In 1977, Illich et al identified the rise of so-called professionals, such as lifestyle counsellors and food fad experts, who fed on consumers' ‘splintered needs and fractured self-confidence’ (Illich et al, 2000: 24). This fractured self-confidence, in my view, has contributed to a coarsening of popular culture, exemplified by the rise of the celebrity and inflated by social media.
The extent to which this phenomenon can have unexpected effects was illustrated by Grol-Prokopczyk (2018), who drew attention to the growing body of research linking popular culture to fertility-related trends, citing, for example, that Brazilian women who watched television soap operas featuring small families had lower fertility compared to women without access to these programmes.
Clive James (2005: 354), exploring the relationship between hip-hop lyrics and gun crime, wrote that ‘anyone who is unworried about the effect of popular culture when it turns sour is living in a dream’. Furthermore, there are aspects of celebrity whose curdling effects can also promote a souring process.
In August 1991, Demi Moore appeared nude and 7 months pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, with editor Tina Brown later explaining that the photograph ‘liberated women from a sense that pregnancy was something to be sort of covered up’ (Handley, 2018).
Demi's ‘full disclosure’ was the first of many nude, pregnant celebrities, including Kim Kardashian, Serena Williams and Mariah Carey, apparently keen to undergo this glossy magazine rite of passage. But what effects might be wrought by magazine-mediated analyses of pregnant celebrities on those women whose immediate priorities don't include a handsomely paid photoshoot?
Boepple and Thompson (2017: 1862) noted how magazines covered celebrity pregnancy with an attitude that dissects ‘their pregnancy fashion choices, weight gain, and pregnant bodies’. They studied appearance-related images and messages in a range of pregnancy magazines and found that images sexualised pregnant women's bodies, concluding that these messages ‘may contribute to body dissatisfaction’.
Hopper and Aubrey (2016) observed that sexual and general objectification in the media could result in self-objectification: girls and women perceiving themselves based on how they think their bodies appear to others. The authors recruited 127 never-pregnant college women, randomly assigned to view recent, full-body images of postpartum celebrities, head-shot photographs of the same celebrities, or control images and captions. They found that exposure to both full-body and head-shot photographs provoked greater self-objectification compared to controls.
Drawing on objectification theory, Williams et al (2017) explored the responses of 38 mothers to images of celebrity mothers in popular magazines, asking how the images influenced the women's views of their own postpartum bodies. They found that most evaluated themselves negatively, but in different ways, depending on their social class and educational backgrounds. Higher-income women tended to frame motherhood in more competitive terms, having greater interest in conforming to perceived standards of beauty in their social groups. Interestingly, all mothers identified negative effects of these images on men, diminishing mothers' feelings of sexual attractiveness to their male partners.
Many celebrities appear eager to act as ‘role models’ for the rest of us who have not been conferred with such an exalted status. The challenge for us is to assert the fact that perfection is a phantom and that we do not need lessons from celebrities when a combination of experience and brains does the job better.
Actor Liz Hurley once described non-celebrities as ‘civilians’ (Woods, 2010). If we are to have ‘role models’, let them be civilians. After all, ‘civilian’ resonates better with ‘civilisation’ than ‘celebrity’.