Celebrities: Should We Shun Them, Ignore Them, or Adore Them?

Occasionally, I mention celebrities in this blog. Some recent ones include Edie Falco and Kim Cattrall. Each time I do, someone raises the question of why anyone pays any attention to these people.

As one who has never subscribed to People magazine or any others of that ilk, I should be sensitive to that criticism, and at one point I would have been. The view I've come to now, though, is that even though celebrity lives or opinions deserve no special consideration simply because they are attached to celebrities, neither should every famous person be prejudged as stupid or shallow or anything else.

I don't know of any relevant research, but my guess is that if you were to assess the entire range of celebrities on a number of dimensions, and compare the results to a representative sample of non-celebrities, there would be few differences.

I'm always wondering how to pierce our matrimaniacal cultural consciousness, let out all that hot air, and let in something cooler and fresher. The matter is similar to one I raised earlier with the readers of Living Single, asking them whether visitors to dating sites should run into the perspective we discuss here.

So I now think that if Edie Falco can model an enlightened way of responding to an interviewer who can't seem to take "I'm happy" as an answer from a single person, then I'm all for highlighting that. If seeing her name in a story draws people to it who would never have read it otherwise, then I count that as a plus. Maybe they will think about their own single lives, or the lives of single people they know, in a less stereotypical way.

With that as my excuse, here, for anyone interested, is a link to a story with the tease, "Celibacy and prolonged singledom are turning out to be viable options for a wide variety of women - not just Lady Gaga."