Eating Disorder Essay

A fewer years ago, Britney Spears and her entourage swept through my bosss office. As she sashayed past, I blushed and stammered and leaned over my desk to vex her hand. She looked right into my eyes and smiled her pageant smile, and I confess, I felt dizzy. I immediately rang up friends to ex ply my celebrity encounter, saying She had on a gorgeous, floor-length white fur coat Her skin was blotchy Ive never been much of a Britney fan, so why the contact high? Why should I fear? For that matter, why should any of us? Celebrities ar fascinating because they live in a parallel globeone that looks and feels just the likes of ours yet is light-years beyond our reach. Stars cry to Diane Sawyer about their problemsfailed marriages, hardscrabble upbringings, magnanimous career decisionsand we can relate. The paparazzi catch them in wet hair and a stained T-shirt, and were thrilled. Theyre ordinary folks, just like us. And yet Stars live in another world entirely, one that makes our l ives face woefully dull by comparison. The teary chat with Diane quickly turns to the subject of a recent $10 million film fee and honorary United Nations ambassadorship. The magazines that specialize in gotcha snapshots of schleppy-looking celebs also feature Cameron Diaz mantled in a $15,000 couture gown and glowing with youth, money and star power.Were left hangingand we pauperization more. Its easy to blame the media for this cognitive whiplash. But the real celebrity spinmeister is ourown mind, which tricks us into believing the stars are our roll in the hayrs and our social intimates. Celebrity culture plays to all of our innate tendencies Were built to affect anyone we recognize as an acquaintance ripe for gossip or for romance, hence our powerful interest in Anna Kournikovas sex life. Since catching sight of a beautiful face bathes the brain in pleasing chemicals, George Clooneys killer smile is impossible to ignore. But when celebrities are both our intimate daily com panions and as distant as the heavens above, its hard to know just how to think of them. Reality TV further confuses the picture by transforming ordinary folk into bold-faced names without warning.Even celebrities themselves are not tolerant to celebrity watching Magazines print pictures of Demi Moore and Bachelorette Trista Rehn reading the very homogeneous gossip magazines that stalk them. Most pushers are users, dont you think? says top Hollywood publicist Michael Levine. And, by the way, its not the castigate thing in the world to do. Celebrities tap into powerful motivational systems designed to foster romantic love and to urge us to find a mate. Stars summon our most human yearnings to love, admire, copy and, of course, to gossip and to jeer. Its only natural that we get pulled into their gravitational field. Exclusive Fans brain transformed by celebrity powerJohn Lennon infuriated the faithful when he said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, exactly he wasnt the fir st to suggest that celebrity culture was taking the place of religion. With its myths, its rituals (the red rug walk, the Super Bowl ring, the handprints outside Graumans Chinese Theater) and its ability to immortalize, it fills a similar cultural niche. In a secular society our need for ritualized idol worship can be displaced onto stars, speculates psychologist James Houran, erstwhile of the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and now director of psychological studies for True Beginnings dating service. Nonreligious passel tend to be more interested in celebrity culture, hes found, and Houran speculates that for them, celebrity fills some of the same roles the church fills for believers, like the desire to admire the powerful and the drive to fit into a community of people with shared values. Leo Braudy, author of The Frenzy of Renown Fame and its History, suggests that celebrities are more like Christian calendar saints than like spiritualauthorities (Tiger Woods, patron saint of arriviste golfers or Jimmy Carter, protector of down-home liberalist farmers?). Celebrities have their auraa debased version of charisma that stems from their all-powerful captivating presence, Braudy says.Much like spiritual guidance, celebrity-watching can be inspiring, or at least help us muster the provide to tackle our own problems. Celebrities motivate us to make it, says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Oprah Winfrey suffered through poverty, informal abuse and racial discrimination to become the wealthiest woman in media. Lance Armstrong survived advanced testicular crab louse and went on to win the Tour de France five times. Star-watching can also simply point the way to a grander, more dramatic way of living, publicist Levine says. We live lives more dedicated to safety or calm desperation, and we transcend this by connecting with bigger livesthose of the stars, he says. Were afraid to eat that fatty muffin, but Ozzy Osborne isnt. usurpt I know you? Celebrities are also common currency in our socially fractured world. blue college coeds and laid-off factory workers both spend hours watching Anna Nicole Smith on late night boob tube Mexican villagers trade theories with hometown friends about who killed rapper Tupac Shakur and Liberian and German businessmen critique David Beckhams plays before hammering out deals. My friend Britney Spears was, in fact, the top international Internet search of 2003. In our globose village, the best targets for gossip are the faces we all know. We are born to dish dirt, evolutionary psychologists agree its the most efficient way to navigate society and to determine who is trustworthy. They also point out that when our brains evolved, anybody with a familiar face was an in-group member, a person whose alliances and enmities were important to keep track of.