This week I have been thinking a lot about celebrities, public intimacy, and boundaries.
A big part of the research I am doing for my master's thesis involves the ever-growing field of celebrity studies, and so I spend a lot of time reading about how we relate to public figures.
What I have gleaned from this research, and my general observations, is that society tends to perceive celebrities as public property. We take photos of them without their consent, we hang around their houses as a tourist activity, and we read about their lives in tabloids and on gossip blogs.
We are endlessly drawn to the celebrity, and we feel entitled to their life story, right down to the gory, intimate details.
Personally, I think it's pretty fascinating how we construct these figures, but at the same time I feel uncomfortable at the idea of constantly invading someone's privacy in order to fulfil our appetite for gossip and spectacle.
As a woman, there are times when I feel like public property, with politicians mulling over what I should and shouldn't do with my body, and the constant anxiety that someone will physically violate my personal space just because they feel they have a right to my body, my time and my attention.
Celebrity culture, for me, brings up important questions regarding boundaries and how they are so sorely lacking in so many social situations.
Boundaries are something we could all be better at. There are so many ways in which we all violate each other's boundaries almost on a daily basis because, growing up, we are rarely taught what is best for us and those around us.
Violating someone's boundaries might involve coming into their room or office without knocking, or trying to make someone talk about something you know makes them uncomfortable. Or it might be worse; it might involve physically violating boundaries to the point of committing assault.
Most people are only engaging in pretty minor boundary pushing and I think this comes down to a lot of mass media culture. In films we regularly see men pursuing romantic partners even when the woman is clearly not interested, we see representations of people reading each other's private correspondence, and we watch every moment in a celebrity's life.
Pushing boundaries is so normalised in the media that we often overstep without even thinking about it, or worse, we overstep and find some justification for our behaviour.
It's not just pushing boundaries that is the problem, either. We're also not very good at setting firm and appropriate boundaries. Personally, I often find my boundaries shift and change, and I'm never sure exactly where they are and consequently, I'm not very good at communicating to those around me what my boundaries are and how to respect them.
Establishing strong and healthy boundaries in your personal relationships is essential but extremely difficult, especially when we're dealing with a society in which boundaries are fluid for the benefit of entertainment, and where people feel entitled to test the boundaries of women and other marginalised people.
I don't have a solution for building better boundaries, or a way of enforcing respectful interactions, but I think it would help a lot if people started thinking about what makes them uncomfortable and then extended that thought process into considering how they interact around other people.
Because we so often don't have to language to communicate what our boundaries are and when they are being violated, it is really important to pay attention to how people are responding to your behaviour. For example, you should pay attention to body language, tone, and facial expressions, and constantly be aware that what you are comfortable with may be someone else's social nightmare.
And, if this doesn't work for you, then try imagining being hounded by the paparazzi, and if you don't like the thought of that feeling, then try to be aware of when you're inflicting it on someone else and take a step back.
-Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
