The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

The Many Faces of Ashley

Funny Hanna, I am having no trouble at all reconciling sweet middle-class baby-sitting Ashley with starving streetwise Ashley with elegant upscale hooker Ashley. They’re all clichés. At one point or another I had each of those Barbies in my collection. (Upscale hooker Barbie had the BEST shoes.)

I’m willing to double-down on Melinda’s post about these folks as vehicles for our own shifting sense of who we are. I think we are a culture of people who have learned to build an identity for every occasion. MySpace is not about who you really are, its theater. So, for that matter, is hooking. We had a version of this conversation back when we talked about the MySpace tragedy: We are all too busy constructing identities—perhaps in the event that a reality show lands in our laps.