This post is in response to arguing with people--straight and gay alike--about a certain celebrity, whether or not she's an ally, if she's pandering, if pandering matters, and whether or not I'm an asshole.
The last part is probably an enthusiastic "Yes" but let's reflect on this for a bit anyway without actually giving more time to an argument about a person none of us know, which is a crucial part of what I want to talk about.
People you know are more important than people you don't know.
I realize it's tricky in an age where we've never been closer or more engaged to our celebrities to keep in mind that we do not know them, they are not our friends, and while we may love them and stan and feel like we're attacked when they're attacked--
That is not true.
That is not real.
They are in no tangible way connected to us.
Now, as someone who is obsessed with pop culture, I get that it's a little hypocritical for me to be making that argument.
Have I ever defended a celebrity against someone I knew in real life?
Yes, yes I have.
Do I feel personally attacked when someone doesn't like what I like and do I accept that that's just part of being human?
Yes, yes I do.
Is it reasonable to stop talking to someone you're friends with for a few months because they criticized Madonna or Katy Perry or Beyonce or Lady Gaga or--I'm trying to think of a guy here, but nobody cares about them, so let's just say--Is it reasonable?
No.
No, it is not reasonable.
And I get that part of stan culture is not being reasonable when it comes to the people you like, and that somehow that relates to keeping passion for something you enjoy alive at a time when we all just want to crawl under the covers and weep, but there have got to be limits to this.
And the limit should be--
Do not equate people in your real life with people you see on television or in the movies on hear singing in your car.
Do not equate them and--whatever you do--do not value those people over the real life people.
I don't even have a good analogy for why you shouldn't do that, just don't.
Now, I will acknowledge the other side of this, which is--
Right now, people are saying the country is more polarized than ever, and that's just...not true.
The people we're mad at now are the people we've always been mad at, we just didn't have as many platforms available to us to let those people know how mad we were.
Thirty years ago, if you thought I was an asshole, and you wanted me to know you felt that way, you had to have the guts to tell me to my face that I was an asshole, or do what Dorothy Parker did, and write long, clever letters about it.
Now, there are SO many ways to let people know you hate them, but the truth is, while we've been given more resources to do that, we've never really developed the bravery for it.
And there's a reason for that--
It's so we don't all just outright kill each other.
But if there's one thing we humans know how to do, it's circumvent our own cowardice.
So now, when we don't like someone, or have an issue with someone we do like, one way we've found to express it to them is to wait until they say something about a celebrity we disagree with, and then it goes from--
I actually like that song.
--to--
Well, you wouldn't know anything about that, because you never let anybody finish a sentence.
--to--
It's fine, because you're going to die alone unless you figure out how to let those walls down.
And pretty soon, you're like--
Wait, are we still talking about Shawn Mendes?
And gurl, we were NEVER talking about Shawn Mendes.
It would be insane--and it is insane--to get as heated as we get, myself included, talking about people we've never met, will never meet, and who have so much more money than we could ever imagine so that while we're tearing each other's heads off, they're sitting on a yacht named Privilege kissing someone who looks like a Greek statue and eating gold-covered shrimp.
If you don't like someone, that's okay. You don't have to like everyone. But you can never truly like a person you don't know more than a person you've actually met.
Like, it's possible your uncle is meaner than Nick Jonas, but you can't ever really know that, so while it's okay for you to not like your uncle, you arguing with your uncle about something Nick Jonas side, and taking Nick Jonas' side, is crazy, because you don'tn know Nick Jonas and he could be a way bigger asshole than your uncle is. You have no way of knowing that.
And if you're thinking--
Well, Kevin, I'm not defending Nick Jonas in that moment. I'm defending something he said. His position. I'm defending a principle.
Okay, awesome, good for you--
But say that.
If you don't like someone, deal with that. Don't use a celebrity as a proxy for a bigger conversation.
Granted, that's what pop culture is supposed to do when it's working correctly, and the Thinkpiece Era means that when Zendaya sneezes, Huffington Post has seventeen essays about it, and yes, I've read some of them, and yes, they're good, but this is a losing trend. We're on a sinking ship here.
It's fine that we've needed stand-ins to kickstart important conversations, but honestly, can we just have the conversations now?
While I've been arguing with people all week about someone whose name rhymes with Sailor Miffed, what I've learned is that so many people want to learn how to be better allies, so many gay people want to talk about what we should expect from our allies, people want to talk about what exactly pandering and gay-baiting is, people want to talk about how exhausted they are living with so much outrage, people want to talk about cancel culture, gay people feel disconnected from their own community, older gay people are worried younger gay people don't understand their history, and apparently everybody feels very differently about what shade means.
