Wednesday, July 30, 2014

The Backlash Famous Women Suffer

    Have you ever noticed that male celebrities don't suffer from backlash when they are at the peak of their success. Yet, this happens to a lot of female celebrities like Anne Hathaway, Gwyneth Paltrow, Taylor Swift, and yes even Beyoncé Knowles who is loved world-wide. Recently, Jennifer Lawrence admitted to knowing that she too would get to be too much for people and they would start to get annoyed with her. This type of backlash has also occurred to women who are in politics like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. Whenever any woman is seen successfully working in several different projects, unlike her male counterparts, she is seen as wanting attention and sometimes mocked at for branching out. In an Instyle magazine interview, Zooey Desanchel said that because aside from acting she has also been working in the music industry some people throw shade at her for wanting to do other projects besides acting. When in reality she has been singing just as long as she has been acting. What right do we have at attacking any woman for branching out in her career choices? It seems that as soon as we see women at their best we slowly start to find things about them that we hate until we finish completely tearing them down and make them out to appear like the most horrible human beings.
    But, what is it that causes us to start to point out all of the flaws of successful happy women? Sure, some of the celebrities that this has happened to do have negative aspects about them but so do successful men in the industry like George Clooney, Justin Timberlake, Chris Brown, and Hugh Jackman. Yet, we don't tear them down and attack them as if we have some sort of personal vendetta against them. Even when a male celebrity does get shamed for his wrong-doings after a brief period of time we welcome him back as if the things he did weren't so bad after all. An example of this is Chris Brown who severely beat Rihanna when they were dating and although we did shame him for quite a while, he ended up winning a Grammy for an album called "Forgiving All My Enemies" and is still popular today. Then, there's the felon who's mug shot has become quite popular and who is getting praised for being so attractive. In fact, he has received so much attention that he was signed on to a modeling agency. People seem to have forgotten that that wasn't the first time that he committed a crime and it seems like he won't be receiving backlash any time soon. Yet, after Anne Hathaway made several awkward acceptance speeches for her role in Les Miserables everyone began to attack her, calling her conceded and obnoxious. So much so that she decided to take a break from the limelight to "give everyone a break" from her. In a way we forced her to be absent from last season's award shows because we were so offended by her being proud in her achievements. How is being happy and proud of the goals you've reached a bad thing?
    By turning against famous women because of their content with their triumphs we end up hurting our own gender and ourselves. I don't believe that this means that we should begin to tear down famous and successful men because we shouldn't go on a crusade against anyone for being successful, be it man or woman. No matter what we do all celebrities are going to have things about them that we don't like and find annoying because they are human beings. I guarantee you that there is no one on this earth who is perfect. If our backlash against these women stems out of jealousy and intimidation we shouldn't be jealous of them; instead we should be inspired into doing whatever it is that makes us happy and trying to figure out what our definition of success is. After all, attacking accomplished women and focusing in on every last flaw of theirs won't improve your life, make you more successful, or happier.   

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