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When I was growing up in the mid-aughts, celebrity culture ruled the roost as much as it does today. Perhaps the single crucial difference was that it was considered extremely weird to be too into any particular famous person; I found this out the hard way when I wore a tie to day camp, and proceeded to be mocked from sunup to sundown for “trying to be Avril Lavigne.”
These days, however, suffering through the public’s borderline-scary obsession with you seems to be just par for the course when you have a high profile—a state of affairs that Barry Keoghan excoriated in a statement posted to X on Saturday, after news of his recent breakup with pop star Sabrina Carpenter emerged.
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“I can only sit and take so much,” Keoghan wrote in an emotional plea for privacy. “These messages I have received no person should ever have to read them. Absolute lies, hatred, disgusting commentary about my appearance, character, how I am as a parent and every other inhumane thing you can imagine…. Sitting outside my baby boy’s house intimidating them. That’s crossing a line.”
While it’s….disconcerting, to say the least, that Keoghan should have to ask people to stay away from his two-year-old son, such behavior is nothing new; singer Chappell Roan has had to deal with similar incidences of stalking and harassment ever since her star began to rise this year. Once again, it seems people simply aren’t interested in being normal to the celebrities they claim to love (nor their exes).
Obviously, fan culture has been around a long time, reaching back as far as to the 19th century (see: the Janeites). Yet the impulse to intrude upon the object of your obsession’s life—or intrude on someone else’s life on their behalf (Carpenter, it should be noted, has not said a word against her supposed ex)—feels like a distinctly new thing, upheld by our 24-hour news cycle and Instagram- and TikTok-feed-informed public discourse. (If you’ve never really learned about boundaries or had them enforced online, is it so strange that you’d carry that porousness into your IRL life?)
Ultimately, if you’re truly a fan of Sabrina Carpenter, Barry Keoghan, Chappell Roan, or anyone else, the kindest thing you could possibly do for them is to enjoy their art but otherwise leave them alone. It’s possible to be a fan without being, well…a creep! After all, famous people may have asked for our attention, but they don’t need all of it.