And all of that is valid and worth talking about, and we should talk about it, and we don't need Sailor Miffed to do it.
I mean, if I have to compromise, sure, let's use her as a jumping off point, but once we've jumped, let's not mention her again--not because she's bad or good, this isn't a judgment of that--but because if she try to keep her at the center of a conversation that's not really about her, it's both unfair to her and to ourselves and to the very serious topic we're probably talking about--it also guarantees we won't get anywhere, and it'll be one of those things where we finish speaking and say--
I don't even know what we were talking about.
We cannot continue to value imaginary relationships over real ones.
We can't continue to center our conversations around moments in pop culture if we're not prepared to then shift the dialogue to something bigger.
We can't take things so personally.
And that last one is really hard.
I get that.
Believe me.
I struggle with it myself.
We are all walking open wounds lately, and it's just as crazy that I don't get how attacking a celebrity someone likes is hurtful as it is that someone would get mad at me for doing it, but we've all got to stop.
A movie or a song or a book or a tv show is meaningful to you for very personal reasons, and if someone else says--and they should say it exactly this way--
Oh, it's interesting you like it. It's hard for me to connect to it, but maybe it's just not for me. But I'd love to hear more about what it means to you.
--We cannot bite that person's head off.
Secretly, I think part of this might be that we all see ourselves as being sort of famous now, whether we have any proof of this or not. I got faves on Twitter when I posted a photo of me in my favorite jeans so I'm basically George Michael, but the rest of you need to understand that you're not famous and Sailor Miffed is not your colleague.
You are not on the same level as her.
It doesn't mean you're a nobody or you have no value.
It just means that if someone attacks her, part of why you might feel the urge to rush to her defense is because you might see a certain kinship in her, and--I'm going to put this as delicately as I can--
There is no kinship.
You are not famous.
Could you be famous one day?
Maybe.
I guess.
Sure.
But odds are--
You are not now and you never will be.
And that's fine.
I'm not saying you'll never be successful.
I'm saying you'll never be famous.
And they're very different things.
I wrote a thinkpiece about it that you will never read, but trust me, it's true.
So save your energy fighting and your outrage and your passion and devote it to the people you can engage and connect with in your real life.
Have discussions.
Have debates.
Have arguments.
Fight.
Yell.
Say what you want to say--with respect.
But if you think someone's just a #$#-ing idiot, why are they even in your life?
(Unless your friend is dating them and she always dates guys with names that begin with a 'Q' and you can't figure out why and--you know what? That's another story.)
You are not obligated to let every person you meet know how you feel about them.
You are not standing at some sort of magical podium talking to a bunch of press agents who are waiting on your thoughts about everything.
You are not CJ from The West Wing needing to respond to anything that happens ever.
If you don't like someone, either get far away from them or, if you can't figure out why you don't like them, do some soul-searching or get to know them better until you realize why or change your mind, but do not wait for them to talk about something they love and then shit all over it as a way of letting them know, Hey, guess what? I've always disliked you.
That is sociopathic and it's something more and more of us are doing, and it's not okay, and no matter how awful the person is whose parade you're raining on, you are still the person in that situation who is in the wrong.
Ready?
Let's all say this together--
Nobody cares why you don't like the thing they like.
Nobody.
Nobody, nobody, nobody cares.
And I'm saying this as someone who JUST posted something to let everyone know I don't like Sailor Miffed, so I get it. I get it. I get it.
And I justified posting about not liking her by saying there were bigger reasons, and I truly believe there are bigger reasons, but I should be starting a conversation about those reasons, and not just taking a snide jab at her, because I don't understand why people like her.
So I need to do better.
Because while you should not like someone so much that it makes you treat people you know like garbage if they don't feel the same way, it's also not cool to hurt the people you care about by attacking something or someone they like knowing full well it's not going to change how they feel, but it is going to make them sad or angry or upset or even a little less happy.
That's not okay.
I've had some really great conversations this week, and I hope to have some more, but a few conversations sort of bottomed out when I tried to say--
Hey, I don't think this is really about--
Because some of us--including me--are not always ready to have bigger conversations. Or maybe all we do is have bigger conversations and we're sick of them. We're sick of big conversations. Boy, do I understand that.
But we also have the choice to step away, take a break, not look at social media for a few hours, and remind ourselves that we know people. We know real people. And they're important if only because they're real.
