In case you missed the news, naked celebrity photos were recently stolen and leaked on the web, bringing with them scores of discussions, debates and even an art exhibition.

Aside from our monster junk food, monster house and monster car obsessions, Americans also have monster celebrity obsessions as well as some fairly unhealthy relationships with the naked body. We idolize both celebrities and nakedness for what they represent, rather than what they are. (Which is to say: they’re people and naked people, respectively.) So should we really be surprised by the insane amount of media attention that’s been given to this ‘news’?

It all got me wondering why we’re so fixated on people we don’t know, let alone why we clamor to see them naked. I get the whole seeing people naked for, you know, practical purposes, if you will. But the level of gawking people are doing at an undressed Jennifer Lawrence isn’t serving a utilitarian function like pornography (although I’m sure it has for some)—it’s mostly being approached in the neck-turning effect driving past car wrecks have on us. We simply want to see something incredible.

But why?

This whole scenario got me thinking about the time Bill Murray and I shared our spit. Yes, that Bill Murray, and no, we didn’t make out. He was shopping at a health food store about ten years ago when I was there for a South American tea company. The tea, yerba mate, is traditionally drunk out of a gourd from a metal straw (a bombilla). The gourd is filled and shared as a ritual, which we were attempting to emulate in this humble north Jersey strip mall, when from behind me I heard the store owner say, “Hey Bill, you have to try this stuff.” Mr. Murray wasn’t the stock boy I thought I’d see when I turned around, and the shock and awe hit me hard, making my job to explain what I was handing over to one of my all-time favorite actors and asking him to sip, quite the task. As all this was registering in my head in super slow-motion, Bill Murray did what only he can do so well—he filled the awkward void with his even more awkward humor, asking me silly questions like ‘will I die if I drink the stuff?”.

Eventually I sort of mostly got my heartbeat down to a manageable thumping and was actually able to converse with Bill Murray about the reported benefits of the tea. He was clearly curious. After all, he was in a health food store looking for healthy products. And while I may have been able to share some information with him that impacted his life for the better, it was the lesson he shared with me that I’m reminded of anytime the media encourages us to go extra ga-ga over celebrities and idolize them in these unhealthy spectacles. It may sound so simple, but it seems we need reminded that celebrities are people too. Sometimes they’re just looking for a healthy energy drink. Sometimes they snap naked pictures of themselves on an iPhone. (And really, can you blame them? If I had a body like Rihanna, I would probably want to see it from all angles too.)

Which brings us to the issue of our strangeness over nakedness. The irony here of course is that some of these celebs have been next to naked in public, in films or videos. It’s not hard to imagine the rest, is it? But that’s not why we freak out over these photos. We freak out over the candidness, and the naughtiness of something we know we’re not supposed to see. We’re blindsided by the reality that these celebrities, are in fact, actually just sitting around being bored people who get tempted by the same iPhone camera opp as any of us.

Chuck Klosterman once wrote that television has turned us all into voyeurs. It’s a valid point. We spend countless hours each week just watching other people do mundane things. It turns us on in ways we’re largely unaware of, or unwilling to admit. We watch others, whether it’s in a pornographic setting or a romantic sitcom, to give our own lives perspective. We unravel a bit of ourselves in observing how we’re similar and different to other people, what we like or don’t like. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that setup. But idolization brings with it a slew of problems. Rewind thousands of years to the stories of deities that ruled cultures across the globe (and still do) and you can glimpse into the overwhelming power these people we elevate above our own lives has on society—and just how dangerous that can be.

What’s really dangerous today is that we let our celeb-obsession turn unhealthy in new ways. We’re encouraged to, in fact. Girls starve themselves to look like their heroes and boys wield weapons to emulate theirs. Multi-billion fashion and beauty industries prey on our insecurities and desires and we buy into them, no matter the cost. In today’s world you either have to be a celebrity, or work damn hard to look like one for your next Facebook selfie. That we now have these little slivers of fans in our own social networks gives even more fuel to our celebrity obsession.

And of course, the more distracted we are with celebrities, clothed or naked, the less time we have to inspect the real news of the day, the things that may outrage, inspire and motivate us to become more active and involved in ushering in real change on this planet.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t enjoy celebrities. We absolutely should enjoy them. They’re talented, beautiful, inspiring. But can we enjoy them more in the same ways we enjoy videos of puppies and kittens (who, by the way, are almost always also naked) than in our dehumanizing obsession of naked celebrity photos? What if we all take off our clothes and take naked selfies, whether we look like J-Law or not and then share them on the Internet? Maybe that will even the playing field. It will at least make things more interesting.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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We hope for happy endings, usually. But lately, doesn’t it feel like we’ve gone over to the dark side? Like we’re just a tad bid obsessed with bad guys and villains?

