Messages By: preraph

There is nothing wrong with being an avid fan.  The difference between being a fan and a stalker is when you cease to care if your actions are affecting the celebrity in a negative way.  Just as with non-celebrity stalking, once you cross that line, it should be apparent to you and to the stalking victim that this is not motivated by love but by a self-esteem problem inside the stalker.  If it were love, you wouldn't want to inconvenience and frighten the person.  You may not think having someone outside your gate watching your house is threatening or that a celebrity might get nightmares from someone who writes regularly to say how they love them, but they do.   In the last few years, the public awareness of celebrity stalking has improved, and at this point, there is no excuse for ignorance.  You can no longer say, "I didn't know this would bother someone."  It's normal to go to concerts, because the artist expects to deal with the public there.  It's even fairly normal to wait by the stage door to get a quick autograph.  It is crossing the line to invade that person's privacy when they are not working. 

I realize this program can only have so much in an hour, but we had two young women on who were obsessed with fans, but most men I know are completely obsessed with sports in general that if their team loses, they are completely depressed and feel worthless the next day.  I think overall, that is a much more prolific phenomenon, but no one ever acts like THEY have a problem.  Obviously there's a big segment of the population who need to identify with sports to give themselves an identity injection.  At least with musicians, there is some creative talent there to admire.  I think that's healthier than just admiring brute force, personally.  It doesn't seem like much to aspire to.  And I think there are FAR more children who get neglected by their sports-obsessed fathers than there are children who get neglected by their obsessed mothers.  FAR MORE. 

My advice to anyone who is unhealthily obsessed with ANYONE is to try to isolate the internal qualities you so admire in the person and just try to be more like them.  If the external is at the root of your obsession like it was with Mary Kate's fan, that's immediately NOT healthy, because placing THAT much emphasis on how one looks is unhealthy.  I'm sure that girl either had a weird upbringing or a trauma to have such low self-worth.  She was quite beautiful.  I just cringed on the final shot of her, which showed her trying to purse her lips like Mary Kate, which isn't an attractive maneuver to begin with and is just so embarrassingly sad to see emulated.   

It's true that that gayness often becomes more than just a sexual orientation and more of an identity for gay people, but that's because about the only place they find support is from within gay circles.  I'm not gay, but I've known lots of gays, lived in an apartment complex I didn't realize was gay when I moved in (guys) and got to know a bunch.  I was openminded even before then, having seen a young teenage male friend of mine struggle and be criticized and ostracized by his peers in the small conservative community.  I saw him struggle to not be gay, and it was very painful to watch and painful for his little confused girlfriends as well.  I don't know anyone who would CHOOSE to be gay.  I have a lot of  knowledge about violent crime and one thing I've learned from reading all the most cutting edge stuff on sexual offenders is that they are not rehabable.  Their idiosyncracies, because they are sexual, are innate .  They can't be rehabilitated because they were never any other way to go back to.  Trying to train a pedophile not to be attracted to children is the same as if someone tried to tell you not to be attracted to men (if you're a woman).  They should be restricted from society for life.  

There was a tremendous amount of resentment by the straight sister about her gay sister's having made gayness her entire identity.  I think she perceives it as self-important.  Even Dr. Phil didn't seem to get that gayness does become your identity many times.  As society becomes more tolerant and allows gay people to have the same rights as straight people, this division will greatly lesson, but right now, they are fighting a war.  And more power to them.  It's a shame that people embrace religions which exclude their children or that their own innate sense of morality doesn't overrule arcane literature and allow for reality.