In this episode, I delve into the complex dynamics surrounding celebrity culture, particularly in the context of comments made by actress Emma Watson regarding marriage and motherhood. Watson's assertion that being pressured to marry and have children at a young age equates to violence raises important questions about societal expectations and individual choice. As we explore her statements, I reflect on the broader implications for women in the public eye and the controlling nature of celebrity culture.
I begin by discussing the nature of fame and the ephemeral quality of celebrity. Celebrities are often seen as valuable and unique; however, the reality is that they are largely replaceable. With the constant influx of new talent vying for attention, the unique status of any given celebrity can quickly fade. Various examples from history, such as Diane Keaton and Robert Redford, illustrate how even the most revered figures eventually age out of the spotlight. The relentless pursuit of fame creates pressure, not only on celebrities themselves but also on the surrounding ecosystem of agents, publicists, and production teams, all eager to capitalize on their prominence.
Exploring Watson’s situation, I theorize about the forces at play that discourage female celebrities from settling down and starting families. Numerous individuals benefit financially from the ongoing careers of female stars. There’s a tangible economic incentive for management teams and production companies to perpetuate the "girl boss" narrative that prioritizes career over motherhood, often at the expense of personal happiness and fulfillment. The shadowy forces behind celebrity culture can promote certain lifestyles while disincentivizing traditional family structures.
This pressure extends to the psychological realm as well. I discuss how society's standards and the overwhelming influence of celebrity figures create a skewed perception of success for women. The constant barrage of praise and attention that attractive young women receive can foster an addictive environment, where the thrill of fame might seem more appealing than the substantial commitments that come with motherhood. The allure of a glamorous lifestyle versus the reality of raising children can pose a difficult choice, especially when it feels more isolating to choose the latter in a modern context where communal support for mothers is often lacking.
I further elaborate on the societal implications of celebrity influence, especially concerning the perception of motherhood. Female celebrities who embrace traditional roles often find themselves sidelined or marginalized in media narratives. In contrast, those who focus on maintaining a public persona as unattached and career-driven receive widespread admiration and visibility. This double-edged sword has significant ramifications for the perception of women in society, suggesting that fulfillment can only come from external validation and fame, rather than the more profound fulfillment found in familial bonds.
Closing the discussion, I delve into the underlying themes of control and competition in the celebrity sphere. The economics of stardom creates a powerful dynamic where celebrities, rather than enjoying freedom, often find themselves ensnared in a cycle of perpetual work to maintain their relevance. The illusion of choice becomes a profound pressure, making it difficult for female stars to prioritize personal happiness over public expectation. As we dissect the complex interplay between personal agency and external pressures, I encourage a deeper understanding of how societal structures shape individual choices, especially for women navigating the conflicting demands of fame and motherhood.
0:04 - Introduction
0:59 - Celebrity Control and Dependency
3:41 - The Disposable Nature of Fame
6:30 - The Illusion of Irreplaceability
11:07 - The Economics of Celebrity
17:31 - The Hedonism Trap
25:14 - The Dilemma of Motherhood
27:29 - The Competition for Women's Attention
[0:00] All right, everybody, hope you're doing well. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain,
[0:03] freedomain.com/donate.
[0:05] And for subscribers, I have created a feed of my new novel, Dissolution, which I hope you will check out. You'll find it in the donor section. All right. So I asked subscribers for questions and I got a good question. I did see this article when it came out at the time. And the question is, What are we to make of someone like Emma Watson's recent comment that she considers it almost like violence, or it is violence to ask women to get married and have children younger. She's now 34, and she says, well, or 35, something like that, 34, 35, and she says, well, I wanted to find myself, to be myself, to whatever, whatever.
[0:59] And what am I to make of this? And he went on for sort of more, but I'm just going to go by that issue. So there's a couple of important issues in there. First of all, because the demand for celebrity is so high and celebrities are largely disposable.