Stories play a huge role in our culture. They always have. Whether real or fake, the story is an integral part of how we understand and experience our world. But click on the news and it’s the villains who we give the most attention—and not just the politicians (although, mostly). Sometimes winter storms are villains. Sometimes viruses. Lately it seems like it’s average people with guns. But it’s always someone or something that we fear is going to get us.

The hero, on the other hand, gets the final 30 seconds of the news. Unless he’s a really big hero—like Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger, who landed an airplane in the Hudson river. We give heroes like Sully a lot more attention because they did something unbelievable. It was so good, so heroic, so exceptionally impossible, that it’s as fascinating as evil acts are, which are also most of the time, similarly hard to believe. A governor would shut down a bridge to retaliate against a mayor? Get. Out.

Author Chuck Klosterman explores our fascination with villains in “I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined).” He notes that to humans, the role of the hero is more of an aspiration. Most of us can’t relate to what it’s like to be Superman or Mother Theresa. Those are the rare circumstances. But we can all relate to the bad guy. We have it in us, even in small amounts. Klosterman explains it, through “Star Wars”:

When you’re very young, the character you love most is Luke Skywalker (who’s entirely good). As you grow older, you gravitate toward Han Solo (who’s ultimately good, but superficially bad). By the time you reach adulthood, and when you hit the point in your life where “Star Wars” starts to seem like what it actually is (a better-than-average space opera containing one iconic idea), you inevitably find yourself relating to Darth Vader. As an adult, Vader is easily the most intriguing character, and seemingly the only essential one.

According to psychiatrist Carl Jung, villains help us to confront our own shadow selves, which can ultimately help us to become stronger, even better humans.  It can also lead us down a dark path. James Holmes did this in the brutal shooting spree in a Colorado movie theater while he sported flaming red hair and told police he was the “Joker” – a villainous character in Batman. It’s also perhaps why we need to keep Hitler “alive,” according to Klosterman. “Hitler needs to be a person we hate on a one-to-one basis. He’s the worst. That’s his job.” Those who act so unthinkably evil do the shadow work for us. We need Hitler to exist, just like we need Nile crocodiles, sharks and lions. They keep us on our toes.

Sigmund Freud would say our attraction to villains and bad boys stems from another psychological condition—the fact that humans are by nature, antisocial creatures. We’re inherently selfish, and in the spirit of getting what we want, we identify with those exhibiting inappropriate and evil behavior. We love villains because vicariously, we can do our biddings.  And this is why we love Walter White of “Breaking Bad.” He’s not pure evil—he’s a family man, after all—but at some point he recognizes his inherent selfishness is more important than it is not. He’s evil only in the sense that he wants to be who he is, or who he thinks he was destined to be, and won’t let anyone stop him.

It’s also why romantically we seek out people who will never really love us because they’re too self-involved. The “bad boys” are a common phenomenon—women love the man who won’t commit. And, so is the “bad girl”. Guys love the tease, the one who uses her sexuality to get you to chase her even though she has no intention of getting involved. In both cases, it’s safe to say it is our own fears about commitment and being in a happy, healthy partnership that pushes us to seek out traumatic relationships.

Just like it’s a thin line between love and hate, it’s an even thinner line between hero and villain.

We see this in our own lives most commonly in road rage. (Louis CK illustrates this perfectly.) It’s one of the only places where we collectively agree it’s okay to threaten people, curse at them and make obscene gestures simply because they forgot to use a turn signal. We allow ourselves to be both the villain and hero here: We’re the villain because we are cruel and unforgiving, calling a complete stranger awful names. But we’re also the hero because we’re not letting them get away with their bad driving. Perhaps by yelling at them through the cracked open window at 50 miles an hour, we teach them a lesson about driving rules. We’re probably saving someone else’s life. Maybe. At the very least, we’re keeping some kind of good and evil balanced in the universe. Or perhaps we’re trying to give ourselves the opportunity to go fully in either direction. Would we be happier totally evil? Or will we spend the rest of our lives trying to be a better, kinder person? It seems likely why we’re so fixated with the bad guys in the first place. We’re hopeful they’ll help us decide.

“Avoiding villainy is not that different from avoiding loneliness,” writes Klosterman. “First you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.”

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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Image: official star wars

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