So yesterday I was in the hair salon, getting my inch or so of pure grey roots coloured, when I reached for salon-type reading material: People and US Weekly. Let me preface this by saying that tabloid magazines are a bit lost on me, as I rarely know who any of the celebrities are and also I rarely know the shows or movies that they are in. My twelve year old niece excitedly showed me her Camp Rock themed Easter treat, at which I initially stared blankly, and then conjured up some interested-sounding questions. “You see, Aunty, it’s the Jonas brothers!” she said, to which I answered with a bewildered look that I surely inherited from my own constantly-bewildered father, along with his pure grey hair. Thanks Dad!
Anyway, for those of you who read or have read US Weekly, there is a “feature” called “Stars – They’re Just Like Us!” which shows various celebrities doing things like grocery shopping or picking up their dry-cleaning or some other mundane task which shows that really, we are all people and there is only the smallest degree of separation between me, and say, Jennifer Aniston.
One of the photographs showed a celebrity couple taking a picture of their baby on a swing, and the caption was “They take pictures of their kids!”. On the same page was another celebrity at a playground (or maybe it was the same one, I don’t know) watching his child go down a slide. The caption? “Their kids go down slides!”. Really? Is this news-worthy? I don’t know. I stared at that page for a long time, feeling some kind of apocalyptic sinking and also feeling puzzled. “Their kids go down slides!”
For a while it has seemed like children are the latest celebrity accessory, a baby bump being the ultimate in trendiness. The fact that magazines show photos of these children, who in all likelihood are primarily cared for by nannies and night nurses, is the ultimate in revolting to me. The fact that a child is fodder for the media because he plays at a playground, and is supposedly leading a perfectly ordinary life, despite immense wealth and fame, is pathetic. And the fact that I actually read that magazine makes me feel ill. In this celebrity-obsessed world of ours, children have become just one more thing, something to buy expensive items for and something to dress up in expensive clothes, and something to farm out when they become tiresome.
Well said. I feel the same way about shows like Jon and Kate Plus Eight.