We have always looked to people who we regard as larger-than-life for guidance on how to live – that is a truth as old as time. Mimicking the examples of gods or heroes or older siblings or very popular users of Instagram often feels easier than trying to make self-directed life decisions.
Article by Jean Hannah Edelstein
Just look at celebrities. They have a discernible effect on the way that we live today – and one that is often assumed to be negative. Sometimes, though, their impact is a good. A new study revealed that coverage of pop culture news has helped to destigmatize children born outside of marriage. Maybe it’s also time for us to destigmatize pop culture news.
Tracking the shift in celebrity narratives about pregnancy in People magazine over a 40-year-period, alongside shifts in family norms, Dr Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk, an assistant professor of sociology, found: “The early model dictated that you should marry by the time the baby is born. By the mid-2000s that had changed, and it became widely acceptable in the celebrity world to have a child without marrying first.”
And thank goodness for that: according to the most recent numbers published by the CDC, 40.2% of children in the US are now born to unmarried mothers, with higher rates among women who are not white. While this represents a slight decline since the peak in 2007, it’s impossible to ignore that for many communities, having kids outside of marriage is the reality for a majority of people. Celebrities: they really are just like us.
Some research shows that kids who grow up with married parents experience certain benefits, particularly economic ones. But stigmatizing unmarried mothers doesn’t help anyone – though there’s plenty of historical evidence of the opposite.
And if celebrities’ freedom to choose how they build their families leads to greater acceptance of a wider range of family structures for the rest of us, it can only lead to better, more accepting communities and a more positive environment for children from all kinds of families to grow up in.
Decrying popular media consumption as evidence of the wider demise of culture has long been a beloved tradition of the self-righteously serious. And there’s no doubt that some portrayal of celebrity living can have a less positive impact on folks who are keen consumers of magazines like People: there’s some correlation between media consumption and body image issues, for example. And it would have been good if no one had ever read a magazine that advocated that they wear jeggings.
But magazines like People are an important part of the fabric of our culture that also includes the New York Times and Foreign Affairs. No one is forced to consume popular media. But millions choose to look at People’s website every month – not to mention its continually huge newsstand circulation.
Many of us are always going to be interested in learning what celebrities are up to. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing certain kinds of media for covering news that lacks seriousness. But alongside this criticism, we must acknowledge their value: in telling the contemporary versions of stories we’ve been sharing with each other since the beginning of time, People and other pop culture outlets can use their presence in our lives to make the world a slightly kinder place.
