Can I offer you celebrity gossip in this trying time?
chronically online ramblings on parasociality, social media, and snark subreddits
I have a confession to make. I’m kind of tired (and by tired, I mean utterly exhausted) of being “that friend that’s chronically online and obsessed with celebrity gossip.” Writing about pop culture and writing about and for celebrities is kind of my whole thing, so I personally can’t escape this cycle anytime soon, but I do want to at least acknowledge and examine the problem because well, this can’t possibly be healthy for me or for anyone.
I haven’t had a socially acceptable screen time in God knows how long. Even now, most of my work for both school and writing is done online so I unfortunately won’t be breaking up with my scary screen time stats anytime soon. We’re in a toxic relationship to say the least. Now, I can’t blame all of my screen time on outside forces however. I spend precious hours of my day scrolling through the hell hole that is Reddit, usually doomscrolling in search for the latest movie news and celebrity gossip to fill my time. Reddit is obviously not the greatest place on the internet, but I’ve learned to stay where I’m familiar and not venture anywhere I wouldn’t go without a gun. I only visit a handful of subreddits and avoid the “Popular” page like the plague. There are three subreddits I frequently lurk that I should also be avoiding like the plague, but I just can’t seem to look away from: r/Fauxmoi, r/LAinfluencersnark, and r/popculturechat.
I know, I know. What the hell am I doing there? I wish I could give you an answer. I wish I could justify my obsession with those subreddits, but I honestly can’t. Celebrity gossip is a cycle I found myself lured into many moons ago, and there’s no light to be seen at the end of this endless tunnel.
r/popculturechat has some throwback gems, but they love to hate on anyone over there so it gets weird very quickly. r/LAinfluencersnark is just straight up unnecessarily mean, but I’m addicted to seeing problematic influencers clowned on. But what I’m really here to talk about is r/Fauxmoi, a gossip subreddit inspired by the infamous Deuxmoi Instagram account know for its (often incorrect) celebrity blinds and sightings.
I first found myself lurking r/Fauxmoi during the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial in 2022. The rest of the internet, and especially Reddit, was incredibly toxic during that time, and as a bi woman, it was also incredibly dehumanizing to see misinformation being spewed everywhere I turned. r/Fauxmoi was my one safe space on Reddit, the one place where I didn’t feel insane for believing a woman rather than her husband who was on record saying he wanted to burn and rape her corpse.
It’s hard to imagine how terrible things would soon become. Taylor Swift started dating Matty Healy in the summer of 2023 and she became r/Fauxmoi’s public enemy number one. Every Swift hater migrated to that subreddit and every conversation about every celeb was somehow traced back to Taylor and used as an opportunity to shit on her. I’m a Swiftie who is more than willing to hold Taylor accountable for her faults, but the way r/Fauxmoi was going about it was just absurd. She has certainly done things worthy of criticism, but in their insistence to villainize anyone associated with her and praise anyone seen in opposition to her, r/Fauxmoi became the very thing they swore to destroy.
Why do I stay? Well, I get a cynical delight out of watching the car crashes that are the teatime threads. r/Fauxmoi has two weekly teatime megathreads, “I HAVE TEA ON…” and “DOES ANYONE HAVE TEA ON…,” self explanatory threads that garner hundreds to thousands of comments immediately upon posting. You ask for tea, someone will probably deliver, and every celeb discussed is automatically and unanimously labeled as either a saint or a devil depending on the responses received in the echo chamber that is r/Fauxmoi.
I have nothing against cancel culture (however non-existent it may be) and calling people out for who they are. If you have tea about Johnny Depp being an abusive alcoholic, yeah, I’m going to want to see it and put it into my pocket of receipts. The Depp-Heard case had global implications, the likes of which we’re still seeing today with the success of smear campaigns against women like Blake Lively and Rachel Zegler. If a celebrity is a racist, rapist, homophobe, transphobe, and/or misogynist, I would very much like to know so that I can stay as far from them and their work as humanly possible (though even that has its complications given the state of the entertainment industry).
However, it feels like we’ve reached the point of gossiping for the sake of gossiping. Of course, it’s nice to know if a celebrity seems to be a decent human being. Of course, it’s intriguing to learn about the latest Hollywood love triangles. Of course, it’s validating to finally have a legitimate reason to publicly voice your dislike of someone. But lately, I just feel like “Kim, there’s people that are dying.” And let’s not forget, anyone can just go on the internet and lie. I could post in that tea thread right now, “I have it on good authority that Taylor Swift hates watching football,” and people will just believe me.
Something of the sort happened recently too. In the days before the Oscars, someone in the thread claimed to have known Mikey Madison’s family through a friend of a friend and “had it on good authority” that her and her family are MAGA Zionists. These rumors escaped the echo chamber of r/Fauxmoi and got around enough that her own father had to respond to someone in his DMs and confirm that their family is nothing of the sort. To be fair, awards season was very messy this year and I wouldn’t put it past certain stans trying to take Madison down in order to bring their fav up. If there’s a well-documented history of someone being a terrible person [cough cough Karla Sofía Gascón], then yeah, let me see the receipts. But the fact that we put any weight into these “friend of a friend” allegations is crazy.
It feels like common sense to take these teatime allegations with a grain of salt, but the plot has been completely lost. Even if there is truth to some of the things said in these threads, they are often coming from people who had exactly one interaction with the celeb in question. People have bad days. People have resting bitch faces. People will give you “bad vibes.” I’m not going to base and alter my entire perception of a celebrity on something an anonymous Reddit account said about their five second interaction. My frontal lobe isn’t even fully developed yet and even I know that. What’s your excuse?