And if you know Sailor Miffed in real life, then none of this applies to you.
But tell her I said "Hello."
The last part is probably an enthusiastic "Yes" but let's reflect on this for a bit anyway without actually giving more time to an argument about a person none of us know, which is a crucial part of what I want to talk about.
People you know are more important than people you don't know.
I realize it's tricky in an age where we've never been closer or more engaged to our celebrities to keep in mind that we do not know them, they are not our friends, and while we may love them and stan and feel like we're attacked when they're attacked--
That is not true.
That is not real.
They are in no tangible way connected to us.
Now, as someone who is obsessed with pop culture, I get that it's a little hypocritical for me to be making that argument.
Have I ever defended a celebrity against someone I knew in real life?
Yes, yes I have.
Do I feel personally attacked when someone doesn't like what I like and do I accept that that's just part of being human?
Yes, yes I do.
Is it reasonable to stop talking to someone you're friends with for a few months because they criticized Madonna or Katy Perry or Beyonce or Lady Gaga or--I'm trying to think of a guy here, but nobody cares about them, so let's just say--Is it reasonable?
No.
No, it is not reasonable.
And I get that part of stan culture is not being reasonable when it comes to the people you like, and that somehow that relates to keeping passion for something you enjoy alive at a time when we all just want to crawl under the covers and weep, but there have got to be limits to this.
And the limit should be--
Do not equate people in your real life with people you see on television or in the movies on hear singing in your car.
Do not equate them and--whatever you do--do not value those people over the real life people.
I don't even have a good analogy for why you shouldn't do that, just don't.
Now, I will acknowledge the other side of this, which is--
Right now, people are saying the country is more polarized than ever, and that's just...not true.
The people we're mad at now are the people we've always been mad at, we just didn't have as many platforms available to us to let those people know how mad we were.
Thirty years ago, if you thought I was an asshole, and you wanted me to know you felt that way, you had to have the guts to tell me to my face that I was an asshole, or do what Dorothy Parker did, and write long, clever letters about it.
Now, there are SO many ways to let people know you hate them, but the truth is, while we've been given more resources to do that, we've never really developed the bravery for it.
And there's a reason for that--
It's so we don't all just outright kill each other.
But if there's one thing we humans know how to do, it's circumvent our own cowardice.
So now, when we don't like someone, or have an issue with someone we do like, one way we've found to express it to them is to wait until they say something about a celebrity we disagree with, and then it goes from--
I actually like that song.
--to--
Well, you wouldn't know anything about that, because you never let anybody finish a sentence.
--to--
It's fine, because you're going to die alone unless you figure out how to let those walls down.
And pretty soon, you're like--
Wait, are we still talking about Shawn Mendes?
And gurl, we were NEVER talking about Shawn Mendes.
It would be insane--and it is insane--to get as heated as we get, myself included, talking about people we've never met, will never meet, and who have so much more money than we could ever imagine so that while we're tearing each other's heads off, they're sitting on a yacht named Privilege kissing someone who looks like a Greek statue and eating gold-covered shrimp.
If you don't like someone, that's okay. You don't have to like everyone. But you can never truly like a person you don't know more than a person you've actually met.
Like, it's possible your uncle is meaner than Nick Jonas, but you can't ever really know that, so while it's okay for you to not like your uncle, you arguing with your uncle about something Nick Jonas side, and taking Nick Jonas' side, is crazy, because you don'tn know Nick Jonas and he could be a way bigger asshole than your uncle is. You have no way of knowing that.
And if you're thinking--
Well, Kevin, I'm not defending Nick Jonas in that moment. I'm defending something he said. His position. I'm defending a principle.
Okay, awesome, good for you--
But say that.
If you don't like someone, deal with that. Don't use a celebrity as a proxy for a bigger conversation.
Granted, that's what pop culture is supposed to do when it's working correctly, and the Thinkpiece Era means that when Zendaya sneezes, Huffington Post has seventeen essays about it, and yes, I've read some of them, and yes, they're good, but this is a losing trend. We're on a sinking ship here.
It's fine that we've needed stand-ins to kickstart important conversations, but honestly, can we just have the conversations now?
While I've been arguing with people all week about someone whose name rhymes with Sailor Miffed, what I've learned is that so many people want to learn how to be better allies, so many gay people want to talk about what we should expect from our allies, people want to talk about what exactly pandering and gay-baiting is, people want to talk about how exhausted they are living with so much outrage, people want to talk about cancel culture, gay people feel disconnected from their own community, older gay people are worried younger gay people don't understand their history, and apparently everybody feels very differently about what shade means.
