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‘These reporters who don't know anything about me look like idiots,” snorts Tila Tequila, a tiny 4-foot-11 inch person who weighs 97 pounds.

Ms. Tequila – who was born Tila Nguyen and reportedly earned her stage name after a bad experience with tequila in high school – is perched on the edge of a sofa in the basement of the MTV building in Toronto with her hands in her pockets, a saucy ask-me-anything look on her 26-year-old face.

Tough as a street fighter, the “It Girl” of MySpace (whose friends number more than two million) equips herself with retaliatory answers and a throwaway ha-ha-ha laugh to knife the criticism that has risen up as she breaks into mainstream culture.

Her new dating reality show, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, made its debut on MTV in early October.

The premise is that two million Internet friends have still left her lonely. She wants to find The One, from a group of 16 straight men and 16 lesbians.

The hook is that she is bisexual – a revelation she has saved for this show – and the mood is decidedly low-class.

Highlights that include fisticuffs, big bleached hair, women in bikinis and high heels, and some leering dude who enthuses, “I've never been with an Asian chick, but I like Chinese food,” take the show's trash entertainment to a whole new level.

The mainstream press have heralded Ms. Tequila's arrival with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. “When exactly in the Warholian arc of fame did we arrive at a point where we create celebrities of people so little accomplished that they make Paris Hilton look like Marie Curie?” worried a New York Times critic last week.

“Oh, they're just blabbing on,” Ms. Tequila says of her detractors. “And I think, ‘You don't know anything. You're, like, old.'”

It is a shrewd put-down. Age is the hot button of our age. She knows that if nothing else, she is young and sexy, and a savvy marketer on the Internet, the medium that an older generation struggles to grasp but on which she releases her self-published rap-like music, posts her sexy pictures, sells her clothing items and writes her blog.

What “old people” don't get, she says, is that, “I represent the majority of people out there, because their stories are exactly like mine. So I feel I am a voice and a platform for everyone who is going through hard times and who is misunderstood.”

Her narrative is the redemptive American one. With their Vietnamese parents, she and her two older siblings arrived in the United States from Singapore when she was one year old. They settled in Houston, where they lived in what she says was “a cult.… They said it was a temple. There were strict rules, and every time you left, you had to tell them where you were going.… It was like jail.”

The family eventually left, but by that time, Ms. Tequila was on the path of rebellion. She joined gangs, and at 16, ran off to the drug culture of New York.

But she fought her way back on top. “At the end of the line, it's like you're moping around with no money left, and you're just doing drugs, and you're just like, this is gross.” She went back home and finished high school.

She tried a few things – she worked as a scantily clad car model and for a time hosted the Pants-Off Dance-Off television show that features amateur strippers undressing to music videos – but it wasn't until she got kicked off Friendster, which had a 500-friend limit, and joined MySpace in 2003 that she became every schoolboy's naughty dream girl.

With her large head, wide-set eyes, tiny body and big breasts, there's a cartoon quality to her – a perfect product for teenage consumption. She is more watchable online than she is in person. Best as a fantasy, when her audience is prevented from seeing her entirety; she seems too tiny and too abrasive in person to be widely popular.

But this unconventionality, which made her an underdog, has been her prime motivator. If Americans seem horrified that their beloved narrative as a country of limitless possibility has created her brand of dubious celebrity, then her response is to shove that reality in their face.

“My drive to make it was my anger,” she says, flipping her dark hair from her face. “I was angry at the world. Everybody kept talking down to me. My parents just wanted me to be a doctor and nothing else. And if I was modelling, people were like, ‘She's so ugly and she's so short.' Blah blah blah,” she sniffs dismissively. “My whole life has been a big ball of criticism.”

Her currency is her rawness, she says. “A lot of my fans feel, like, this is raw. This is her unedited. This is honest.”

Which is delusional because for all her protestations that she is real and people should understand her story, Ms. Tequila deliberately keeps herself unknowable, always changing the image of who she is.

Perhaps she recognizes that she is a virtual person, some being that others look to not for her realness, but rather, as a simulacrum of a person. She becomes whoever she thinks an audience wants her to be, and it is never complex. She picks a stereotype and embodies it, however briefly.

Eight years ago, she was a nude Playboy model, arching her back and opening her mouth, slack-jawed, in that tired offering of male fantasy. On MySpace, she developed an almost retro appeal as a calendar pin-up girl, a flavour of the month, transmogrifying from a punk with a pink Mohawk to a slinky siren in an evening dress to an innocent girl next door, thumbs pulling down her jeans to reveal underwear with the words “I Love You” on the front.

In her music videos she plays the sexual bad girl, with big hair and tiny clothing, shrieking, “I just don't want to love, I just want to get screwed.”

In the interview, she portrays herself as a Hollywood megastar. “I'm just going to keep building my empire, clothing, my music, books and then my life story, which I will turn into a movie and in which I will star,” she proclaims with laughing bravado.

When asked who she is, beneath all those layers, she offers another guise. “I'm a very simple girl, a down-home, southern girl from Texas. I just want to be in love for the rest of my life and raise a family.”

Well, okay. Tila Tequila, in person, feels as made up as her name. At her core, it seems, she is empty except for defiance, and part of that bullying stance is to remain everything and nothing, a moving target of personae, so that no one in the backstabbing world of fame can pin her against a wall to inflict a wound.