So Paris Hilton has made a movie. A real one, with actors and everything. It’s called The Hottie and the Nottie, and it’s a comedy about a dweebie male who’s torn between the ravishing external beauty of the sizzling LA singleton Hilton (the “Hottie” of the title) and the kooky internal charm of her best friend (Christine Lakin, the “Nottie”).

The film, as you might have guessed, isn’t very good. It’s poorly written, lazily directed and only vaguely amusing. However, Hilton acquits herself amiably, with a heavy hint of self-deprecation. She does a good slow-mo sex icon and a fine spoilt party-going harridan. And, in one scene, sitting on a picnic blanket with her voice dropping to a whisper and her face stretched in an unselfconscious, half-lidded grin, she is positively luminescent.

But she is Paris Hilton, and so we must hate her. “She makes Bo Derek look like Meryl Streep,” hissed the New York Post’s review, adding: “Possibly cue cards were involved, although that would presume she can read.” The industry bible Variety announced that she’s “laughable, preening in frequent ‘Look-I’m-sexy!’ sequences”, while The Hollywood Reporter could only sneer: “She performs the ‘downward dog’ yoga position with particular skill.”

What these reviews have in common, first, is that they were all written by men of a certain age, men who seemingly respond to Hilton’s self-assured allure with a mixture of nervous aggression and leering derision. Secondly, their unthinking dismissal of Hilton as a screen talent is part of a wider preoccupation with Paris-bashing (incidentally, Hilton’s turn is better than anything that Scarlett Johansson has done in her past nine movies, or Kate Hudson’s past seven, or any role from Jessica Alba or Lindsay Lohan).

Hating Hilton, according to a recent article in the Chicago Sun-Times, “is a sign of lingering cultural sanity” (the same piece also referred to Hilton as “America’s Slut in Chief”). Similarly, a recent Newsweek profile of Hilton screamed “Could Anyone Be This Stupid?” And, while Guinness World Records has her as the World’s Most Overrated Celebrity, even the Los Angeles County sheriff who released Hilton early from her jail term last summer did so, he said, because her name and fame had incurred excessive punishment. The justice system itself, it seemed, had hated Hilton.

Yet when you hate Hilton, what exactly are you hating? A New York heiress educated in exclusive schools and raised to become a part-time model and full-time celebutante who earns more than £3.5 million a year (according to Forbes magazine) from product endorsement, public appearances, TV shows and sporadic pop tunes? Not to mention residual fees from a publicly available sex tape, released by her former boyfriend Rick Salomon, called One Night in Paris?

Then you’re wrong. The Paris Hilton that you hate is not a flesh-and-blood person. She is a self-created concept, an icon and a signifier for our times.

“I think every decade has an iconic blonde, like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana, and right now I’m that icon,” she said more than a year ago in these very pages. The comparisons were telling, and accurate, for she has undoubtedly become our Diana – one of the most hunted, most Googled, desired and objectified commodities on the planet. But crucially, unlike the Princess she has done it all herself. Like some MySpace savant she is fully in charge of her own exploitation. She is a YouTube princess for a generation raised onPop Idolspin-offs and the transformative powers of an omnipotent celebocracy.

Most importantly, Hilton is a postfeminist trailblazer. She wields her sexuality with pinpoint precision, just as she wears her cover-girl status with delicate irony. It’s always there, right in the centre of the semi-clad photo op – that smirk, that half-wink that says: “I know exactly what I’m doing, and you suckers are paying for it.”

Thus Paris-bashing is based on a certain sense of conservative powerlessness among the bashers. These reactionaries yearn for the old icons, the nonironic sexbombs and the unempowered sluts. They can’t see that Hilton is in a grand tradition of beguiling cultural potentates and fearless mould-breakers that includes silent stars such as Theda Bara and Louise Brooks and classical standards such as Barbara Stanwyck, Catherine Deneuve and Elizabeth Taylor. Hilton is reinventing the rules on the run, and she promises to endure for some time to come. And if you don’t like it, well, hey, there’s a new Scarlett Johansson movie due any day now.

The Hottie and the Nottie is released on March 28

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