And all of that is valid and worth talking about, and we should talk about it, and we don't need Sailor Miffed to do it.
I mean, if I have to compromise, sure, let's use her as a jumping off point, but once we've jumped, let's not mention her again--not because she's bad or good, this isn't a judgment of that--but because if she try to keep her at the center of a conversation that's not really about her, it's both unfair to her and to ourselves and to the very serious topic we're probably talking about--it also guarantees we won't get anywhere, and it'll be one of those things where we finish speaking and say--
I don't even know what we were talking about.
We cannot continue to value imaginary relationships over real ones.
We can't continue to center our conversations around moments in pop culture if we're not prepared to then shift the dialogue to something bigger.
We can't take things so personally.
And that last one is really hard.
I get that.
Believe me.
I struggle with it myself.
We are all walking open wounds lately, and it's just as crazy that I don't get how attacking a celebrity someone likes is hurtful as it is that someone would get mad at me for doing it, but we've all got to stop.
A movie or a song or a book or a tv show is meaningful to you for very personal reasons, and if someone else says--and they should say it exactly this way--
Oh, it's interesting you like it. It's hard for me to connect to it, but maybe it's just not for me. But I'd love to hear more about what it means to you.
--We cannot bite that person's head off.
Secretly, I think part of this might be that we all see ourselves as being sort of famous now, whether we have any proof of this or not. I got faves on Twitter when I posted a photo of me in my favorite jeans so I'm basically George Michael, but the rest of you need to understand that you're not famous and Sailor Miffed is not your colleague.
You are not on the same level as her.
It doesn't mean you're a nobody or you have no value.
It just means that if someone attacks her, part of why you might feel the urge to rush to her defense is because you might see a certain kinship in her, and--I'm going to put this as delicately as I can--
There is no kinship.
You are not famous.
Could you be famous one day?
Maybe.
I guess.
Sure.
But odds are--
You are not now and you never will be.
And that's fine.
I'm not saying you'll never be successful.
I'm saying you'll never be famous.
And they're very different things.
I wrote a thinkpiece about it that you will never read, but trust me, it's true.
So save your energy fighting and your outrage and your passion and devote it to the people you can engage and connect with in your real life.
Have discussions.
Have debates.
Have arguments.
Fight.
Yell.
Say what you want to say--with respect.
But if you think someone's just a #$#-ing idiot, why are they even in your life?
(Unless your friend is dating them and she always dates guys with names that begin with a 'Q' and you can't figure out why and--you know what? That's another story.)
You are not obligated to let every person you meet know how you feel about them.
You are not standing at some sort of magical podium talking to a bunch of press agents who are waiting on your thoughts about everything.
You are not CJ from The West Wing needing to respond to anything that happens ever.
If you don't like someone, either get far away from them or, if you can't figure out why you don't like them, do some soul-searching or get to know them better until you realize why or change your mind, but do not wait for them to talk about something they love and then shit all over it as a way of letting them know, Hey, guess what? I've always disliked you.
That is sociopathic and it's something more and more of us are doing, and it's not okay, and no matter how awful the person is whose parade you're raining on, you are still the person in that situation who is in the wrong.
Ready?
Let's all say this together--
Nobody cares why you don't like the thing they like.
Nobody.
Nobody, nobody, nobody cares.
And I'm saying this as someone who JUST posted something to let everyone know I don't like Sailor Miffed, so I get it. I get it. I get it.
And I justified posting about not liking her by saying there were bigger reasons, and I truly believe there are bigger reasons, but I should be starting a conversation about those reasons, and not just taking a snide jab at her, because I don't understand why people like her.
So I need to do better.
Because while you should not like someone so much that it makes you treat people you know like garbage if they don't feel the same way, it's also not cool to hurt the people you care about by attacking something or someone they like knowing full well it's not going to change how they feel, but it is going to make them sad or angry or upset or even a little less happy.
That's not okay.
I've had some really great conversations this week, and I hope to have some more, but a few conversations sort of bottomed out when I tried to say--
Hey, I don't think this is really about--
Because some of us--including me--are not always ready to have bigger conversations. Or maybe all we do is have bigger conversations and we're sick of them. We're sick of big conversations. Boy, do I understand that.
But we also have the choice to step away, take a break, not look at social media for a few hours, and remind ourselves that we know people. We know real people. And they're important if only because they're real.
And if you know Sailor Miffed in real life, then none of this applies to you.
But tell her I said "Hello."
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