There’s something afoot in the starlet stratosphere. If publicity power brokers have spent the last decade dutifully keeping their Wagyu-grade cash cows from tweeting anything more controversial than “#blessed,” someone, somewhere, must have gifted them all a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck for Christmas, because… Ron, come quick. They’ve gone wild. The girls have gone wild. Not quite Lindsay Lohan’s Scattegory sex list/Paris Hilton’s mugshot wild, but they’re definitely unmuzzled, decidedly less afraid to put a stiletto wrong on occasion instead of playing the fool’s game of trying to keep every last incel on X happy with their behavior.
The notion of “respecting the sacred privacy of relationships” is about as popular with the A-list right now as lipreading. Public ass grabbing, on the other hand, is back—for better or for worse. (For better.) Taylor Swift—a woman who’s been known to enter and exit venues secreted in a janitor cart—is cruising into Highmark Stadium with all the swagger of Caesar entering Rome to watch Travis Kelce make heart hands, while Doja Cat remains at least 350% less tameable than Miley Cyrus circa 2010. A particularly ingratiating message lately sent to her Kittenz: “I don’t [love you] though cuz I don’t even know y’all.” (Imagine, if you will, the breakdown this must have elicited from whoever Doja’s answer to The Idol’s Nikki Katz is.) As for Ariana Grande: she’s met rumors of being a side chick with the same level of disdain she’s long held for capital letters. The popstrel MO for 2024: out with the Notes app apologies; in with the “yes, and?”
And no one has spat out their PC ball gag with quite as much relish as Selena Gomez. Since first laying her head on Benny Blanco’s zebra-print-covered chest, the 31-year-old has been hitting “reply” like the internet is still in its consequences-free “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!!” era. There have been clap backs regarding her relationship with the producer; a tweakment “confession” (“I’ve had Botox bb girl”); and numerous solemn pronouncements that she would be quitting social media. “I will never be a meme again,” she wrote, with all the bitter conviction of Scarlett O’Hara digging up a moldy carrot at Tara. As God is my witness, she was back on TikTok before it had time to invent a new aesthetic.
It’s all a little mad, yes, but I’m quite into this has-she-been-hacked? approach to influencing. Most celebrities whose net worth isn’t directly connected to fabricated reality TV drama haven’t had fully unfettered access to their own social media accounts since we were all very excited about the glow-up potential of the Valencia filter and Apple was boasting about the fact that the iPhone 4 had multiple choices of display wallpapers. Selena laying waste to comment sections (and her own near-universal popularity in the process) without anyone prying her phone out of her hands means it actually feels something close to genuine when she posts anything even vaguely poignant, as she did this week, in the form of before and after photos. “Today, I realized I will never look like this again…” she captioned a Story of herself in Miami in 2013, following it with a shot taken in Mexico last year. “I’m not perfect but I am proud to be who I am… Sometimes I forget it’s OK to be me.”
On the whole, I’m not one to reach for my confetti gun every time someone at the pinnacle of the Global Shaggability Index deigns to “get real” about their body, nor do I consider it an act of bravery to admit to having pores, then announcing the equivalent of a Proactiv deal. But there’s a LiveJournal level of earnestness to some of Gomez’s online confessions/aggressions recently that feels more cleansing than a diet tea after years of being waterboarded with PR-polished content masked as true vulnerability. If we will insist on the closest approximation of realness from our celebrities, it can only come with a side of the inevitable chaos that having as many followers as there are people in Croatia all but guarantees. To this bb girl’s mind, a little typo-heavy trash talk feels like a small price to pay for even an Ozempic vial’s worth of authenticity.