Last week a friend asked me, apropos of the new issue of Paper magazine — which put Kim Kardashian and her most famous assets on prominent display on the cover and inside — why Kardashian is so famous. It is a good question. How is it that Kardashian, who was once an assistant standing a pace behind early reality star Paris Hilton, has not only become more famous than her former employer, but a genuinely significant cultural icon, all without doing any of the serious artistic work that it normally takes to make someone such a prominent subject of discussion?

In hawking perfume, beauty products and clothes, Kardashian is not so different from the actresses profiled in The New York Times this weekend who have turned to lifestyle businesses to bolster their incomes as the quality of available parts has declined, along with the salaries that come with those roles.

But unlike other women with similar businesses and similar profiles, Kardashian is not an actress, a showrunner, or a director, offering up her work for us to react to. And while Kardashian makes enormous amounts of money from her family’s show, the in-game purchasing functions of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, and all of her licensing deals, none of this lifestyle branding feel like her real job either, as it might be for Martha Stewart.

What Kim Kardashian is actually selling us is not episodes of television or sheath dresses or shiny hair, but opportunities for social positioning. By putting her life on display in a 24-hour, globally accessible gallery, and by guaranteeing that we will have plenty to say about it, she has fashioned herself into the perfectly optimised celebrity for the outrage era.

“She is variously seen as a feminist-entrepreneur-pop-culture-icon or a late-stage symptom of our society’s myriad ills: narcissism, opportunism, unbridled ambition, unchecked capitalism,” Amanda Fortini writes in the Paper profile of Kardashian, the text of which has attracted infinitely less attention than the photos that illustrated it and graced the magazine’s cover. “Social media has created a new kind of fame, and Kardashian is its paragon. It is a fame whose hallmark is agreeable omnipresence, which resembles a kind of evenly spread absence, soothing, tranquil and unobjectionable.”

But if Kardashian herself is a pleasant blank, that smooth expanse makes for a wonderful projection surface. And at a moment where everyone has opinions and technology lets everyone create their own content, she is a sufficiently savvy businesswoman to keep handing her audience plenty of inspiration.

The response to the Paper photo shoot is a perfect example of the infinite possibilities that seem to spin out from any action Kardashian takes.

For the person who wants to prove to himself that he is still capable of shock, the delighted expressions on her face might be proof of her shamelessness. For the observer who appreciates that Kardashian helped do away with the idea that a sex tape was the ruination of a public life, the Paper spread is just another way Kardashian is monetising the gawping fascination with what Fortini called “the flesh that carries the myth.”

There is what Heather Cocks at Go Fug Yourself described as the “Girl, you are someone’s mother” school of reaction, and the equally heartfelt response that motherhood need not be the end of a woman’s erotic life and enjoyment of her own body. If you want to quote Tina Fey, the Paper spread is the perfect time to page through your copy of Bossypants to Fey’s discussion of Kardashian and American body ideals. But if you are frustrated with the way Tina Fey (and other comediennes) are treated like serious social commentators, never fear! This is the perfect moment to suggest that maybe a conventionally attractive white woman shouldn’t get to pass judgement on another woman’s body.

Continuing with the focus on race, Blue Telumsa at the Grio notes the similarities between the Paper shoot and images of Saartjie Baartman, “whose large buttocks brought her questionable fame and caused her to spend much of her life being poked and prodded as a sexual object in a freak show.” And now we have looped all the way back to discussing the role of the posterior in modern American life and culture.

I do not mean to say that any of these reactions are illegitimate (though, really, pearl-clutchers, naked Kim Kardashian is old news), or that the critiques and conversations are uninteresting. But I am fascinated by how Kardashian has positioned her career and her private life in a way that seems designed to meet our needs to stake out where we stand.

When we look at Kardashian’s wedding to rapper Kanye West, do we see the racial and economic progress that allowed, as West put it, a “black American male from Chicago” to hold his “rehearsal dinner at Versailles and then got married in Florence with a view of the entire city”? Or just a really tacky party? Is letting their daughter North finger-paint on a wildly expensive Birkin handbag proof of obscene wastefulness? Or parental indulgence?

After the couple went viral with the video for ‘Bound 2’, featuring Kardashian topless on a motorcycle, did we think West had lost his mind and judgement as an artist? Or did we see them as clever, self-aware operators who knew how to drive a conversation? Are we above chasing fame in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood? Or unpretentious enough to recognise the pleasures of mass culture? Criticising or praising Kardashian has become a way we can explain our approaches to sex, to parenting, to money, to our own families.

Break The Internet may have seemed like an overreaching claim for a profile of Kim Kardashian. But there is a sly point to the way Paper phrased it — not as a description of what Kim Kardashian has done, but as a command to the rest of us. Kardashian gives us the fuel, and we go ahead and set the internet on fire, all on our own initiative.

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2014