[1:18] Then celebrities are controllable. If you've ever seen, there was some movie, it was pretty bad, with Michael J. Fox from many years ago, about everybody being nice to a grandmother who was, dying or was old, and she had a lot of money to leave to people in her will, and so everybody was desperate to be her best friend and backstab each other and all this kind of stuff. And so when there's a bunch of money floating around, you get a bunch of control. I mean, this is the whole point of, you know, if you want the vote of a certain demographic, then you just give them what they want, right? You give them money or benefits or whatever it is, right? You just offer them stuff for quote free. And so you control people who want your money. Now of course every celebrity feels important uh irreplaceable and of course you know they're paid a lot of money and and that's good but you know who is it who is it who just died at the age of i think it was 79 diane keaton yeah diane keaton was this quirky she played uh michael Corleone's wife in The Godfather.
[2:39] And she played a lot in Woody Allen movies, and she played this quirky, ironic smile, vaguely frightened, hyper self-conscious kind of woman. She popularized this sort of dressing half like a man, defeminization of women. It's a long way from Marilyn Monroe to Diane Keaton.
[3:05] Dressing in a tie and a little waist jacket and a pantsuit and just being sort of sexually unavailable. And she didn't actually have any kids. She adopted some kids, I think, and then talked about how motherhood was. It's a whole other topic.
[3:20] So Diane Keaton, you know, retired some time ago. Jack Nicholson hasn't made a film in years. And, you know, people are just aging out of the celebrity conveyor belt all the time. Celebrities come along, and then they're famous, sometimes for years,
[3:36] sometimes for decades. Robert Redford, a hyper lefty, died a couple of weeks ago.
[3:42] And, you know, people who are sort of very important, right?
[3:46] I don't even know. And it's funny, you know, I've just, just by the by, I've just kind of lost track of music. I've lost track of music. I don't know who's producing new music. If I want to listen to music, I'll go to some old sort of tried and true albums and singers and songwriters and so on. And I listened to Yes's last album, the band Yes. It was bad, boring, derivative. Although John Anderson's voice has held up really well, as a lot of sort of counter tenor voices or high tenor voices seem to. I listened to Sting's last album. It was bad, boring. I listened to Paul McCartney's last album, also bad, boring. A lot of the fire and intensity and curiosity and creativity has gone out of people as a whole. I just don't really keep track of... I used to love it when I knew... I remember when Mercury Falling was coming out, I was really keen to listen to it. It wasn't a great album, but I was brought to my senses, it's got a pretty beginning and so on. But...
[4:50] People come and go. Sting was huge in the 70s and 80s. I think the band split up, the police split up in 1984. And now Sting is being sued for the, what, couple of hundred thousand pounds a year generated by Every Breath You Take because Andy Summers says he did the guitar lick and Stuart Copeland is saying that he did the complex drumming and therefore there should be collaborators or co-songwriters which would give them access to a lot of money, including massive amounts of back pay and so on. But Sting sold his catalog for like $350 million.
[5:26] And I don't know what would happen to that sale. But yeah, so now these guys are pretty pathetic. They're in their 70s. And they're bickering about money from almost half a century ago. It's really kind of pathetic. Actually, is it in 1984? Yeah, close to. I mean, 44 years. But you know, they first got together in the mid-70s, I think. So, celebrities are coming and going. Everybody wants to be a celebrity. You make a lot of money. You get a lot of attention. It's good for the ego, good for the vanity. And so, because everybody wants to be a celebrity, it's a kind of paradox. Because everybody wants to be a celebrity, you are kind of replaceable. Even the band Journey, didn't they end up with some Filipino singer who won some Journey singer sing-along or sound-alike kind of contest and all and just toured with that guy instead?
[6:23] So, Emma Watson, is she irreplaceable? No, she's not.
[6:31] And of course, every now and then you'll see a little article or social media post, which is like, here are all the actors who were considered for this role. And it's like half a dozen actors and so on. And of course, like you get it. Like, I mean, when you see Jack Nicholson in The Shining, it's hard to imagine anybody else doing that work or his work in A Few Good Men and so on.
