Celebrities are entitled to privacy. At the same time, fame is what fuels a career and generates income. It only works, though, if there are regular infusions of something to maintain the hoi polloi’s interest. 

For some celebrities, that means incorporating elements of their personal lives into their public persona. 

A few weeks ago, Meghan Sussex posted on Instagram a video of her children doing an Easter egg hunt.

The British media, not surprisingly, decided this was worth reporting on and commenting on. Which the digital site Celebitchy then wrote about and offered its own commentary, including this:

I always think it’s so sweet whenever Meghan posts anything about her family life. She’s extremely proud of her husband and children, and she’s only sharing a small fraction of their life together.

I’m betting most fans of Meghan and Harry would agree.

Celebitchy tends to have good analysis of the British media’s obsession with the Sussexes, but is more muddled and fan-like when it comes to analyzing the Sussexes as celebrities apart from that.

So now I’m coming along with a third iteration of commentary, lol. They don’t call it the attention economy for nothing. Let’s get into it.

Celebrities exist in a realm of image creation and image management. It's not out-of-bounds to a) acknowledge this and b) try to understand what kind of image they're conveying.

It's OK to like that image, by the way. But something is being sold to you. Maybe you want to buy it! Cool! But let's call it what it is.

I’m old, so I don’t get the impulse to share one’s family life with strangers. What’s the calculus, though, if you are a celebrity? Because everything a celebrity chooses to do (or post) publicly is a calculation, and pop cultural literacy means thinking through these questions more deeply.

Consider this observation about the Sussex’s video from the British paper The Times:

In 2026 the “emoji on child’s face”, or the lesser variant, “child always shot from behind”, trend is many things, and all of them are strange. Parents don’t have to choose between their children having an online or an offline childhood, they can instead broadcast endless “nape” shots of their child’s necks or slap a garish cartoon sticker on their face, done in the name of hypocrisy, or love.

It’s a reasonable point. If privacy is paramount, why share images of your children at all? That's a disconnect worth examining. What do celebrities, specifically, get out of it? 

One person in the comments of the Celebitchy post had this to say:

Is the British media actually nuts? A lot of people who aren’t famous don’t show their kids’ faces on the internet, just for basic security, and because they don’t want the images repurposed for something gross.

This is fascinating to me because it presumes that of course it’s “nuts” to even ask why people want to post images of their children — even obscured images — to hundreds of thousands (millions?) of strangers.

I would argue there’s value in having these conversations, instead of a knee jerk response of "whatever, everyone does it."

Someone on BlueSky offered this explanation:

Over the past 7-10 years, I’ve backed off social media, particularly posting on image/video-based social media. Some of that coincides with my growing feeling that my kids should be the arbiters of their online presence and I should preserve that privacy for them. That’s not mine to spend.

Some is about reclaiming my brain space from the idea of performing my life/parenthood for others, and the illusory sense of community I was deriving, particulary with regard to real life bonds. Online connections can be genuine and deep, but in my opinon, likes on images are the “handwritten” junk mailer of social contact.

This is all good stuff to chew on! 

When the famous do it

So. Why did Meghan post a video of her children frolicking? 

I don’t think it’s unfair or cynical to assume this is part of a carefully thought-out image she’s cultivating, first with her Netflix hostess series “With Love, Meghan” and, subsequently, with her lifestyle brand As Ever.

That became more overt last week. Celebitchy was on the case:

The Duchess of Sussex released her newest As Ever products yesterday, with special product bundles for Mother’s Day gift-giving. The new products included … two new candle scents. The new candles reference Meghan’s two children – the names of the candles are for Archie and Lili’s birthdays, and the kids’ names are mentioned in the candle descriptions on As Ever’s site. 

Celebitchy was mostly interested in rumors about whether the children’s royal titles would be part of the product descriptions (apparently they are not) and whether or not Meghan and Harry have trademarked their children’s names.

To me, neither of these questions is as interesting as the fact that Meghan is using her children to generate interest in a product she’s selling. 

That doesn’t make her a bad person. 

