(image c/o www.meltormes.wordpress.com)

In line with the #guestpostday stream on Twitter, I’d like to introduce something a bit different today – a guest post by a friend @parishspinster prompted by my blogpost on women and violence.
Please give it a read, and encourage her to keep writing…

In this age of instant celebrity, it’s becoming less and less likely that Noel Coward would have urged against child stardom in such an old fashioned medium as the stage. 
When you can post your angel’s every waking moment to Facebook and YouTube every child can be flashed around the world in less time than it takes to say ‘mind the paedophile’. 
Most parents are convinced of their offspring’s innate talent, genius and beauty.  With these springboards, there should be no limits to their achievements. 
So why do so many aspire to nothing higher than being ‘famous’?

Fame these days is a very transient state.  To reach the pinnacle, you need to have that something extra that will keep you in the public eye.  It’s hard to predict the alchemy that produces this longevity.  Still, not to worry.  You can always sell your soul to the media.  Others will follow your example.
There’s no need to be any good in your chosen area of fame.  Mediocre is fine.  Believe you can be a star and a star you will be.  Start acting like one now.  No time to waste.

Be orange.  Never mind that all your friends are orange too.  You know theirs came from sun beds or bottles but they will believe yours came from your jetset lifestyle. 
Straighten your hair until it doubles as a plumb line.  Handy for those little DIY jobs around the house, but your nail extensions are so long you can’t unzip yourself to go to the loo, let alone wield an electric drill.  Anyway, that is what men are for.  Whatever you do, be thin.  If you can’t be thin, hate yourself.  If you have daughters, make sure they learn to hate themselves too.  A girl is never too young for pierced ears, or for false eyelashes and lipstick for that matter.
Because a daughter is more than a human being in her own right.  She is the embodiment of your hotness.  She exists solely because you were so damn sexy that you got yourself impregnated.  So it’s only right to celebrate this fact, to dress her up in tiny tight tops with ‘kiss me, I’m gorgeous’ appliqued across the area her breasts will occupy in another decade or so, to see her totter across the room, her still-forming feet wedged into glittery stilettos.  It doesn’t get much cuter than that.  And it does no harm.  Everyone else does it.  Suri Cruise just looked so adorable.

And when she’s older she can go into HMV and buy a button badge that reads ‘Dirty Whore’.

And when she’s a bit older than that she can choose her wedding dress from the bridal shop next to the gentlemen’s club, the one advertising pole dancing lessons.  A nice bit of symbiosis, that.  Buy the dress and get the stag night special offer thrown in.  The boys’ll be okay, they can warm up at the pub over the road.  Erotic dancers every Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  £3.50 entry.  Over 18s only, of course.  Doesn’t matter about the advertising hoardings (or should that be whoredings?), they’ll have already seen worse on the internet.

Sorry, what did you say?  Treating women as sex objects?  What do you think all this was in aid of?  The tanning, the hair, the  nails, the clothes, the absolute horror of not being like everybody else.  This is image we have chosen.  We’re all porn stars now.

Fame is just around the corner.