[6:56] Or As Good As It Gets, you know, that kind of stuff, right? So noodle salads, just not anyone in this car. So you know that they seem irreplaceable, but it's not like the movie industry ended when Jack Nicholson retired or Diane Keaton or Robert Redford or anything like that. These things didn't end. Nick Nolte was a big movie star. And then last thing I saw him in was an adaptation of Bill Bryson's book about a long hike. And he's not quite a sex symbol anymore. But anyway, whatever happened to, right, there was a spinal tap, you know, currently residing in the where are they now file. So if you're a celebrity, a couple of things happen. And the economics, I think, are really important. So if you're a celebrity, then you make people a lot of money. I mean, the people who hang around celebrities make millions and millions and millions of dollars, right? I'm talking the touring crew, backup dancers, the agents, the publishers, the record companies, I mean, honestly, the list just publicists, they just get lawyers, it just goes on and on. Like the people make millions and millions and millions of dollars by hanging around and floating around And hey celebrity.
[8:15] And their goal is not the celebrity's happiness. Their goal is to make millions and millions and millions of dollars off the celebrity, which is why celebrities work so hard. Because everyone is telling them, listen, if you don't do at least two movies this year, everyone's going to forget about you. And then they'll quote all these people. Hey, Steve Kuttenberg, right? All these people who just are gone and nobody cares. They're just gone.
[8:44] So you got a lot of people around you who just want to keep you working like a racehorse like a drayhorse and if you're not making money they're not making money so they just want to keep you working and one of the ways they keep you working is to remind you no matter how important you feel you're replaceable i mean what was the last movie that sylvester stallone was in I know he's been in one because I see this kind of boring speech from time to time that he gives to some younger person about fighting and blah, blah, blah. But I mean, he is a huge star. Now he's gone. Dolph Lundgren, who a friend of mine famously christened Dolph Lugnitz. But Dolph Lundgren, I mean, huge star, very vivid, right? Sorry, he wasn't a huge star, but very vivid star, very good looking guy, very athletic. Like, he's been battling health issues for years, and I think he's in a couple of movies, or Val Kilmer. Anyway, you understand. Like, you could go on and on. But these people who seem kind of essential because they're burned into our brains, well, it could have just been other people who were essential and burned into our brains, right?
[9:54] So, you are replaceable, and you better keep working. Now, because you are replaceable, because if you're not replaceable, the project simply doesn't get made, right? I mean, if you were irreplaceable and the project had to get made, you could command $100 million to make a film, right? I mean, if Emma Watson had not been available to star in Disney's remake of the animated classic Beauty and the Beast, like the live-action remake, if Emma Watson had not been available or had asked for $50 million to make the movie or something, the movie just wouldn't have gotten made. So you're not irreplaceable, even if you are irreplaceable. If you demand too much, the project just doesn't happen. Just doesn't get made. I mean, Tom Cruise is going to retire at some point when his cyborg body gives way.
[10:43] And, you know, somebody else will come along. Maybe they won't be doing Les Grossman, J-Lo, dance moves at some VMA awards, but they will be doing. Somebody will come along, and the industry won't stop, right? Freddie Mercury dies, the music industry goes on. There's Paul Rogers, and then they get the American Idol guy,
[11:04] and just don't write any new songs, I don't think, but Adam Lambert.
[11:08] So you don't have much choice as a celebrity everyone thinks that being a celebrity makes you brings you freedom it doesn't it brings you a bunch of obsessive people around you who need you, but can't just lie to you and say listen i just need you to work because i need a paycheck they have to lie to you and say no no it's really good for your career no no no you really got to work no you just so people are so easily forgotten blah blah blah you know and once you get out of the public eye it's almost impossible to get back and you gotta they just lie to you right just lie Keep the old goose popping out the golden eggs. So because you are replaceable and everybody wants to be you and there's this constant supply of new talent, then you are pretty easy to control. So if you look at people like Taylor Swift or you look at people like Emma Watson, they have a bunch of people around them who don't want them to get married and have kids.
