According to social media, celebrity “feuds”—like the one between Gwyneth Paltrow and Meghan Markle—are very real and something to be taken very seriously. Never mind that the people involved often go to great lengths to dispel the gossip—we still tend to devour it. Where does that instinct come from?
Maybe from the same place that made us pay attention to the Charli vs. Taylor, Selena vs. Hailey, Gaga vs. Madonna, and Britney vs. Christina storylines; the misogynistic depths of pop culture that have always pitted women against each other. The idea that there can only be one woman at the top of any given pyramid is something that’s been borne out for as long as women have been alive, but now that we’re able to just look down at our phones and get real-time “news” about female celebrities feuding, it feels not only insidious but dangerous.
“Before the internet, you had a couple of TV shows about celebrities and you had some monthly magazines,” says Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, out April 29. “And then, at the beginning of the decade, you had all these gossip blogs and infinite posts that could theoretically be written,” she says. Which is how we wound up here, watching an entire economy be built on real-time celebrity “news” that’s often made up of unsubstantiated claims about women in the spotlight hating each other.
But who does it really serve to fuel this content-creation machine with rumored feuds between women, and why do we keep clicking? Glamour spoke with Gilbert to try to find out.
Glamour: I assume you’ve read about the Meghan Markle and Gwyneth Paltrow “feud”?
Sophie Gilbert: I have. What astonished me most about the coverage of Meghan’s show—which I wrote about, so I’m by no means innocent here—was how much people noticed the tiniest details and used them as ways to tear Meghan apart.
I’d click on the Daily Mail—for my shame!—and there would be like eight different pieces attacking Meghan for what she wore, or the particular utensil that she used, just really finicky details that journalists were using to overreach with real tear-downs of Meghan. I understand a lot of it is just to fill content, but I think anything Meghan does at this point seems to make people a little bit deranged, and I’m not sure entirely why that is. But she seems to have both a particular fandom and a particular anti-fandom that plays out in really unique ways online.
I feel like it’s similar to the anti-fandom, as you call it, that Gwyneth Paltrow has—especially on the internet. I understand there are real reasons why people might dislike her, but the vitriol often feels outsized for someone none of us know. Something about her inspires a rage that I find interesting, similar to Meghan Markle.
Yes. The idea that they’re too perfect. Maybe what people are picking up on regarding Meghan in the same fashion is the promotion of herself as someone who’s similarly flawless and radiant and lovely in her clothes and making these gorgeous bountiful gift baskets for her friends, with lavender towels in her fridge. Which is lovely, but it’s not necessarily something a lot of other women can possibly connect with. The aspiration makes it appealing for some of us, but it also makes it easy to lampoon it as inauthentic. So that’s the tension—do we crave that kind of aspirational content or does it put us off? And sometimes it’s both.
When thinking about other recent “feuds,” it seems most are started, or at least promulgated online, by stans and stan culture, which often are led by women. What role do they play?
There’s this really parasocial relationship that people have with celebrities that’s relatively new and thrives on the idea that fans know the celebrities who they devote themselves to better than anyone else. And that, in turn, gives them this rapacious attention to the supposedly hidden details in their art. Taylor Swift has always had an interesting relationship with this idea. The way she feeds breadcrumbs throughout her music, throughout her liner notes, throughout images—she seems to see the desire among her fans to decode everything [and wonder whether] the lyrics mean the thing you want them to mean or be about this beef or this person, to back up your own personal worldview, or your own personal interpretation of events.
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
Amazon
Bookshop
Selena Gomez also has a very passionate fan base and they’ve been “mad” at Hailey Bieber since she and Justin got married. Six years later, and it’s still being brought up and debated on TikTok and X and Reddit. I’m interested really in why this sort of fandom has created this need for tension with other public figures, specifically women.
I think it’s an innate human impulse to self-identify within communities and within teams—they find identity and community and solace in their membership of a certain tribe. With celebrities, people tend to self-identify as stans in a way that says something unique about them and gives them a sense of community and a sense of purpose and a sense of happiness.
