The Celebrity Idea
Remember how when you were a kid your parents told you they never did drugs, had pre-marital sex, cussed at their parents, whatever? Now, remember growing up and realizing that was a lie, because NO ONE is perfect. We grow up and realize our parents aren’t perfect, isn’t it about time we grow up and realize these celebrities aren’t perfect, either?
I recently read some internet-press about Jennifer Love Hewitt and her inconsistent statements about dieting and body image. I’m not going to link to that particular article, because to even take a shot at Ms. Hewitt is tired and cheap these days and this site shouldn’t be getting more traffic from it. Female body image is a topic that is very very important to me, I think it is a lynch-pin of feminism in our current social climate, but I also believe that crucifying a person for having complex feelings about it the way the majority of women do these days is completely reprehensible, if not part of the original problem. She is a woman who has been seriously brain fucked by all the crazy tabloid headlines because she had the unfortunate experience of growing up in this business. If she’s got body-image issues, they’ve definitely been constructed by the swarming media, who have been obsessed with the shape of her butt for years now. All I see is a woman trying to get a handle on her life. She’s expected to be honest about her body-image problems AND be a good role-model, and her uneven statements are a reflection of that RIDICULOUS expectation.
This is my fundamental problem with tabloids, blogs like these, rumor rags, ect. I don’t think that the people in this business consider what they do profiting at the expense of another human being, simply because, in our national eye, these people are not classified as human beings. They are commodities, belongings, mythical beasts even. I sometimes wonder if we imagine ANYONE else as similarly complete, complicated, and diverse as we imagine ourselves. In Psychology, this is referred to as an “attribution error” (notice the word error) An attribution error refers to the phenomena of perception in which we are more likely to attribute the actions of another to personality traits rather than situational factors, for example, if I cut off someone in traffic, my perception is that I do so because I am in a hurry or lost, or because my passenger is noisy and my attention is affected by my surroundings, conversely, if someone else cuts me off in traffic, my perception dictates that it must be because they are a self-centered jerk.
Another example: If Brittany Spears jumps in a car with her baby on her lap and unwisely forgoes a car seat, it is because she is a horrible mother and an irresponsible person. If you or I jump in a car with our baby on our lap, , it is because there is a family emergency across town, or because the car seat is broken and we have no other way to drive to buy a new one, or because we have very little experience parenting and no one ever told us the potential consequences of this action, or because we are tired and emotionally drained and frightened about the potential consequences of being harassed in public by photographers while our child is present.
The most publicized type of attribution error is a stereotype or prejudice, but we talk much less about these one-on-one crimes, the ones we commit on people we don’t necessarily know every single day. Usually, these crimes are relatively harmless, they don’t hurt anyone but the perpetrator, and even then the fall out is usually just a pretty sour mood, but in the case of celebrities, the damage is much more consequential.
What’s interesting about this is that if we all stopped mythologizing these people, it’s possible that the “celebrity” as we’ve come to know it, would cease to exist. While that would devastate the tabloid market and bankrupt the celebrity sex tape business, I sincerely doubt any one of us would be wistfully nostalgic for the days when Paris Hilton latest outfit was national news. So why can’t we pull ourselves out of this? What is it about the celebrity myth that’s so appealing? Are our realities so dismal that we can’t survive without these symbolic golden calves of perfection?
