After Layne Morgan’s post that was posted over a year ago and my own post about privacy, here I am again with yet another text post on the topic of privacy and respect.
I am unsure where to start and how to say this in a way that isn’t berating nor belittling, and I’m sorry if it does come across that way. I hate to preach, but I’ll do it if there’s even the slightest chance that it’ll help this cause somehow.
In the highly technological world we’re living in, it’s very easy to find information about almost anything and anyone. It’s very hard to protect your privacy and the internet never forgets. Anything you say or did can be found by anyone all around the world. This is not always a bad thing, but sometimes it can be overwhelming or undesirable. For example, if you were to google my name, you’d get lots of search results that I wish weren’t there, and though none of them are incriminating in any way, they contain information about my hobbies and my academic accomplishments and so on, that, imo, strangers don’t need to know. I only have one namesake, but luckily they are high-profile and information about me gets drowned out by anything to be found about them.
As stated previously, I know that actors (and some other occupations, like musicians, athletes and writers) all over the world have a job that makes them a very public figure. It’s true that they choose to work in a very public field, and that working in these fields unavoidably does come with certain consequences, but there are a lot of things none of them ever signed up for, and no-one ever would.
One of those things is the harassment they are often faced with, “them” being themselves but also their family and friends, who did not sign up to be in the same public position as the celebrities themselves. Say our sibling, parent or best friend did something that made them famous instantaneously – whether in a good of a bad way – and people found out that we are related to/have a specific relationship with them; I think none of us would want their fame to have repercussions on ourselves. I know that there are fans that are going through celebrities’ social media and through their friends’. I am very aware this is not a hard thing to do, I think that if you know your way around the internet, you can look up anything about anyone rather easily. But something being easy, doesn’t always mean doing it is okay.
Celebrities are human beings. They have feelings. They have bad days that should not be held against them, they can’t always be expected to be nice and smile for us and grant our every wish. They do get overwhelmed, they do get uncomfortable. Us wanting to know/ask/show something, isnever more important than them feeling comfortable and being respected. It’s important to respect each other’s boundaries, both online and in real life. It’s important that everyone can still feel safe and still feel like they are allowed to do their thing and be out and about without constantly having to keep up a happy face. They deserve to be able to keep a low profile and enjoy their leisure time too. People should be able to have a bad day and close themselves off if they feel the need to do so.
I know fandom can be very enthusiastic, but there’s a fine line between being enthusiastic and being intrusive and impolite. I’m not saying everyone is being disrespectful, I know lots of fans that are the most respectful, I have seen lots of fan reactions that warmed my heart. Yet I have seen the opposite as well. I am sure I’m at fault for posting stuff that shouldn’t have been posted too. But I try to learn from my own mistakes and from other people’s mistakes, and I try to take in account how the people I post about would feel if they were ever to see my post, even if that’s very unlikely. I know that a lot of us, fans, are often very enthusiastic and that’s okay. I get it. I do admire and look op to (some of) them too. Sometimes I wish I got to know those people better, but I also know that is never going to happen and that’s okay. I don’t need to know everything about them, what they choose to share should be enough. And it is. Because they may have a job that makes them public figures, but they still have the right to keep their private life private and people should respect that.
Another thing I find very weird, is how fans that are shipping real people together can be so rude about it. I must admit that I don’t really get it, shipping real people that I don’t even know. First of all, they’re real people and they have their own feelings that are not the ones represented by their characters’. Secondly, there are some things you just don’t say to other people. As I’ve stated both here and in previous posts, we don’t know these celebrities, we may think we know them since they offer us glimpses of their lives, but in reality we don’t. And more importantly, they don’t know us. We’re literally strangers, taking photographs of them taking a walk or running errands, asking them personal and even intrusive questions, screaming at them that they need to do this and do that, that they should together with this person or that other person and so on, completely disregarding that they are their own person. Imagine if this happened to ourselves, I bet we’d be very uncomfortable. I am sure they feel the same, since they’re real people with real feelings too, not just the characters they play.
Though I love certain characters and pairings, some things are just not okay . For example, I love fan art, I swear to God I do. I even made some terrible fanart myself. I love that it’s being made and that it’s out there and that we get to see and appreciate what’s been made. It’s not okay to send everything to the actors though. There are a lot of things that are innocent, and those things are okay to show to actors (or singers or whatever they are about). Then there are lots of things that are borderline appropriate and things that actually do cross a line and that you should never ever send to or show to an actor. Let alone if the maker asked you not to. If a stranger drew me doing the deed with God knows whom and I’d stumble across it, I’d be uncomfortable. It that person then showed it to me, I’d get even more uncomfortable, no matter how well the art is done. If people aggressively and very vocally suggested I befriend a certain person (or more), I’d feel uncomfortable. If people wanted to know where I was all the time, pressuring me to post more tweets/pictures/movies and hand out information for all my personal accounts, I would not appreciate it and it’d make me use it even less or not at all. If however, that information and this sort of feed is being provided by the celebrity themselves, I don’t see the problem in engaging with them about it, as long as it’s done respectfully.
I can’t stress this enough, and I have done so in almost every single post I’ve ever addressed privacy in; people will show us what they want us to see. For example; if I post a photo on Facebook and I only want a certain group of friends to see it, I adjust the privacy settings so that only they can see it, and I expect the people whom I shared my stuff with, to not spread it further. That’s why I feel uncomfortable when I see ‘rares’ and private pictures and private information about famous people appearing on the internet. On the one hand, it’s nice to know, on the other hand, they did not choose to share it with us, so they didn’t want us to see it. I get that it’s nice to see such pictures and to gather this information, but it is not and it never was ours to have. So I want to kindly ask each and every one of you to not spread such things further and to not encourage this happening.
Does this long post mean I think actors shouldn’t be thankful for the fans and reactions they get? No, I don’t. There are a lot of trends I stand 100% behind. There are a lot of things being created – jokes, drawings, stories, movies, etc. – that I’m absolutely in awe of. There are also a lot of things I don’t understand and amongst those are the topics addressed above.
Still, however thankful they might be for the positive reactions they get, celebrities should not have to endure being uncomfortable because us fans think we’re in our right. It’s not because someone is a public figure, that they should keep up with everything that is thrown their way. So, as an ending to my long rant, I just wanted to suggest that, if one of us gets the feeling that someone is feeling uncomfortable or unhappy with our behaviour, that we maybe try to be considerate and not engage in this behaviour anymore.
