9 Female Celebrities Who Are Taller Than Their Male Partners - Harper's BAZAAR
9 Female Celebrities Who Are Taller Than Their Male Partners - Harper's BAZAAR |
- 9 Female Celebrities Who Are Taller Than Their Male Partners - Harper's BAZAAR
- The Celebrity Activism Industrial Complex - The New York Times
- Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You - The New Yorker
- 9 celebrities who have identified as gender non-binary - INSIDER
| 9 Female Celebrities Who Are Taller Than Their Male Partners - Harper's BAZAAR Posted: 20 Jun 2019 08:08 PM PDT  A lot is often made of the desire for a "tall, dark and handsome" suitor to come and sweep a woman (or man) off their feet, but in Hollywood, female stars are often very happy to stand head and shoulders above their partners. From sky-high supermodels like Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Bella Hadid (neither of whom hold a candle to Karlie Kloss' impressive stature), to vertically gifted actresses like Nicole Kidman and Sophie Turner, there are plenty of famous ladies who would argue size doesn't matter. In fact, even when many of them have a few centimetres on their significant others, they often choose to increase the difference by donning towering stilettos too. Proving that a height difference isn't the secret to a happy relationship, here are 9 female celebrities who are taller than their partners.  |
| The Celebrity Activism Industrial Complex - The New York Times Posted: 20 Jun 2019 08:05 PM PDT Image  In the second week of June, Jessica Biel graced the unglamorous halls of the California State legislature to oppose a bill that would create an extra layer of oversight for parents seeking medical exemptions to vaccines for their children. Jezebel broke the news that Ms. Biel, the actress, was lobbying legislators alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political scion and an infamous vaccine skeptic. Ms. Biel was quickly excoriated for her efforts, and she defended herself on Instagram, stating that she's not anti-vaccine, she's for the rights of parents to make their own decisions (claiming "health freedom" is a common rhetorical tactic for people against vaccination). Ms. Biel bolstered her argument against the bill by citing personal experience, not scientific expertise. "My dearest friends have a child with a medical condition that warrants an exemption from vaccinations, and should this bill pass, it would greatly affect their family's ability to care for their child in this state," she wrote. Vaccines are safe and effective, and the vast majority of Americans vaccinate their children — but anti-vaccine sentiment and scientific misinformation has proliferated over the years, and clusters of parents refusing vaccines for their children are making experts worry that the current measles outbreak, the biggest in recent years, could turn into an epidemic. The percentage of parents who have concerns about vaccines has skyrocketed since 2000, in part because famous people who are parents, including Ms. Biel, Jenny McCarthy, Alicia Silverstone and Kristin Cavallari, have expressed skepticism about vaccines or lobbied against vaccine-related laws. How did this happen? Fall of the Morals ClauseAs long as there have been widely recognizable celebrities, those celebrities have been getting involved in politics, said Mark Harvey, the author of "Celebrity Influence: Politics, Persuasion, and Issue-Based Advocacy" and the director of graduate programs at the University of Saint Mary. [Want evidence-based, reassuring parenting guidance? Sign up for our Parenting newsletter right this instant!] In 1920, Al Jolson, the singer and actor, became the first celebrity to publicly endorse someone for president when he stumped for Warren G. Harding, Mr. Harvey said. But in that case, it was Senator Harding's campaign that reached out to Jolson. "Celebrities actually advocating on their own, that's a much more recent phenomenon," Mr. Harvey said, which didn't start happening frequently until the 1960s and '70s. That's because up until that time, most actors had morals clauses in their contracts, which kept them from making politically divisive statements, because they would otherwise suffer potentially career-ending consequences, Mr. Harvey said. The fall of the studio system in Hollywood in the '70s gave them much more leeway to take political stances. Many celebrities, notably Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda, spoke out against the Vietnam War, for example. Image  The rise in celebrity activism dovetailed with the fall of Americans' trust in politicians, and political institutions. According to Pew Research Center, in 1958, three-quarters of Americans "trusted the federal government to do the right thing almost always or most of the time." Trust began to decline precipitously during the late '60s and '70s because of the triple-whammy of an unpopular war, a government scandal and a recession. Image  By 1980, only about a quarter of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing, and that's when the line between celebrities and politicians began to truly blur. The first celebrity president, Ronald Reagan, painted himself as an "insurgent outsider." Americans trust celebrities, said Dr. Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the author of "Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians and Activists Aren't Your Best Source of Health Information," because "we think we know them, we see them in movies or on TV and we assume they are the roles they play." We saw them even more on TV with the emergence of 24-hour cable news, allowing a broader range of celebrities access to a platform to share their voices, alongside pundits and politicians, as Mr. Harvey pointed out. "It's no longer the social movement dragging the celebrity in, it's the celebrity deciding they have their own policy bailiwick," said Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Image  Mr. Harvey tracked media attention for Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Bono — all of whom have taken public-policy positions on serious issues — alongside that for Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and members of the U.S. Congress. He found that all three celebrities were more effective at getting newspaper coverage for their pet causes, including AIDS in Africa, education in Africa and victims of the civil war in Sudan, than either sitting U.S. president or members of Congress from 1999-2012. Image  Then came reality TV. Then social media, with savvy politicians and activists allying themselves with celebrities behind the scenes as a way to break through the noise. Then the election of 2016, a year when respondents to Mr. Harvey's surveys found some celebrities as or more credible on certain issues than some top Democrats and Republicans. When it came to same-sex marriage, for example, respondents were slightly more inclined to trust Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John than they were Barack Obama. For expertise on genetic testing, respondents were more likely to trust Angelina Jolie than Hillary Clinton. (On other issues, politicians still held sway; respondents found Marco Rubio more credible on gun control than Bruce Springsteen, though the Boss was more credible on income inequality than Donald Trump.) From 'Mommie Dearest' to 'Just Like Us!'Celebrities have long touted goofy diet and exercise routines, but disseminating medically questionable parenting advice seems to be a more recent phenomenon. Actors couldn't even say the word "pregnant" onscreen until the 1950s, the author Anne Helen Petersen, who wrote her dissertation on the history of celebrity gossip, has noted. Some were notorious for being neglectful or even abusive parents. Elizabeth Podnieks, a professor of English at Ryerson University and the editor of "Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture," said that female celebrities started speaking publicly about motherhood more frequently in the '80s and '90s, as part of the wider cultural backlash to the feminist gains of the '70s. Magazine profiles of actresses began to focus on their parenthood, Ms. Podnieks said, and put them forward as role models for other mothers. In the early '00s, fans began to blog about celebrity mothers, recording "all the things celebrities were doing as parents and using that info as a springboard to talk about their own responses to parenting," Ms. Podnieks said. In some ways, this practice was "wonderfully democratizing," Ms. Podeneiks said. The idea undergirding these blogs was, "I'm never going to have the wealth and fame and success" of major celebrities, but "I can be on par with that celebrity if I can mother like them." Tabloids were also in the mix. In Ms. Petersen's book "Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman," erstwhile Us Weekly editor Janice Min points to the year 2003 as the tipping point for when actresses started really flaunting their pregnancies, and when babies became big business. Us Weekly's "Stars — They're Just Like Us!" feature depicts celebrities doing normal person things, like pumping gas while pregnant, or pushing a stroller at the farmers' market, a "perfect consolidation" of "the mundane and the spectacular," as Ms. Petersen wrote. Watching celebrities being parents in everyday ways certainly made them more relatable to the average person than watching them on a red carpet. Enter Jenny McCarthy, the most dangerous example of a celebrity who used her "expertise" as a parent to become an activist. In 2004, Ms. McCarthy, an actress and model, wrote a book called "Belly Laughs: The Naked Truth about Pregnancy and Childbirth," an unvarnished look at the highs and lows of early motherhood, hemorrhoids and all. It became a massive best seller. When celebrities tell all in memoirs and give a sense of their personal lives, Ms. Podnieks said, "that creates a sense that you're not only democratized and equalized, but actually friends." And so, in 2005, when her son was diagnosed with autism, there was an audience that trusted her on issues of motherhood — after all, she'd been through it, and they saw themselves in her. Image  Ms. McCarthy began to speak out about her belief that the MMR vaccine — the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella — caused her son's autism. "Most people didn't take it seriously," said Ms. Petersen. "But McCarthy's attachment to it is what popularized and legitimized" the now thoroughly debunked connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Ms. McCarthy was booked on the biggest, most influential talk show of the time: "The Oprah Winfrey Show." In her 2008 book, "Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism," Ms. McCarthy wrote, "The irony is that people around ME didn't believe me until I was on 'Oprah'; it wasn't until 'Oprah' that my own truth was validated." By that point, Oprah was probably more credible to the parents of America than the entire medical institution. Faith in doctors had plummeted much the way faith in politicians did. In 1966, 73 percent of Americans said they had "great confidence" in the leaders of the medical profession. By 2012, that figure was 34 percent. Image  The number of celebrities in the parenting-advice racket has only grown in the past decade — especially from stars who are arguably closest to regular folks themselves. Reality TV stars are peddling questionable or downright dangerous quasi-medical remedies. Kristin Cavallari, the star of the E! network show "Very Cavallari," fed her kids a homemade goat milk baby formula — People magazine published her recipe for