Setting boundaries is H-O-T-T-O-G-O. Rising pop star Chappell Roan has started a long-overdue conversation on what it means to be famous, particularly as someone who blew up very quickly. On Aug. 23, Roan posted a message to Instagram explaining her boundaries when it comes to fans interacting with her in public. “I don’t agree with the notion that I owe a mutual exchange of energy, time, or attention to people I do not know, do not trust, or who creep me out—just because they’re expressing admiration,” she wrote in her post.
Unsurprisingly, not all users were receptive to her message when she first broached the subject on TikTok. Comments were turned off on her Aug. 23 post as a result — “This isn’t a group conversation,” she wrote in the description of the post.
While some fans might say she is asking for too much privacy for someone who chose to seek out a career in the spotlight, I say that Roan is addressing a conversation that we as a society have put off having for too long.
Fame has evolved rapidly in the 21st century and it’s easy to forget just how drastically celebrity and fandom have changed. The introduction of social media — specifically mobile social media — has made fame incredibly attainable. That’s not to say it’s easy to become famous, but social media has created avenues for fame that did not exist even 20 years ago. You can, with luck, become famous from within your bedroom — there is no need to rely on outside resources to gain a following.
Fandom, in a similar way, has become all the more accessible, physically and digitally. Just as there are more avenues to fame, there are new ways to interact with celebrities. Physically, we can now record and take pictures of people easily and quickly, and get praise online for doing so. Digitally, we can see interactions with our favorite creators from a fan perspective. When it comes to influencers or other celebrities born out of the social media age, we as fans may also have access to famous creators themselves, as there is no barrier to talking to creators on the apps that made them famous.
This is all to say that modern fame has a new level of pressure to it. Work, whether you are famous for it or not, should end at some point. For some, it’s the end of the workday. For others, leaving work behind is more ambiguous. For someone like Roan with a recognizable look, that work is never really done.
Now, defending the rich and famous is not exactly a cause I would put high on my list of priorities. I do think it is interesting, though, to see someone so strongly defend their boundaries, not only as a celebrity, but as a woman — to so early in their career address a problem that has affected other women in the entertainment industry to a harmful extent.
I would also argue that identifying with celebrities so personally is a relatively new phenomenon. Celebrities are made all the time; I hadn’t heard of Chappell Roan until last semester, and over the summer she performed to possibly the largest Lollapalooza crowd in the festival’s history. A lot can change very quickly, and that includes who we as fans see ourselves supporting. We want the people that we follow and support in a number of ways — or represent with merch, for example — to be good people, or at least reflect our values. Shouldn’t we as fans respect the values of those creators?
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said that the medium is the message. With social media and cell phones as our medium for consuming content, celebrities are literally in our hands; that is arguably a closer relationship than you would have with, say, an actor you could only ever see on T.V.
With such a low barrier of entry to becoming famous, and such an accessible way to reach and even interact with the people we admire, we ought to build that relationship on a foundation of mutual respect. We have for a while now treated celebrities like we are entitled to them. I won’t defend celebrities in a blanket statement, but I think we should agree — as casual fans or superfans — that we are not entitled to anyone.
How we treat other people, no matter who they are, says a lot about who we are. When we treat people as if we are entitled to their time or a physical interaction or reciprocated enthusiasm, it says more about us than them when they ultimately put boundaries in place.