Boy meets girl, girl falls in love, blah-blah-blah.
Let me be clear with you from the beginning. This is not that kind of story.
My name is Cait, and I live in the great city of New York. Okay, so maybe I've only lived here for a week and a half...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Celebrities. Gotta love 'em, right?
Perfect faces, perfect bodies, perfect lives. We follow them on social media, listen to stories about them on the news, read countless articles online. As a culture, we're more or less obsessed. (And sorry, if you're not...you're probably lying.)
According to Leo Braudy, Ph.D., professor of English at the University of Southern California and author of The Frenzy of Renown, the first celebrity was Alexander the Great.
"Not only did he want to be unique," Braudy said, "but he wanted to tell everybody about it, and he had an apparatus for telling everybody about it. He had techniques for doing famous things. He had historians, painters, sculptors, gem carvers on his battles."
Over the centuries, fame has replaced heroes, the stories of old, so now we watch the myths and legends on the big screen (or on Netflix) because it's easier and consumed by the masses. The media eats it up, pushing people higher and higher to drive ratings until - inevitably - they fall.
Believe it or not, falling sells too.
Sex sells. Movies sell. Relationship drama sells. Gossip sells. Lies sell.
Lies, lies, lies.
We forget that these people are just that. People. They have hopes and dreams and ambitions. They have goals. They have fears. They poop. It's true.
It's not that we shouldn't look up celebrities, that we shouldn't be entertained by them - after all, they're entertainers and that's what they do - but maybe it's time for a reassessment. Maybe we recheck our values, what's important, and ask society to do the same.
So many of us strive for fame, push for fortune, we'd do anything - anything - to make it. Beg, borrow, steal. Sell our bodies. Sell our souls. Find fame on the keys of a message board. Find notoriety behind the barrel of a gun.
Didn't think about that one, did you?
We all want to be remembered. To leave a legacy. To be more than blip on the surface of this planet that doesn't really give a shit if you live or die.
No one said that legacy needed to be positive.
And so we watch them struggle. We see people fail. We give them air time and magazine covers, then we destroy lives and self-esteem. We turn people into plastic and put them on a shelf, more than happy to praise them when they're beautiful but just as thrilled to crush them to bits under our feet when they're done.
We even do it to the ones we love. We forget they're humans. We hyper-sexualize, we de-humanize, we push the trick too far. Instead of people who have volunteered to make us laugh, we try to put strings on the puppet to force it to dance 24/7. Do this for me. Do that for me. I don't care about your body, it's mine. I bought it with a ticket to your movie, to your signing, to your _______.
That's terrifying. Claiming ownership over people we've never met.
This world is constantly pushing people to the top, but - in reality - there's a part in all of us that loves to see people fall.
We say, "Well, they volunteered for it. They wanted it. They deserve it."
