I’ve had something bugging me for a year or more. Certain news sources and aggregators mix in what seems like an inordinate amount of what I’ll just call Kardashian news. This of course features the Kardashian spawn most prominently but also a regular rotation of select others like Hailey Bieber, the Hadid sisters, Dua Lipa, Megan Fox, Megan Three Stallion, etc etc. The mix was even further saturated this past week by the ‘wedding’ of J-Lo and that Affleck guy. The overload was intense and unseemly.
I’m not opposed to ‘skin’ in media, let’s get that out of the way. If you see it on your beach trip, I don’t care if it shows up in major media. I don’t hold it against anyone that they make money, that they ‘influence’, or that they’re a brand rep. I’m not on the business end of media but I’m pretty sure the profligate placement of the ‘articles’ are paid advertisements from clothing, make up, and just about every other product showing up in the images. Capitalism, I’m not opposed to that either. Furthermore, I recognize that there’s a lot of fakery in the images themselves; that everything is photoshopped, filtered, and this on top of plenteous plastic surgery. There is very little practical aesthetic for the vast majority of those that would bite the worm of this kind of advertising, and everyone knows it. Even for early twenty-something young women in the prime of their life, the look is impossible for most of them already. A fair number of women will never spend a single day of their life with those curves.
Then there is the social life, the camera-ready reality show that is their relationships and ‘spouses’, and these seem to share one quality, they’re ruinous. I know that ‘they are people too’, but… Ironically, this part of their lives may be more relatable to the public. The world is full of people that have made bad choices and the love life of these girls seem to be calculated to hit this target squarely. Find the least suitable, psychologically damaged, unstable, underworld material, and bingo, you have your man. They’re out for a type.
Sure, we can all relate to twelve or fifteen vacations a year in succession, one after the other, ten thousand square foot houses that they visit less often than they visit hotels. Don’t forget the boats, the cars, the nightclubs. The weddings and showers are gag invoking as well. They may as well have been produced by Cecil B. Demille, like an epic movie set but where everyone knows they’re just a reality actor. My head aches seeing the news or captions about the parties where all of the people with fake lives get together with other people that have fake lives and drink $500 champagne or $50 mocktails and pose for the photographers all night, setting up the next story line for next weeks ‘news’; betrayal, breakups, the next damaged soul, a victim of some new man-prop.
There is a meme that says something like how proud they are that they’ve never watched the Kardashian show. I once inadvertently saw about 90 seconds of an episode. I wouldn’t be proud to watch it or not watch it. I just look at this genre of circus and think there certainly must be a market for it but at the same time, I’m saddened that there must be such a large adoring crowd that is personally invested so much for something that mocks them so thoroughly. While future influencers might dream of hitting their own lottery number one day, being defrauded by the prospect of fame is cruel to so many millions of others. It would be good if the K-types admitted this, but it would probably break their self-induced spell.