They’re always on magazine covers, as well as our television screens. They dress in the latest fashion trends, even if the t-shirt or pair of pants costs $500. They can’t make a trip to the grocery store without being photographed. They are celebrities and we can’t get enough of them.
“Obsessed” may serve as a better term than “love,” considering we’ve always got the 411 on celebrities. We want their jobs, their houses, their cars, their clothes, and even their names. The big questions is, why? Is it because they get more publicity in one day than we ever will in our entire lives? Or is it because we are just so attracted to the fact that they get millions for doing a simple Pepsi commercial?
According to a recent Buzzle article, experts on generational social trends say that young people, specifically teenagers, feel that fame is the most important thing in life. Some even feel that fame is something that they can ultimately achieve. For those who don’t think that they’ll ever reach stardom themselves, they believe that dating a celebrity is the light at the end of the tunnel.
Yes, teenagers all over the world claim that they will end up marrying their celebrity crush, but for the most part they’re not actually serious. However, there are those who truly think that they’ll own an over-the-top mansion in Malibu with their “one true love.”
Take teen heartthrob Justin Bieber, for example. The teen heartthrob has girls all around the world screaming his name while tears roll down their cheeks, as well as sending death threats to any girl he’s associated with. Bieber’s ex-girlfriend, Selena Gomez was sent thousands of death threats over Twitter daily, including, “@selenagomez hey selena if u don’t leave bieber alone i’ll kill u n wear your skin n pretend im u.” Harsh.
What if “Biebs” wasn’t famous? Would girls still be creating shrines of him in their closets or freaking out over him as if he were a surprise trip to the Bahamas? The same goes for every celebrity out there.
“If I saw Channing Tatum walking down the street, and he wasn’t famous, I honestly wouldn’t give two sh*ts about him,” says 17-year-old Chloe Strippoli. “Of course I’d think he was cute, but I wouldn’t be having an over-joyous freak-out.”
Now comes the golden question amongst teens: would you rather date a celebrity or someone not in the public eye? Out of 45 high schools students surveyed, 31 said they’d rather cozy up with someone famous, while just 14 decided they’d rather date someone who wouldn’t end up in People magazine.
“Honestly, I just think people want to date celebrities so they can have a shot at fame,” says VHS junior Teddya Konopka. “We obsess over the lives of the rich and famous, which leads to us wanting everyone to start obsessing over our own lives.”
According to ABC News, the fixation with celebrities has now gotten to the point where there is now something called “celebrity worship syndrome,” which can be classified as entertainment-social, intense-personal, or borderline-pathological. It’s basically a scale that goes from “I love talking about my favorite celebrity with others,” to “when my favorite celebrity is feeling hurt, I feel hurt too.”
Social media websites prove to be what fuels this syndrome. We can easily learn about the lives of our beloved celebrities through posts on things like Twitter and Facebook.
“I kid you not, I stalk Miley Cyrus’s tweets and then talk about them with my friends at lunch as if she was my friend,” explained Miley-obsessed high school student Ashley MacMoyle. “I just want to be her, like 90% of them time.”
From the looks of it, it seems as though the obsession over celebrities won’t be dying down anytime soon. Guys will still be fighting over who has a better chance with Katherine Webb, while girls will still be arguing over who Ryan Gosling would introduce to his mother. Soon enough, we’ll all be diagnosed with celebrity worship syndrome.