[12:02] Because tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of economic activity swirls around just those two people over the course of their careers. And that's sort of the immediate financial incentive. The more sinister, shadowy, geppetto, string-pulling incentives are even worse, which is, you know, there's lots of people who don't want overpopulation, right, of certain groups, let's just say that. And so they don't want the role models of women being women who give up their girl boss stuff in order to have a lot of babies. So there's a whole sinister, there's the immediate people who are making tens of millions of dollars off these people, and then there are people who are more shadowy, who just want to pull all the strings and so on. And it's hard for men, straight men, it's hard for men to understand just how susceptible women are to imprinting from female celebs.
[13:04] Honestly, it's a phenomenon that, you know, it's like women feeling overwhelmed, right? Overwhelmed? It's like, men, we don't really get overwhelmed because we just stop doing stuff. Oh, I can't do that much? I'll just stop doing stuff. So we don't really get overwhelmed. But women have a tough time not doing stuff. And everything is kind of equal or higher priority and everything's an emergency, and so they get overwhelmed. And again, not a complaint. It's a feature, not a bug, but it's a fact nonetheless. And for some reason, that perhaps we could go into another time, so evolutionary reasons for it, but for some reason, women get incredibly imprinted upon by female celebrities, which is why the Kardashians were an absolute disaster for the West. I mean, I'm not kidding about that, like an absolute horrible disaster for the West. So women get programmed and women say, well, I mean, Emma Watson's not having children or married even.
[14:10] And Taylor Swift is a girl boss and she's having a great time. And the Kardashians are fantastically rich and pretty and blah, blah, blah. And so it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's like if you're an actor and like you're in New York and you're struggling to get roles or something, if you're an actor and you've gone there, you know, with a couple of other friends to all become actress. If everyone's struggling, you feel okay. If, you know, one by one, your friends get really successful, then you're going to feel worse as a whole. So for a lot of women, childless celebrities are a buffer that has them not freak out. And if you don't want women to have babies, then you've got female celebrities and you will get them to postpone having babies. And then, honestly, like a lot of women's opinions are just pulled after celebrities. They have seemed to have as little choice as sort of being dragged behind a speedboat as a water skier, maybe a bit of back and forth, but you still got to go the same direction.
[15:15] And again, it's hard, you know, you see these Swifties or other sort of celeb fetishists, you see them in their 50s or 40s or 30s, and they're just so emotional. They're in the concert and they're crying. And it's hard for men to fathom this, but it is a chillingly real phenomenon. I mean, I predict...
[15:44] Taylor Swift has a bunch of babies and is really happy women will have a bunch of babies. And we'll be pursuing that if they can. They might be too old, right? It's one thing to be in your mid-30s and a slender, I don't know, I don't hugely like her look. It's too sour and pouty, but you know, whatever, an attractive woman and very rich and so on, a lot of charisma. So she can get married and have kids. Her followers, not so much.
[16:14] So there is an enormous amount of pressure from both the immediate profiteers and the shadowy puppet masters for celebrity females to not have to not have children and there is a punishment too so if you are a female celebrity uh and you choose not to have sorry you choose to get married and have children, then you will be disappeared from the tabloids. Unless you serve some other sort of propaganda purpose, but you will be disappeared. Nobody will write about you. Nobody will call you. You will be unpersoned and you probably won't be allowed back. I mean, there's lots of people. Again, we don't usually see them directly, but there's lots of people who want to lower the birth rate. And if you are a celebrity, you have a bunch of kids and you say, oh my gosh, being a mother is way better than being famous. They will give you a wish and they will keep you away from the public. You won't see a bunch of articles about how happy so-and-so is because they quit and had kids and it's way better and blah, blah, blah. You just won't see it. Again, maybe some exceptions if you serve some other propaganda purpose, but you will be kicked out of the club and you will not be allowed back in. So that's the sort of economics of it as a whole. now you.
