Stop making perverts powerful.
December 12, 2017
By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com
- You might’ve seen the meme: “Stop making stupid people famous”.
- It’s been bouncing around the interwebs in various forms for quite a while.
- It’s purpose is quite self-explanatory: it is calling into question our collective drooling fascination with untalented imbeciles who subsequently become cyber celebs.
- Or “influencers”.
- Famous for no discernible reason
- Famous for being famous.
- The 90s gave us Seinfeld, the show about nothing.
- The 00s & 10s gave us celebs with nothing to explain or justify their celebritydom.
- Exhibit A: Pewdiepie, the biggest youtuber in the world with close to 60 million subscribers.
- A Swedish 20something dude who tapes himself playing videogames and indulging in stream-of-consciousness, pressured speech rambles devoid of any shred of rhyme or reason.
- Exhibit B: Kim Kardashian.
- The empress of groupidom.
- She wasn’t the first aspiring “it girl” to post a grainy sex tape online for the world to share.
- Her talent?
- Bedding ballers, as far as I can tell.
- Unless you consider a big flabby rear end reason enough to give someone a TV show or a clothing line.
- In any case, Kim and Pewdiepie are not necessarily dangerous.
- They might be infusing questionable personal priorities into the malleable minds of a few million gullible teens but they mean no harm.
- The problem arises when our culture unwittingly gives dangerous people fame and the power that comes with it.
- To judge by the latest string of sexual misconduct scandals, an AWFUL LOT of people, males in particular, have used their power to behave badly.
- Is it correlation?
- Causality?
- Coincidence?
- A reporter asked Gene Simmons once why he’d joined a glam rock band.
- (Gene Simmons, in case you live in a TupperWare™ container, in KISS’s legendary bass player and tongue contortionist).
- His response was quite insightful: it seemed like the best and possibly only way for a nerdy Jewish boy to be popular with the opposite sex in high school in the early 70s.
- Angus Young, guitar player with seminal Australian heavy metal band ACDC, said quite the same thing, albeit in a slightly more candid way: he had never played an instrument and music was not really one of his hobbies, he admitted on the record, but he joined a band cuz there was no other way an “ugly” guy like him would get laid.
- One word: groupies.
- Don’t insult me yet, keep reading please.
- What if alleged pervs such as Roy Moore, Charlie Rose, David Lasseter, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer et al actually seek fame as a pretext to obtain the power and impunity that comes with it?
- Is it possible that their real calling was to obtain unchecked power as opposed to, say, public service, journalism or filmmaking?
- Groupiness.
- An inseparable staple of politics, show business and corporate America.
- Possibly its lifeblood.
- We can’t deny that the entire edifice of marketing & advertising owes a great deal to the human tendency to groupiedom.
- Cuz, let’s admit it, our obsession with celebrities has exceeded the definition of fandom.
- It is deranged superstition and outright, pathological groupiness.
- Groupiness + machismo = trouble
- Nothing good can come out of a society that considers a sexually active female “a slut” and a sexually aggressive male “a player”.
- Which, again, begs for the question: why do we collectively become groupies of evil individuals?
- I don’t mean the bad boys with tattoos who seem to make all the girls swoon in college: I mean serious scum of the earth.
- Charles Manson-style scum (recipient of bagfuls of female fanmail in prison).
- And no, for the umpteenth time, it is NOT just a female problem, of course not.
- It happens to all of us, regardless of gender.
- It has been a marked characteristic of our species for eons.
- It’s more than an epidemic or a cultural trait: it is an instinct.
- Admiring charismatic douchebags seems to be a deeply ingrained evolutionary atavism.
- I’ve seen the most composed of males wet their undies in the presence of a star athlete.
- I’ve seen iron-fisted CEOs and CMOs become giggling pubescent boys in the presence of B-listers who are taking them to the cleaners for a few hour’s work.