There’s also something in entertainment that comes from this idea of a scarcity mindset, the idea that only one celebrity can triumph over them all. Historically, there hasn’t been enough space for powerful women in the entertainment industry to have multiple figures all working alongside each other and not competing for the number ones, and not competing for attention and Vogue covers. I think this is part of why feuds have been covered with such interest in gossip media. I mean, ever since Lady Gaga and Madonna, or Britney and Christina, you can see this idea disseminated that only one of them can [rule].
I was just reminded of the two most powerful women in the music industry, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. It seems like people are always trying to create tension between them but it never seems to catch—and they’ve very publicly supported one another. Why are we so eager for two of the most important artists of our generation to dislike each other?
People love to see women fighting. There’s an entire genre built around this impulse to feed it. On the one hand, it’s fun, car-crash entertainment. On the other, it’s internalized patriarchy and it’s a distraction. If women are competing with each other, they’re not focusing all their energy on themselves, on their own art. I could talk for a long time about how important sisterhood and intersectionality were as concepts in the second wave and even third wave feminism, and then somehow in the 2000s, post-feminism came along and it was all all about individual gain and individual ascension. These [“feud” rumors] might seem frivolous but they’re actually rooted in quite serious shifts in feminism.
At what point do you think celebrity gossip becomes harmful?
I wish there were a clean line because it would be so great to be like, no, you’ve crossed the line.It’s been really interesting to me watching Millie Bobby Brown recently and her calling out some of the writers who had written pieces criticizing her appearance and saying quite cruel things about her, because it really did remind me of the tenor of a lot of the coverage of celebrities in the 2000s, which was really mean and uninhibited and damaging. And so to hear Millie Bobby Brown come out and say, “this hurts me, this is not fair,” is really important. And it does remind people that celebrities are human beings.
In the 2000s when there was this red-hot misogyny in pop culture that we tried to roll back in the 2010s with a focus on inclusivity and general positivity. But now, do you feel like we’re heading backwards?
I do. There were people who were really victimized by the gossip industry in that era, and there were also people who played the game so well. Paris Hilton would always pose for photographers, Kim Kardashian would always pose; she’d be very gracious, she’d stop, she’d talk. And the people who were willing to be that visible and have their image be that disseminated across all different kinds of platforms, they were the ones who really sort of won that moment and were able, for the most part, to get through it without being really damaged by it. But there were also much younger women who did not escape unscathed.
I feel like we have to mention other forms of misogyny in celebrity feuds. We’ve been talking about how the media pits women against each other, but how does this relate to something like the Blake Lively versus Justin Baldoni lawsuit?
What’s been really interesting to me about the Blake situation is how much of the hatred against her is coming from women. That’s been really fascinating and depressing and dispiriting to see. Like the Megyn Kellys and Candace Owenses obviously have their own agenda, but these stan campaigns against Amber Heard and against Lively, so many of them seem to be coming from women. I wish I understood the impulses better. There’s probably a desire to resettle old scores.
Maybe it’s just that we all live in a patriarchal society and we’re all susceptible to its rules and its sense of the world. And so I think people, even women, are innately distrustful of women sometimes.
I did read this article by a psychologist about how, for a long time, one of the easiest ways to get male approval has been by denigrating other women and how women — you see this in the Handmaid’s Tale a bit with Aunt Lydia — are often the most powerful enforcers of social norms and social practices against other women because they know the system that they’re working within.
Unlike with Blake Lively and Amber Heard, many of the celebrity feuds between women that make the news cycle are shockingly petty—like Meghan Markle is “stealing” the Goop brand, or Hailey “stole” Selena’s boyfriend. In your opinion, does this make it more or less harmful to people who are consuming it?
I think it’s damaging to have this much media attention on women supposedly competing with each other, especially in ways that aren’t true. And I do think it just comes back to the neutralization of feminism. There was so much in second-wave feminism that was really powerful because it wasn’t self-focused. I think about the Jane Collective in Chicago helping lower income women get reproductive services, often at a great danger to themselves and their safety. But it was important to them because it was about principle and it was about sisterhood and it was about making things easier for women and better for women, writ large, so that everyone could be elevated. I think we’ve lost so much of that. It feels so much like project of distraction, keeping us preoccupied with stuff that doesn’t matter so that we are less energized by things that do.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
The post Where Do Celebrity Feuds Come From—and Why Do We Keep Clicking? appeared first on Glamour.
