Parasocial relationships: who to blame?

Personally I have never been through the phase of having in crazy, stupid, parasocial love with a celebrity, even when I was a teenager. Although I do think some celebrities are cute and pay extra attention to them on social media, I have never done anything crazier than having a secret crush. I do know some crazy fans though. A girl I went to middle school with once dressed up as a caterer just to get into the backstage of a concert. She paid way more than she could afford just to see the celebrities she loved, and literally screamed and cried for everything about those celebrities. In my opinions back then, as a “calm teenager,” I thought she was insane. And I kept reminded myself to not end up like that because that was just embarrassing. Fan girls seem to have a pretty bad reputation of being loud, crazy, and sometimes violent. Since I do not know much about why they behave that way, I looked up online and found this:

This video confirms my opinion on crazy fangirls when I was a teenager – annoying and hysterical. The YouTuber thinks this kind of behavior is a specific phase of women’s brain development in which they misplace their emotions, while if a boy adopts any crazy fan behavior, he is gay. Although I agree that teenagers tend to be more emotional, I do not think parasocial relationship is an exclusive thing just for teenagers or girls. For example, in Friends Ross once reveals his sex with Princess Leia from Star Wars. He has such a big crush on her that he secretly wants Rachel to dress up as Princess Leia and sleep with him. That is a grown man and his parasocial love with a fictional character. Not to mention fans of hair bands in the 1980s. We are talking about adult men dressing up like their favorite celebrities and weeping tears to every song they listen. 

In Tuesday’s lecture it was mentioned that girls are socialized to think relationship is important, while boys are socialized to think sex is important. Therefore girls appear to be pathologized to celebrities and have more parasocial relationships because they tend to overthink. Media, in my opinion, seizes this feature of girls and uses it to generate more profit. Other than idealize celebrities in order for fans to fantasize them as perfect, nowadays with social media, they also overexpose celebrities’ daily life and make fans believe they are who they appear to be. So more and more celebrities are required to be “funny” or “cute” on their social media accounts. They have to reveal more and more idealized “life story” to let their fans “know them better.” More and more fan meetings are giving fans a platform to “act crazy,” allowing fans to be “closer” to celebrities in order to making the parasocial relationships even stronger. If fan girls are criticized for acting crazy, how come nobody says anything about people who drive them crazy? After all, an intentionally polished “I woke up like this” Instagram picture would make a bunch of 13-year-old think they just found the love of life, but they are not the ones who intend to do that.