it, though they took it down after multiple complaints about how dangerous it was. Oh, and she seems to believe there's a connection between autism and vaccines, too. For those of us who don't want to see polio return in our lifetimes, all of this is sobering. But in the intense pushback to Jessica Biel, there is a bit of hope. The Los Angeles Times pointed out that the celebrities who are usually involved in vaccine-skeptical advocacy, including Ms. McCarthy, Jim Carrey and Alicia Silverstone, did not join Ms. Biel in her lobbying efforts, perhaps because they realize the cause is so unpopular. That said, celebrity parent activists aren't going away anytime soon. In many cases they can make lasting positive change. Serena Williams is bringing media coverage to the black maternal mortality crisis by sharing her story of life-threatening postpartum blood clots and hemorrhaging. Amy Schumer is doing wonderful work on Instagram to bring attention to hyperemesis gravidarum, or extreme morning sickness, by showing the gory reality of the deeply unpleasant condition. Image  Ms. Podnieks gave the example of Brooke Shields, who has raised awareness about postpartum depression by writing a memoir about it, and Dr. Offit gave the example of Jerry Lewis and his decades-long commitment to raising awareness and money for children with Muscular Dystrophy. "He had a huge platform because he was a popular comedian, and he used that for the good," Dr. Offit said. "But we can't have it both ways. If we give them the platform, we expect them to use it for the good, but it's our fault if they don't. We give them that attention" no matter what.  |
| Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You - The New Yorker Posted: 21 Jun 2019 06:45 AM PDT  The first time I noticed that quite a lot of people on the Internet seemed to be begging celebrities to kill them was a couple of years ago. "Can lana del rey step on my throat already," one person tweeted. "Snap my neck and hide my body," another announced, when Lady Gaga posted a new profile photo. Taylor Swift could "run me over with a tractor and I'd say thank you and ask her if she wants to do it again," another wrote. If you performed a cursory search, you'd find hundreds of such messages, mostly lobbed by young millennials and members of Generation Z. There was an emphatic queerness to much of this discourse, whether or not the person tweeting identified as anything but straight. Many of the messages were about women and sent by women; the subset of men who attracted these tweets tended to be girlish, in a boy-band way. There were lots of appeals to sweetly handsome Korean pop stars, lots of "harry styles punch me in the face" requests, lots of wishes for the still-babyish Justin Bieber to run people over with his car. Nowadays, on Twitter, every hour brings a new crop of similar entreaties. One takeaway from all this is that young people really love celebrities. Another is that we're craving unmediated connection so desperately that we would accept it in the form of murder. It's also possible that we simply want to die. Earlier this year, at the Cut, in a piece about the upswing of "run me over" tweets, Gabriella Paiella observed that the popularity of these jokes can't be separated from the ambient fatalism inculcated by attention to actual real-world problems—"the fact that we're living during a time when we're constantly being reminded that the Earth is going to be virtually uninhabitable by the end of the century, that capitalism is wholly unsustainable, and that we're just one push of a button away from perishing in a nuclear war." Paiella talked to the writer Brandy Jensen, who had recently tweeted that her primary reaction to seeing a hot person was to think "back over me with a truck." Everyone, Jensen said, seemed to be constantly posting about how they were horny and how they wanted to die; it was natural that the two would converge. Devotion, by its nature, tends to invite agony. "Love has brought me within the reach of lovely, cruel arms that / unjustly kill me," Petrarch writes, in Robert M. Durling's English translation of "Rime Sparse," a set of poems written in the fourteenth century. Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," published in 1593, describes Venus as a maiden who "murders with a kiss." In the early seventeenth century, John Donne famously begged, "Batter my heart, three person'd God." (A degraded Internet-era version of the poem, "Holy Sonnet 14," might involve the impassioned poet pleading with God to choke him.) But this language appears to be spilling over. It may originate in a sort of erotic consecration, but love and pain, joy and punishment, seem increasingly convergent, at least in the ways that people express themselves online. Love may be timeless, but the half-ironic millennial death wish has become an underground river rushing swiftly under the surface of the age. Earlier this month, I got on the phone with Mistress Velvet, a dominatrix in Chicago with a day job in social work, to ask her what she made of all this. She'd started noticing the prevalence of punch-me-in-the-face talk in 2011, she told me, when she was first coming into her queerness, in her early twenties. "Saying that I'd 'literally let her stab me' was a way of linguistically valuing my queer relationships over my heterosexual ones," she said. "But I've also become interested in it in the context of B.D.S.M." Mistress Velvet told me that, when clients came to her with this sort of intense sacrificial devotion, they often were seeking replacements for powerful people who were absent from their lives. "It reminds me of when I transitioned from Christianity to atheism," she said. "I was suddenly afraid of death—I was nihilistic—and I had to find something else that could fill that gap." That parallel