, especially early on, is tending to the soil, it’s building the foundation…this is especially true when you are bootstrapping a business. Running a business independent of any investors, private equity, VC - you are doing it on your own, you have to be so intentional and careful with all your choices. And you can’t expect a harvest to happen overnight!”

I was playing this in the kitchen when my husband walked in and grumbled: “The only bootstraps she knows are Gucci.”

But never mind his opinion. This battle is not for the hearts and minds of hard scrabble men. It’s for us, the women. And Meghan knows that. So she gives practical advice to female entrepreneurs and really leads by example. You mustn’t let your own needs go unmet! “Last week, even though I had lots of meetings, I made it a point to go and see a Broadway show.” The woman lives in California.

In an interview in late April, M gabs with one of her besties, Jamie Kern Lima, a woman who actually did found a very successful business. “I love how your eyes are sparkling right now,” Lima says to Markle. The Duchess then reads a letter that her “kids” “wrote” to her: “We love your cooking. We love your pancakes. We love love love your hugs. You’re the best mummy and we love youuuuuuu.”

Look, I am a woman. Many of my friends are women. My mother is a woman, as are my aunts. I know what we are like. We all think our kids are adorable. We can be mutually reinforcing, supportive, and loving to each other. For example, I have noticed that when I join the Radical Center for their Monday livestream, we spend five minutes telling each other how great we each look. In fact, almost every time I meet a friend I open with, ‘you look great!’ or ‘I love your hair!’ And I’m a right-wing harpy with totally unacceptable opinions! It’s just one of the great things about being female.

But just as doing yoga in the altogether risks alienating human females with flab who struggle to touch their toes, going all in on the perfect mumsy sweetie pie routine also can get you in trouble. Namely, for being an insufferably smug twat.

The Duchess clearly thinks her signature moves of gratitude, being present, and knowing you are enough are going to win her the title of Most Worthy Attention Whore. But it could backfire and instead provoke seething, quiet rage of normal women, who maybe don’t need life lessons from a woman who literally had a princess wedding in a castle. On the other hand, strivers, wannabe girl bosses and social media influencers will lap it up.

Meghan does get a few extra points for being far nicer to Harry than Hilaria is to Alec.

But even though she’s nice to him on camera, one wonders what goes on behind closed doors. After all, Harry was recently in the papers for wandering up to random doors in London and ringing the bell, mournfully looking for old friends who had moved to Spain. And in what sounded alarmingly like a hostage statement, Harry said upon the launch of her jam brand: “I am so happy for my wife. I fully support everything she has done, and everything she continues to do.”

Hilaria flaunts the cracks in her marriage. Meghan papers over them.

But are Markle’s tactics working? Even SNL is making fun of the Duchess. Yikes! In female celeb world, this is the equivalent to a brutal left hook. Pretty, rich, famous, women cannot handle being made fun of — that’s what fat girls are for!

This is the weakness of the Markle method: she tries so hard that she attracts the kiss of death — being cringe. See, for example, this gauzy Instagram post of her doing a floral arrangement, which she inexplicably paired with the song ‘Doin’ It’ by LL Cool J. Sample lyric: “I need a rough neck nigga, Mandingo in the sack, who ain’t afraid to grab my hair and spank me from the back.”

That’s not on brand, Meghan. It does not pair with rosé cupcakes.

Hilaria, while being deeply unpleasant, somehow manages to avoid being cringe. And her shamelessness is unparalleled because she managed to make the death of an innocent woman, all about poor (but still hot) Hilaria. But on the other hand, there is simply no competing with Meghan: a C-list actress who got a spare prince to marry her, and now tries to convince us she’s the second coming of Martha Stewart, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Sheryl Sandberg rolled into one. I call it a draw.

Hats off to both – true champs.