Remember the simple times before the internet and the constant surveillance of celebrities? When you decided to like a singer for their songs or an actress for her movies? Good times! Now before declaring your fandom to anyone, you have to do an entire background check on them!
With almost every single celebrity now on Twitter, they have the ability to let the world know who they are as a person. They tweet out their political stances or positions on controversial topics and that gives you a clearer idea as to who you’re a fan of.
This is when the term problematic fave comes into play. You can be a fan of someone’s music but be outraged by some of their personal opinions on women rights or race or politics. This makes it a lot harder to like someone as a celebrity these days.
This is not even bringing up the issue of them having controversial art like when Robin Thicke sang “blurred lines”. Even though you knew it was a terrible song and hated everything it stood for, you couldn’t help but sing along to the catchy tune. The celebrity space constantly puts us in dilemmas like this and we don’t know how to handle them.
This environment of political correctness might be needed but it can definitely be overdone. There is now an entire tumblr page dedicated to finding things celebrities did that are considered wrong or politically incorrect. From things like cultural appropriation to more serious issues like sexism and racism, everything is being policed!
We need to figure out what matters to us as humans and be able to understand that even celebrities are humans and make mistakes. We need to appreciate art regardless of its creator and give people the chance to grow and develop.
