There’s something a little bit weird about
Hollywood. That sentence is a little misleading because it implies that I’ve
got some inside information about the “stars” that live there, and I don’t. I
only know as much as you. What I mean is that there is something off about our
interest in them. The moment we come to adore them, (and we can’t be blamed for loving them for they are all so loveable.
Even Kanye’s short temper gains some sort of cute-ish quality once looked at
through the tint of Hollywood) we pick up the puppet strings that control
their lives and pull them as we see fit. We judge them by our standards, and
punish them when they deviate from our expectations of them. Child stars suffer
the most from this.
As they navigate puberty and approach young
adulthood, we, who shouldn’t have any control over them at all, lend our hands
to their shaping. We justify this by saying that they’re role models to the
masses hence they must be held to higher standards of behavior than the typical
young person. There are two problems
with this. The first is that the individual in question did not choose to be
you or your child’s role model, so at some point or the other they will
disappoint you. At one stage of their lives, they will get a belly button
piercing or dye their hair, or get a tattoo or twerk and you’ll be pissed off.
The second problem is that young people don’t make very good role models for
anyone. After Chris Brown beat Rihanna, attempts were made by the media to turn
her into the how to guide for dealing with an abusive partner. She was meant to
break up with him, see that he was prosecuted to the full extent of the law and
then never speak to him again. That would have been the wise thing to do but
she didn’t and she can’t be judged for it either, because before she became
your role model she was a mere mortal.
Furthermore they find themselves trapped
between the fans that want them to remain children and the adult audience that
couldn’t care less about them. To lose their perceived innocence, they rebel
spectacularly against everything and anything remotely associated with good
sense and propriety. Jessica Biel, posed topless in the March 2000 issue of
Gear magazine. This made the producers of 7th Heaven so mad that
they brought legal action against the magazine. Lindsay Lohan obliterated her
child star image by partying and drugging her way through her late teens and
much of her twenties, and let’s not forget that she’s posed nude numerous
times. Miley Cyrus, is twerking and slutting her way away from Hannah Montana and everything
that the Disney character stood for. The list goes on forever. It’s about time
that we cut these youngsters some slack. I’d hate it if I had to see Ariel
Winter (Alex in Modern family), Zendaya Coleman (Dancing With the Stars finalist
and Shake it up main character) or Elle Fanning, sprawled across the cover of
Playboy in the name of seeking a more adult audience.
Happy Days,
Afam
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