[17:32] Of the economic stuff, there is the hedonism stuff. Now, I was really sort of racking my brain ahead of time. I don't know how to communicate this to men very easily. I'll do my best. I've sort of come up with a couple of different analogies and so on. But men have a very tough time imagining what it's like to be an attractive young woman, which you should. You should think about that so that you can understand women and the pressures and opportunities that they face or receive. So the only thing that I can sort of think of is, you know, the Mel Brooks line, it's good to be king or, you know, being king and you can have any woman you want or being a rock star in his prime. And, you know, you just have to go out and play some music for an hour and a half and you get all the drugs and sex and rock and roll that you want and all of that sort of stuff, right? And so if you have that kind of life where you can, like stuff is just delivered to you on a silver platter and there's no reality and you can have anything that you want and everything that you want is at your fingertips, why would you want to give that up and settle down? Why would you say to Steve Tyler or, I don't know.
[18:55] Mick Jagger or whoever, like, why would you say to them when they are 25 and, you know, their careers are just really cooking saying, okay, so you've got to give all of this up and stay home and be a house husband?
[19:08] That's, they would say no. Right? They would say no. They'd say no. I love writing music. I love touring. I love the groupies. All of that sort of stuff. And so, as a man, to imagine being an attractive young woman, imagine being a rock star and people trying to convince you to give up touring to stay home and wipe diapers and raise babies. It'd be like, what? Now, the average, especially in the age of social media, the average attractive young woman has the sexual power of a male rock star.
[19:46] People are constantly offering her, men, or maybe mostly men, are constantly offering her free stuff, and they're offering her free trips, they're offering her dates, they want to buy her stuff. They want to send her money. And that's a lot of fun. And it's got sexual power. She gets a lot of dopamine, a lot of addictive chemicals right around in her brain because of all of that stuff. And so she has a real high, a literal real high. It's addictive. It's addictive. Men don't realize just how many compliments women get. Like, it would completely short circuit. Like, I saw this as a teenager, right? This woman who was drunk, this girl who was drunk when I was in high school, I played, it was in Thornton Wilder, our town, and she was drunk and she said, well, you're gorgeous, but you just flirt with everyone. And I literally hung on to that for like 10 years.
[20:46] You don't know. I mean, go and look at any attractive woman's picture on social media and look at the absolute tsunami of hyper-praised thirst comments being posted underneath those pictures. It's incomprehensible for men to understand or process how much praise and compliments women get. It is so easy. To get addicted to that. Men live on an absolute desert of positive feedback for the most part relative to the giant.
[21:31] Tsunami of compliments that are constantly showered upon women. And if you can imagine you are so good at your job that even when you are not looking for work, you get a hundred emails a day of people offering you work. Even part-time, even this, even that, anything, right? It is an unreality that is incomprehensible to men. That level of unreality is incomprehensible to men. All unreality genuinely is incomprehensible, but it is, I mean, almost impossible. If you've got an attractive female friend, you know, just look at her inbox. Look at how she experiences the world of omnipresent, insistent, constant, permanent, monsoon intrusions of male praise, male offers, male desire, male dates, male gifts, male, unfortunately, Richard Picks, and so on, right? It's incomprehensible. Now, if you look at that, you look at sort of daydreaming about, you know, some guy, he's going to take you there, he's going to take you there, he wants to buy you dinner, he wants to, you know.
[22:49] Take you to the Four Seasons, he wants to, like, just take you to, you know, Jamaica for the weekend, like, whatever, right? All of that stuff is, you know, it's sexy, and it's fun, it makes you feel desired, and it's dopamine addictive, and so on.
[23:04] And to give all of that up, for what? For what? Unfortunately, because of our atomized society, it's not like for women it's like well all of my friends are getting married and having children so if i don't get married and have children i've got nothing in common with anyone and, we have no connection but that's not how it is now now it's like okay so all of my friends are out there having fun and there's a sort of certain momentum to this kind of stuff but all of my friends are out there having fun and uh if i get pregnant get married get pregnant have kids i'm going to be home alone. You know, it's not like all of my sisters and cousins are all having kids together and all hanging out together and all having fun together. No, it's isolating. It's you and a baby for 10 plus hours a day while your husband is off at work and you are alone on an empty freaking street because all the other moms are out there working or they're not there at all or whatever, right? So, you know, you don't speak the same language or whatever, right? So, you are alone with a baby. And that's it.