But a limited run of Mother’s Day items pegged to her own identity as “mother” isn’t a coincidence, but an intentional business decision. Her celebrity is tied to her personal identity as wife and mother.

The celebrity couple

Elizabeth Taylor had seven husbands over her lifetime, and her tumultuous marriage to Richard Burton — who she divorced in 1974 after 10 years together; they remarried 1975 and then divorced again a year later — certainly juiced her career during this period.

They met on the set of the 1963 epic “Cleopatra.” Their on-screen romance bled over into reality and a year later they were married. They starred in 11 films together that played on their notorious dynamic, including 1967’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” 1973’s “Divorce His, Divorce Hers,” and most notably in 1966’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” about a rocky marriage fueled by booze and regret. Just the suggestion that the Burtons might be channeling some of their own real-life friction into any of these movies was a commodification of their relationship of which they knowingly partook. 

Other celebrity couples have worked together and it’s been less clear — or at least less obvious — if they were using the public’s interest in their private lives to goose their careers. Joanne Woodward starred in 1968’s “Rachel, Rachel,” a low budget indie about the sexual awakening of a repressed school teacher, which was produced and directed by her husband, Paul Newman. Did their involvement — him behind the camera, her in front — generate more interest than if only one of them had worked on the film? Probably. But if they had really wanted to take advantage of their joint celebrity, there were probably glitzier options than “Rachel, Rachel,” which wasn’t aimed at a wide audience.

Let’s consider a more recent example. I don’t know what to make of Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner in terms of their personal relationship vs. whatever it might be doing for their images (jointly and separately). They don’t seem to generate much excitement, just generally. Maybe that’s a good thing, from a human perspective.

Then again, consider the headline for Vanity Fair’s profile of her from March, which plays on the movie title for which her boyfriend was Oscar-nominated: Kylie Supreme! A Makeup Mogul Enters Her Hollywood Era

Even if the relationship is real, is her connection to Chalamet also a way for her to carve out a path into acting that was closed off to her previously? Who knows. But she sounds very confident about it:

“I’ve actually gotten a few scripts, nothing that I feel is right yet, but I 100 percent want to do more … I really like comedy. I think I’m good at it.” She pauses. “Maybe next time I talk to you, I’ll be the lead of an action movie!”

Celebrities are always selling something, be it their most recent project or a consumer product or their own image. That’s OK. That’s the deal. 

When it goes even further

Reality stars understand, first and foremost, that they are the commodity. Their lives function as the equivalent of the modern-day soap opera. 

It's a Faustian bargain and therefore all the more confounding when celebrities with actual talent go this route.

Taylor Swift often writes songs about her former boyfriends, and recently told the New York Times:

There’s people who are going to try to like, do detective work, figure out the details — who is that about? What is this? When it gets a little bit weird for me is when people act like it’s sort of like a paternity test. Like, ‘This song’s about this person.’ Because I’m like, ‘That dude didn’t write the song. I did.'

Right. This is her whole deal. She’s the pop star who is forever writing about her exes, who are often famous people such as Joe Jonas, John Mayer, Jake Gyllenhaal and Harry Styles. Swift writes her own songs. She has all the agency here! She knows what she’s doing.

Here’s how Rolling Stone put it:

From high school crushes to Academy Award-nominated beaus, she’s apparently experienced the full spectrum of relationship joys and woes and has used her songs as a public diary to share her lessons and aches with her millions of fans.

She’s currently with NFL player Travis Kelce, a relationship that has, to an extent, played out in public, culminating in their engagement last year. The announcement was a piece of winking but overt image-making in terms of what kind of investment we’re supposed to have in their coupledom: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”

This goes beyond, “Oh, good for them.” It’s not just “the English teacher and gym teacher are getting married,” it’s “your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”

The public is cordially invited into the fantasy.

When a couple doesn’t go the distance

Megan Thee Stallion recently broke up with her boyfriend, the NBA player Klay Thompson. Maybe, like Swift, she’ll write a song about it. But for now, she’s posting about it on Instagram:

Breakups are terrible! Especially when someone has done you wrong. Who doesn’t want to vent?

