Why People Read Celebrity Gossip Magazines.

There's one thing I don't understand at all, and that's the appeal of these gossip magazines, such as Heat and Reveal, I just don't understand why anyone would care about how much weight Kylie lost, or pictures of Angelina Jolie on the beach (well I see the appeal for lads on this one). What is the appeal in screaming over the latest boyband? Or knowing who Paris Hilton has shagged lately? Why do some girls go mad when they see McFly on TV?

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I understand why most girls like to see the latest fashion and make-up tips, and the latest music news (just like everyone). Most guys follow football and stuff, and girls have their own interests and hobbies, just like everyone. I'm not about to sterotype people by saying only guys are into football and all girls are into fashion and makeup, because I know that's not true, but a lot of girls are..just like a lot of guys might be into football. I do think there's more to life than wearing the latest fashions or having the latest hairstyle but my sociology A-level studies taught me that most of this is down to peer pressure, you do something because your friends are doing it, and I'm not about to say that I was never a victim of that, because everyone has been sometimes, no matter what they say. That's getting slightly off topic, so why do people idolise and obsess over celebrities?

Psychology has attempted to explain the public's lust for celebrity gossip by theorising that it may be down to evolutionary traits, that several million years before Angelina gave birth to her first baby the human psyche already had a thirst for page after page of celebrity gossip. William Allman said that "Our modern skulls house a stone age mind" through patterns that guarantee humankind's survival, such as scanning the nightclub for an ideal sex partner, collecting gossip, and battling others for a place in the pecking order. Capitalzing on the human ape's basest instincts is what moves millions of copies of these gossip magazines every week. The people worth gossiping are the blond and the fertile. Gossip is so finite and restricted that only the primal power of evolutionary psychology can explain their pervasive hold on the collective imagination.

No matter how much these magazines seem to be about sex their real subject is reproduction and the future of the human tribe:

'On the savanna, we needed to monitor how our clan was faring, and given
our small populations we could do the job by ourselves, gossiping about
how Gronk had left Zumba and that last night she slipped into Uggah's
cave to make a baby, and what our chance might be to steal one of them
as a mate. But in a country of 290 million people, where even our
next-door neighbors are strangers, we still need to flex those savanna
needs for gossip and information in order to measure our species'
prospect. What better proxy than the young, wealthy, handsome, and
visible alpha-male and -female breeding stock that Hollywood employs?'

This spills over into other areas such as courtship, engagement, marriage, and conception, which means that people are also interested in the latest celebrity marraige because it is connected with reproduction.

'Readers become so consumed by the fate of the alphas chronicled in the
rags that they can't help but think that if Pamela and Tommy are
kissing on the cover of Us, it's going to be good for their
children Dylan and Brandon. And that will be good for social stability!
Be gone, Kid Rock (unless you intend to make reproductive use of
Pamela's remaining fertility cycles).'

People are interested in celebrity's having plastic surgery or having botox injected into the lips because attractiveness is what makes us want to reproduce with the person in the first place. Beauty attacts us because symmetrical good looks are a good marker of healthy offspring that will live to procreate. You can usually tell if someone has had cosmetic surgery, hence the rags dismay at the practice and their joy in reporting it. Why, though, are most readers of these magazines female? The simple answer is that girls like to look at the competition and hence relish every bit of news of a celebrity divorce if it brings them one step closer to fulfilling their celebrity courtship fantasies. For whatever reason though, most men don't see the appeal in celebrity gossip at all, mostly because love and pregnancy doesn't exactly excite men. In the Paris Hilton sex tape scandal, the only reason that most men were interested is because they wanted to see the sex tape for themselves, like most men do. Girls are commonly more sensitive and able to express their feelings so are interested in the social outcomes of scandal's such as these, while men basically just want to perv.

So why do girls scream over McFly?..well..anyone can answer that...they think the members of this certain band are 'hot', but the real reason written in the human psyche is that these girls want to reproduce with the members of McFly, because several million years ago people would reproduce because they are attaracted to each other in one way or another, and nothing much has changed today. Girls are jealous and want to be like these female celebrities because they have the hot's for the sexual partners of these celebrities and want to be with them. What they don't realise though is that this obession for every little detail of a celebrity's life is because the reproduction area of our brain drives it.

Reference

http://slate.msn.com/id/2091502



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