In our performative age, we’re rewarded for sharing every crisis that happens in our bodies, every thought that passes through our heads
A celebrity story broke last week that gave me, as my fellow young people would say, all the feels. But they were not good feels. In fact, they were pretty much every feel except the good kind: sad for the celebrity, bad about myself, uncertain about the world today.
This story was about Chrissy Teigen, a model and the wife of the singer John Legend, although neither of those descriptors really explains her popularity. Rather, that is down to what is frequently described as her “relatability”, or her willingness to share her personal life with the world. This, according to current thinking, makes this extremely beautiful and wealthy woman more real to the public. Over several days, she posted videos of herself on Twitter and Instagram, talking about how she’d been having heavy bleeding while pregnant. “Chrissy Teigen shares updates from hospital bed as she prepares for second blood transfusion” and “Pregnant Chrissy Teigen’s horror scare as she scrambled to hear baby’s heartbeat” were just two of the newspaper headlines, as if it were totally normal that a woman’s intimate pregnancy issues should be international news.