But doing this publicly is giving access to her private life in ways that could be worrisome.

My friend Alexis Malcolm is a screenwriter and producer and this was her perspective:

Stuff like this is always hard because she made the relationship very public in the first place. And now he’s cheated and he’s embarrassed her and now she’s put in this hard position.

What’s the hard position outside of her own feelings about what’s happened? She’s not obligated to provide a narrative. Unless you believe a celebrity’s romantic ups and downs exist to shape their public persona?

Yes, that is what I’m saying. She uses her personal life to shape her public persona. And now this is what that means. This is the fallout. This has always been the case with celebrity to an extent. But it has gotten worse in the age of social media.

The author and screenwriter Nora Ephron used to say “everything is copy,” meaning: Take what happens to you and put it into your work. But she meant as inspiration, not that your life itself was literally the commodity. 

But Ephron did the same thing as Megan Thee Stallion, only longer and in more detail! Her 1983 novel “Heartburn” is a semi-fictionalized account of her short, combustible marriage to — and subsequent divorce from — Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. I suppose she had the last laugh; it was turned into a 1986 movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

Another friend, the physicist and cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (buy her new book, “The Edge of Space-Time”!) had this point of view. Whether you’re famous or just notable in your field, strangers will make all kinds of leaps and assumptions about your life:

Parasocial stuff kind of forces you to make a choice and it’s easier to let a controlled piece of that info to be public than to hide everything.

That, too, is perhaps part of the calculation. 

When stars collide

Let’s not forget the existence of the showmance that’s actually a fauxmance — a PR stunt ginned up for the cameras. But will people buy it? If you can’t convince audiences that you’re drawn to each other in real life, good luck trying to accomplish the same on screen. (Coughs, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi promoting “Wuthering Heights” earlier this year.)

Here’s how Harpers Bazar put it:

Celebrity romance is a product that sells, and as A-listers have become more obsessed with milking their relationships for profit, the public have become equally as obsessed with unveiling the frauds. 

There are, perhaps, diminishing returns on these tactics. Kim Kardashian has such a predilection for the showmance/fauxmance that each new incarnation comes across as just the latest effort to maintain her pop cultural relevance. Celebitchy posted about her latest pairing, with British Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton:

Kim and Lewis went to Coachella, then they went shopping for rugs, then they went to Malibu and had dinner at Nobu. A few days ago, a photographer got pics of Kim and Lewis cavorting on a Malibu beach. You get the idea – Kim and Lewis have hard-launched their relationship and they want everyone to know that they’re really, really happening.

Even the bottom-feeding Daily Mail is skeptical, calling their relationship “one of the most expensive, elaborate and utterly unconvincing ‘showmances’ to date”:

Because if Kim Kardashian does not want to be seen, she will not be. So it’s hard to believe in the less than four months Kim and Lewis have been “an item,” the ten times they have been “spotted” are by accident.”

But as Celebitchy points out, two competing ideas can be true at once:

You can date someone for real AND exploit the relationship for attention.

Memoir as celebrity

The trap of intermingling the personal with the public is that it becomes the only thing people are interested in. That carries a risk, both for a celebrity’s image but also in terms of withstanding a barrage of opinions that probably aren’t great for anyone’s mental health.

Lena Dunham became a household name thanks to both the popularity and notoriety of her HBO series “Girls.”

Dunham was 26 when the show premiered. She’s 39 now and has already written two memoirs. Two!

There’s also her latest TV series, “Too Much,” which premiered on Netflix last year and is plainly autobiographical, about an offbeat young woman who runs away to London to escape a bad breakup and ends up falling for an equally offbeat musician. 

Is Dunham’s life interesting enough to form the basis of two books and one TV series? Or has she built a career that relies on her willingness to navel-gaze? The existence of her second memoir (“Famesick”), which details the period when she made “Girls,” would suggest she’s accepted her own creative limitations and is leaning into whatever fascination people have with her. 

Maybe there’s just more of a market for Dunham-the-commodity.

Everyone has to earn a living.