Hailey Beiber, Celebrity Gossip, and Us

Women and gossiping

It feels like everyone says Hailey and Justin Bieber’s marriage is falling apart and he hates her and wants Selena Gomez back every few months or so.

And like a lot of celebrity gossip and drama, it’s women leading the charge. The whole genre of ‘gossip’ in media, from the teen magazines like Seventeen and Tiger Beat in the early 2000s and 2010s, to social media today, has been a female-dominated field. At least in its consumption and distribution.

It also says more about us than the people we’re gossiping about.

Celebrity culture in the early 2000s

Let me take you back to the 2000s and early 2010s. Justin Bieber released Baby in 2009, and took the world by storm. I had at least a dozen Justin Bieber posters in my room, and just about every girl I knew was fantasizing about being ‘Mrs. Bieber.’

Girls fainted at his concerts. Crowds of teen girls would chase him down the street. They would sob just at the sight of him. It’s honestly a type of fan hysteria that I haven’t seen in a while, except from K-pop fans.