Being famous sucks in ways you’d never imagine.
I spent some time being mildly noticeable (one of maybe five foreigners in a Chinese city of three million) and that aspect was miserable. Picture people peeking into your windows while you cook breakfast, people snapping photos of you while you walk to the pharmacy for cold medicine, people waiting at your door hoping to talk to you, dinners with friends being disrupted by strangers, and basically every tiny aspect of your daily life being turned into a small circus. Sometimes, you get so sick of it that you retreat into a bubble of your home and the handful of “safe” places where you can live normally. And that is a miserable existence. Humans are not happy in cages, even gilded ones.
The alternative is that you brave it, and that is tiring beyond belief. The issue is that people are meeting you for the first time, while you are greet the public for about the billionth time this week. So your life becomes a constant stream of making the same half-hearted introductions, the same forced sincerity, the same little bits of small talk, answering the same five or ten questions…all the freaking time, every second of you dare to step outside of your home. And if you fuck up once- if you are snappy because you are sick, you had one to many beers, you are tired from being out too late…people are going to remember it forever. Being seen at anything less than your best for even a second is going to have lasting effects on not just your life, but on the lives of people you understand are usually just being sweet and well meaning.
I can’t even imagine having to deal with this being the organized industry it is out here. It’s one thing to deal with well meaning fans, and another to deal with people who don’t give a damn about you as a person except what money they can make off you.
Anyway, nobody has the foresight to know how they’d feel about it when it’s a reality. Being famous seems awesome, but think about how many famous people are deeply troubled. Nobody thinks they are going to get rich and famous and then descend into a mess of drug abuse while surrounded by fawning yes men, but all to often, that’s what happens. You just don’t know how something is going to turn out, even if from the outside it seems like all positives.
Nor do I blame them for wanting to sometimes have exposure, and sometimes not. Having sold something doesn’t automatically make something public property, and having chosen to do something for yourself doesn’t give other people the right to make those choices for you. If I’ve given paid tours of my home to the public, that doesn’t mean it’s cool for randos to let themselves in to take a look at my house. If I’ve shot a blue movie, that doesn’t mean that someone has the right to rig up a camera in my bedroom and film what I do with my husband. A voluntary transaction- say, giving money to a panhandler or having sex with someone- is really a different beast than the same thing done involuntarily.
Anyway, I think the same protections should apply to everyone, and nobody should be subject to stalking or harassment of any kind.