[24:17] Even have a church full of people who are having babies that you can hang out with and so on, right? You're alone.
[24:24] And it's tough. I've done, you know, when my wife was at a professional training weekends, it would just be me and Izzy when she was little. And it was a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong. I'm not any big complaint, but you're pretty happy when someone comes home and you can have an adult conversation. And that was just for, say, three days. We're talking years. would you rather be flown for a sexy weekend to a tropical island where somebody else is paying for everything and room service and disco and dancing and right? Would you rather do that or would you rather wake up three times a night to a screaming baby and change diapers? And again, I'm not trying to diss or be negative towards motherhood. I'm just saying from the perspective of a young woman.
[25:14] You get all of this fun, sexy, free, and now you also get status, right? So in the past, it was low status to do this kind of stuff. Now it's high status because, you know, here I am being flown out and you just see this sort of hairy forearm of some guy in a private jet. Again, I'm not saying this is every woman's experience, but it's high status. You know, so-and-so is flying me out just for the weekend. Ha ha. LOL. And oh, look at the handbag he bought me and all the, oh, I'm so jealous. Like all the other women, oh, it's so great. Oh, you're so lucky. I wish I were you. I mean, that's catnip, man. That is a serious freaking drug.
[25:48] Say that. You can't say, I prefer having sex in the presidential suite of a five-star hotel in Jamaica rather than change diapers and breastfeed. You can't say that. So, and again, I'm not talking about, I don't know what Emma Watson's dating history is other than I heard rumors that she talked about wanting a sensitive guy and ended up dating the captain of the rugby team. Anyway, I don't know. I don't know what her dating history is. So this has nothing to do with Emma Watson, but you can't say that. You can't say, I would rather have easy, frivolous, sexy. And for a lot of women, it's not even directly about the sex. It's about the being desired and being paid for and all of the sexy power that comes with that. So it's not even necessarily about having sex. I mean, there are lots of sugar babies who will go out and have stuff bought for them, but they won't have sex with the guy. So I'm not, you know, I'm just saying it's not all about the sex, a lot of it, but not all of it. And the simple, clear reality is that they can't say, I would rather have men buy me stuff than have a baby. They can't say that because that sounds terrible and shallow and frivolous and foolish and, you know, a little tardy, to be honest. They can't say that.
[27:12] So, they have to create something else that sounds spiritual, and that's the, find myself, I gotta find myself. No, no, you don't. You look down, you're right there, you're right there, you're right there.
[27:25] So, that is something that is, you can't, you can't compete with that.
[27:29] Men cannot compete with the security of the government giving women money, and a man who's offering a woman motherhood, right?
[27:40] And mother. I'm offering you wife and mother. You cannot compete with wealthy guys showering her with offers and gifts and vacations and handbags. And again, it's not necessarily even that there's sex in return or anything like that, but that is, you can't compete with that. Because one is fun and one is a lot of work. Now, of course you can say, ah, well, but it's, you know, it's fun that's It's fun. It's difficult, but it's worthwhile. And of course it is. Of course, I'm very happy to be a father and all of that. You can say all of that, but that's not how young people think. In the same way that you can say to a young woman, well, you can go and get a job with just a high school education, or what you can do is you can take out a bunch of debt that's kind of abstract and then go have a huge amount of fun at college partying and having a blast that way. And so all of that is the sort of pressure that is there the sort of incentives and the pressure that is there regarding these situations so again this is nothing personal to Emma Watson what do I know but those are the general pressures that are going on and this is all just statism so I hope that helps freedomain.com/donate lots of love from up here my friends I will talk to you soon. Bye.
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