All of these snark subreddits are just the Burn Book repackaged with a modern and “woke” font, but it’s doing more harm than good. We weren’t supposed to idolize Regina George, guys. “Are we the baddies?” Well, I don’t know how to tell you this babe, but I think you are.
Do I really need to know about every new development and paparazzi photo in the potential Sydney Sweeney/Glen Powell love affair? If people use celebrity gossip for escapism, I’m fine with that. We’re all going to die. You do you. I just feel like there are more important things to be spending our energy on right now. TikTok edits and viral Tweets about the two actors following the alleged end of Sweeney’s engagement have raked up millions of views and likes. A lot of them have been used in tandem with Taylor Swift’s “Fresh Out The Slammer” which has led to some of the song’s biggest streaming days since its release. I love the song and suppose I’m glad it’s finally getting its flowers, but I’m whelmed by this being the context that led to that. Not to be all “that friend that’s too woke” again, but I think it’s a tiny bit weird that these two conventionally attractive, blonde, blue-eyed, white, politically neutral American actors are taking up so much of our attention right now. Like…[Jason Bateman voice] them? Does this feel like a recession/fascism indicator to anyone else?
Same thing with the excessive Charli xcx/Green Day headliner discourse. Who cares? Live a little! Why are you up in arms on any side of this discourse when the people at the center of it clearly couldn’t care less? If you’re spending hours of your precious twenty-hours in a day fighting over a sarcastic sash on Stan Twitter, get some help.
Celebrity gossip has also made people way, way, way too comfortable talking about other people’s bodies. I’ve never even watched The White Lotus, but I’ve seen more people talking about Aimee Lou Wood’s teeth this year than I’ve seen my own family. It just feels so back-handed and fake whether they’re praising or bullying her. I obviously can’t speak for her, but I would be so disappointed if I got my big break in a prestige television show and all people could talk about was this part of my body that I was born with.
Unfortunately, I’m not surprised by how hugely this discourse has taken off. This feeling of entitlement we have over celebrity bodies is nothing new. Every other day, it’s “I think this celebrity has an eating disorder,” “I think this celebrity got a boob job,” “I think this celebrity is lying about not having anorexia,” “I think this celebrity is lying about not having plastic surgery.” Concern over a celebrity’s health and the impressionable minds of their young fans is fine, but at a certain point, we’re just going overboard. Isn’t analyzing every Instagram and paparazzi photo for signs to validate our theories just enabling EDs and giving them even more attention than they would have received otherwise? I didn’t have a healthy relationship with my body and food in middle school (former dancer with social anxiety is a lethal combo). I didn’t come to that realization until just last year when I watched Brittany Snow’s Parachute. It took literal years for me to realize something bad had happened to me, and it takes time and support to understood and accept something like that. A snarky comment masquerading as concern isn’t helping anyone.
Celebrities shouldn’t be put on pedestals, but it’s also important to remember that they’re human beings too. Do we not remember how Chadwick Boseman’s appearance was ripped apart before he died of cancer? We just happen to have the privilege of hiding behind Reddit avatars in these situations while a celebrity’s every move is excessively analyzed for our entertainment. Sometimes it’s not our turn to speak, and we need to start learning that’s okay.
“Are you not entertained?” Well, I am only human. I was born on the internet and pop culture. These subreddits and teatimes can certainly be entertaining or gratifying, but these days, I just find myself exhausted by them more than anything. And I know this is rich coming from the girl who was just complaining on main about Jonathan Majors apologist Michael B. Jordan and Zionist Hailee Steinfeld being in Sinners and from the girl who still hasn’t forgiven Addison Rae for happily shaking the orange man’s hand, but I really wish I could just blindly consume media like everyone else seems to be able to. Just this week, we have lost some of the greatest minds of our generation to Hailee Steinfeld and Addison Rae propaganda. I am begging you all to please have some morals and some self-respect. I’ve probably contradicted myself a million times over the course of this article. I probably contradict myself all the time. This stuff is complicated. I get it. Let’s just try to make an effort to do better. I avoided any and all discussion of The Last of Us during and since the first season out of fear of spoilers, but it has recently come to my attention that the game and show’s creator, Neil Druckmann, is a Zionist and based the game off of that so I don’t feel comfortable watching this next season. The world will keep spinning even if I don’t find out what happens next and can’t participate in the weekly release discussions.
While some people are aware of these kinds of things and guiltlessly or guiltily consume them anyway under the guise of separating the art from the artist, so many people just live in blissful ignorance and I honestly envy them. It feels like homework trying to sort rumors about celebrities into files that allow me to best determine whether they’re good people or not and whether I should feel guilty consuming their art. I’ll see Sinners eventually, but jeez Hollywood, get it together. I’m tired. I feel like there’s also a conversation to be had here about pretty privilege making it easy for people to look pass some of these things, but that’s a conversation for another day. Love and light.
The chronically online perception of celebrities changes every other minute, and it’s impossible to keep up even for those of us with the 10+ hour daily screen times. I kind of don’t care if this famous person or that famous person was indifferent to you on a set or at a coffee shop ten years ago unless they have an extensive, concerning history of abusive and problematic behavior. Believe victims. Believe women. That should all be a no-brainer. But I’m not going to be as quick to believe a random snark frequenter complaining just to complain about people who ultimately aren’t hurting anyone. And if you’re going to complain about nothingburgers anyway, at least keep that same energy when it comes to addressing the real losers in this industry because trust me, I’ve already got the receipts. Moral of the story is if you’re going to get your whacks in at least make it worth it.
Reddit, there’s people that are dying, so no, I don’t think I will offer you my trivial celebrity gossip in this trying time. How about we talk about the political and economic state of the world right now? Or better yet, let’s combine the two! Which could mean nothing.
