Fifty Million Dollars of Eyeballs

Satire, based on: BBC News: Kylie Jenner’s debut at Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in $50m bra sparks mixed reaction

I’ve been that fool. Let me say it first, so nobody has to say it for me.

Here is the news, told straight. The BBC reports that reality TV star and makeup mogul Kylie Jenner walked out at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show wearing the famous Fantasy Bra, made of 18-carat gold and 4,410 diamonds and priced at $50 million. That honor has usually gone to a veteran supermodel. Plenty of fans cheered. Plenty of others called it “pure disrespect to real models” and said the show had gone “from iconic glamour to an influencer circus.” A marketing expert told the BBC the brand picked whoever would “bring the most eyeballs.”

Now, I want to be fair to everybody involved, because I used to sell eyeballs for a living. Mine were a much smaller herd. At my peak I had 412,000 followers, and a skin cream company once paid me $600 and a free bathrobe to cry about my pores. That was the fourth take. The first three, I wasn’t crying hard enough to move product.

So I know what that expert meant, and I’ll decode it for the folks at the feed store. “Eyeballs” means you. It means people looking at a screen at eleven o’clock at night when they ought to be asleep. In my old line of work, you are not a person. You are a unit of attention, sold by the thousand, like fence posts.

Here’s the arithmetic, which Mama taught me to do before anybody taught me to pose. Fifty million dollars, divided by 4,410 diamonds, comes to a little over eleven thousand dollars a diamond. That is about what my cousin’s whole tobacco allotment used to bring in a good year, back when there were allotments. And this diamond does not even get to do anything. It just sits there being looked at. Which, I’ll grant you, is also the whole job of an influencer. #relatable. Sorry. Old habits. I’m healing.

The supermodels are sore about it, and I understand why. For years a woman had to earn that bra. She walked runways in shoes like fence pickets, she starved through fashion week, and she smiled while somebody yelled at her in French. Then the company looked at its spreadsheet and found out that being looked at is a talent all by itself, and somebody else already had more of it.

But don’t feel too sorry for the company, either. Victoria’s Secret didn’t get fooled. It knew just what it was buying. It put fifty million dollars of gold on the most-watched woman it could find and let the whole internet fuss about it for free. The angry comments sold that show as well as the happy ones. Believe me, I know. My best month ever was the month everybody hated my kitchen.

Take them at their word, then. If the best model is now whoever has the most followers, follow it on out. The best singer will be whoever has the most followers. The best surgeon too. Someday a young man will be on the operating table, look up and ask the doctor where she went to medical school. “I didn’t,” she’ll say, “but I’ve got nine million followers and a ring light.” Ring light don’t lie, but it sure flatters.

Here’s my confession and my moral, both in one. The fools in this story aren’t the models, and they’re not the girls typing mean things at midnight. The fools are the ones who figured out that our attention was worth more than diamonds, and then went and paid us for it in bathrobes.

So go to bed, honey. Put the phone face down. That’s the one thing they can’t sell to anybody.

Tammy Jo Glitterman, Celebrity Correspondent — logged off and loving it