Eating Disorder Essay

A few years ago, Britney Spears and her entourage swept through my heads office. As she sashayed past, I blushed and stammered and leaned over my desk to shake her hand. She looked right into my eyeball and smiled her pageant smile, and I confess, I felt dizzy. I immediately rang up friends to report my credit encounter, saying She had on a gorgeous, floor-length white hide coat Her skin was blotchy Ive never been much of a Britney fan, so why the contact high? Why should I fretfulness? For that matter, why should any of us? Celebrities ar fascinating because they brave out in a parallel universeone that looks and feels just care ours but is light-years beyond our reach. Stars cry to Diane Sawyer about their problemsfailed marriages, hardscrabble upbringings, bad life history 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 m akes our lives seem woefully boring by comparison. The teary chat with Diane quickly turns to the subject of a modern $10 million film fee and honorary United Nations ambassadorship. The magazines that tell apart in gotcha snapshots of schleppy-looking celebs also feature Cameron Diaz wrapped in a $15,000 couture robe and glo followg with youth, money and star power.Were left hangingand we deficiency to a greater extent. Its easy to blame the media for this cognitive whiplash. But the real glory spinmeister is ourown mind, which tricks us into believing the stars are our lovers and our social intimates. renown culture plays to all of our innate tendencies Were built to view anyone we descry as an acquaintance ripe for cackle or for romance, hence our flop interest in Anna Kournikovas sex life. Since catching sight of a beautiful face bathes the brain in pleasing chemicals, George Clooneys grampus smile is impossible to ignore. But when celebrities are both our intimate ro utine companions and as distant as the heavens above, its hard to drive in 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 immune to celebrity watching Magazines print pictures of Demi Moore and Bachelorette Trista Rehn reading the very same bawl out magazines that stalk them. Most pushers are users, dont you think? says covert Hollywood publicist Michael Levine. And, by the carriage, its not the worst clear upic in the world to do. Celebrities tap into powerful motivational systems designed to value romantic love and to urge us to find a mate. Stars adduce our most human yearnings to love, admire, copy and, of course, to gossip and to jeer. Its only intrinsic that we get pulled into their gravitational field. Exclusive Fans brain alter by celebrity powerJohn Lennon infuriated the faithful when he said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but he wasnt the commencement exercise to suggest that celebrity culture was taking the place of religion. With its myths, its rituals (the red carpeting 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 hold for ritualized idol worship can be displaced onto stars, speculates psychologist James Houran, formerly of the Confederate Illinois University School of Medicine and now director of psychological studies for True Beginnings date service. Nonreligious people 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 residential area 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 spiritualpolitical science (Tiger Woods, patron saint of arriviste golfers or Jimmy Carter, protector of down-home all-embracing farmers?). Celebrities have their auraa debased version of charisma that stems from their powerful captivating presence, Braudy says.Much like spiritual guidance, celebrity-watching can be inspiring, or at least help us muster the will to turnout our own problems. Celebrities motivate us to make it, says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in novel Jersey. Oprah Winfrey suffered through poverty, sexual abuse and racial discrimination to become the wealthiest muliebrity in media. Lance Armstrong survived advanced testicular cancer 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 quiet desperation, and we transcend this by connecting with big livesthose of the stars, he says . Were afraid to eat that fatty muffin, but Ozzy Osborne isnt. take int I know you? Celebrities are also common capital in our socially fractured world.Depressed college coeds and laid-off factory workers both overleap hours watching Anna Nicole Smith on late night television Mexican villagers trade theories with hometown friends about who killed rapper Tupac Shakur and Liberian and German businessmen retrospect David Beckhams plays before hammering out deals. My friend Britney Spears was, in fact, the top international Internet search of 2003. In our global village, the best targets for gossip are the faces we all know. We are born to dish dirt, evolutionary psychologists equalize its the most efficient way to navigate society and to pick up 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.