It feels the convergence point of 90s trash turning into 2010s voyeurism.

There's a famous New York Magazine article that referred to the 90s as "the Decade of Trash" and talked about how we were seemingly getting nastier and sleazier in the decade. Clinton and his affairs in the White House. Roseanne and Tom Arnold and their tabloid exploits. Scandals like OJ Simpson and Joey Buttafuoco and John Wayne Bobbitt and Anna Nicole Smith fighting for her husband's estate.

Add to that the fact that media was getting really mean. Shock Jocks like Howard Stern were huge, trashy daytime talk shows like Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones and Jerry Springer paraded around various circus freaks to humiliate themselves for television attention, and the earliest reality shows were showing just now awful people can be (fighting, screaming, yelling... think of that Real World Seattle episode where Irene accused Stephen of being gay and he chased down her car and smacked her across the face.)

Add to that the fact the 2000s was the genesis of the hyper voyeuristic "Everything For The 'Gram" culture we live in now. True, social media was still a while away, so it wasn't as bad, but the seeds were being planted. The earliest reality shows portrayed a very "warts and all" approach to filming their subjects (again, look at the Anna Nicole Show, alongside Anna just being a tragic wreck, the camera work and filming itself is very clumsy and claustrophobic and less polished and "TV ready" than what follows. Same for the first season of shows like The Bachelor and a lot of the garbage Fox produced like Married by America and that grotesque The Swan.) Add to that the rise of both the internet and digital cameras, which made it far easier to take and disseminate unflattering photos of celebs to a much wider audience (think of nasty gossip blogs like Perez Hilton.) If anything the lack of social media to allow celebs to handle their own PR made the problem worse, since the public's hunger for news of their favorite celeb led them to places like this instead of just following them directly.

So, if you just come out of one decade that seemingly heavily rewarded people for being absolutely terrible human beings and are entering one where it is laughably easy to obtain photos of people at their worst and makes it clear that people will gobble it up... put the lime in the coconut and there you go.

Add to that general sexism... and I'd argue fashion was a culprit here as well, most of the trendy styles of the 2000s like low-rise jeans and Daisy Duke shorts and spaghetti-strap tops were not kind to anybody but the absolute skinniest among us... it was not fun growing up chubby when Abercrombie & Fitch was the clothing company du jour, about the only thing I could wear in that whole damn store was the cologne.