had never occurred to me, I told her. "I mean, if we're thinking of it," Mistress Velvet said, "Jesus died for our sins, and believers are supposed to give our lives back to him. My clients sometimes talk to me like this. They'd let me run them over with a truck. I'm like, 'That's not even what I want! Your life is sacred!' " "Right," I said, suddenly dazed. "Maybe it's a dream of mutuality—of sacrificing yourself for someone in such a way that they would then be permanently tied to you." I messaged a seventeen-year-old Harry Styles fan whose social-media bio included the sentence "harry can run me over, use my crumpled corpse to wipe his car off and then use me to avoid puddles on the street." She'd been on "stan twitter" since 2012, she explained, and "us stans have always been pretty harsh with expressing our love." (A stan, as the Oxford English Dictionary now recognizes, is an obsessive fan of a celebrity; the term comes from the 2000 Eminem song "Stan," and it can be used both as a noun and a verb.) "I say these kinds of things because . . . it would honestly be an honor for Harry to run me over," she wrote. An eighteen-year-old whose Twitter bio was "tom holland could run me over with a truck and I would say thank you" told me, "Even just being near him or in his presence would make me sooo happy, even if it meant he was running me over with a truck." After perusing the ample and growing archive of tweets in which people ask Cate Blanchett to step on their throats, I messaged a twenty-four-year-old woman who'd posted a photo of Blanchett with the caption "she's so tall pls step on my throat ma'am." Step-on-my-throat language, she wrote back, was all about "the LGBTQ people who just love to love and support women, and get more creative every passing day. its our safe place." Plus, she added, "It's Cate freaking Blanchett, you'd do anything she wants you to do." But not all run-me-over tweets direct their sentiment at an object. Plenty of people on Twitter are begging to simply be run over, stepped on, punched in the face. The Twitter user @alwayssaddaily, whose name is stated as simply "Anxiety," recently posted a series of emoji snowflakes that formed a giant "F," followed by "UCKING RUN ME OVER." It received twelve hundred likes. "I honestly feel that this new trend of expression is because people in society as a whole these days are becoming more and more numb to life and are losing perspective on the physical part of reality, which in turn causes the brain to react and express things a certain way in order to satisfy the need for feeling in our bodies," the twenty-year-old woman behind the account told me. "Life is becoming increasingly redundant, which makes me iterate these thoughts out loud to myself—hit me with a car, fucking kill me—for psychological satisfaction." In "Civilization and Its Discontents," published in 1930, Freud wrote about the unconscious sense of guilt he attributed to his patients, who tended not to believe what he was suggesting; it was hard to become conscious of being unconsciously guilty. "In order to make ourselves at all intelligible to them," he wrote, referring to the approach that analysts took with such patients, "we tell them of an unconscious need for punishment, in which the sense of guilt finds expression." In this framework, masochism is the ego's desire to atone. In my life—which is mostly, I would say, a vibrant and happy one—this masochistic tendency surfaces constantly, in a sidelong way. About a month ago, while spending a rowdy weekend at a music festival on the beach with nine other people, I started counting the jokes we made about walking into the ocean and dying together. A friend and I kept talking about drowning each other "as a bit." For me, the capacity to experience such unfettered pleasure—the fact of having the time and capital and freedom required for it, at a time when we know that so many people's lives are worsening—is often what instigates the murmur of guilt. I do deserve to be run over with a dump truck, I think, at home, opening my delivery packages, thinking about how much plastic I have put on this planet, how much labor I have exploited for the sake of my own convenience. Longing and guilt intertwine every time I think about having children, who, if they exist, will exist in a world defined by man-made crisis and natural disaster. On the beach, flooded with joy, I felt the tug of that familiar undertow. "Fucking kill me," I thought, suddenly desiring a sensation strong enough to silence itself—which is, I suppose, one way of defining love.  |
| 9 celebrities who have identified as gender non-binary - INSIDER Posted: 21 Jun 2019 10:58 AM PDT  Bex Taylor-Klaus has had quite a successful career in Hollywood so far, with roles in Netflix's "Dumplin," and on AMC's "The Killing," The CW's "Arrow," and MTV's "Scream" (to name a few). In an interview and shoot with Autostraddle in 2018, the 24-year-old spoke about their struggle to freely explore gender, both in our society and in the industry. "In this day, exploring gender is taboo and stigmatized but to a lesser extent [than in the past], and it's something that I've always been a little bit afraid of because my industry can be a little bit brutal," Taylor-Klaus said. The Atlanta native added that the shoot, which features them wearing various looks — such as a crop top with boots in one instance and a button down shirt with a tie in another — was a way to show that they can be a "chameleon." Just a month after that, Klaus tweeted that they did in fact identify as non-binary. "I came out as trans non-binary in a room full of people today," Klaus wrote in the tweet. "Guess it's time for me to do that on here, too … Hi. I'm Bex, and the rumors are true. I'm v enby [non-binary]."  |
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