Don't Use Celebrities as an Example

If you're trying to talk about what "people" do, celebrities aren't good examples

Does anyone even remember this?

You know how Dr. Becky frequently denies being part of the Gentle Parenting (tm) world? That’s kind of how I am with the gender wars. Look, I don’t like the gender wars. I wish we had gender peace, to be honest with you. I also somewhat snobbishly, resent being grouped in with people like the Whatever podcast and other low-quality rage bait because I am a writer, not a “blogger” or “content creator,” you see. Yes, I may have written about a Reddit sub for the prettiest vaginas, but I demand to be taken seriously.

But anyway, despite my protestations, my content on sex and relationships tends to be the most popular, and it’s fun to write about. Thus, I am unfortunately part of the Gender Wars. I maintain that I’m not fighting in any particular gender war because I don’t aim to moralize the behavior of men or women, and I had no particular stake on whether either gender is more evil (something that has gotten me in trouble, ironically, with both genders.) So I guess I’m a gender war correspondent. And in my serious correspondence work (AKA, scrolling Twitter when I’m supposed to be doing laundry) I’ve observed that when people want to make an argument about how “men” behave, or how “women” behave, they will use celebrities’ behavior as their examples.

This is bad for many reasons, chief among them that celebrities aren’t really “people.” Sorry, I don’t mean to dehumanize and objectify Tom Hiddleston or anything, but celebrities are an extremely bizarre group of people who should just never be used as an example for anything other than, well, celebrities.