Your Parasocial Dream Girl Won't Save You
If you need permission to be yourself, you become no one.
Molly M. Pearson is a writer, educator, and organizer. Her work explores sex, identity, aging, illness, community, and the risks we take to survive and make life worth living. Subscribe to her Substack or follow her on Instagram to read more of her work.
More like Chappell GROAN, amiright? I jest. I have nothing against Chappell Roan. Some of her songs really slap. “Good Luck, Babe!” was constantly stuck in my head for a few weeks, and while it got a little old, it didn’t bother me too much. Roan is quite the vocalist; her voice is at once ethereal and forceful. And the clothes, the camp–it’s fun! She’s done her homework and cites her sources, with one critic describing her as an “unpretentious student of culture, as well as someone that simply lives in the world.” She has much to offer the pop culture landscape, and she’s only gotten started. Good luck, babe, indeed.
It’s not Roan herself that makes me roll my eyes. What has been getting to me has been harder to put my finger on, but it finally hit me a few weeks ago while gripe-texting with some friends: Roan is often treated like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Her mega-fandom has put undue pressure on her to be everything to everyone, and they have made some truly wild demands along the way. From stalking behavior to outrage over her principled refusal to endorse Kamala Harris for President, these frenzied, chomping-at-the-bit reactions to her every move indicate something scary and sad: the hunger for a savior-like figurehead to tell us that we are Good and save us from our own misery.
Some treat her as if she has arrived at last to give us all permission, finally, to be queer, and when she doesn’t reflect back exactly what people want from her, they can’t seem to handle it. I think it’s this pedestalizing of her persona, this expectation of her Good-ness, that is ultimately driving the unequivocally unhinged behavior of her fans. The train of thought seems to be: She is queer. I am queer. She says queer is Good, therefore, we must think and feel all of the same things.
Of course, it’s not just the fandom around Roan. While much has been written about the pros and cons of the rise of parasocial relationships and fandom in the digital age, we haven’t confronted what they mean for our own identity development. Nor have we confronted how obsessive parasocial relationships become stand-ins for how we measure what our identity means politically, materially, and socially. As we collectively isolate and navel-gaze from behind our screens, for every queer white woman who finds a parasocial, Manic Pixie-like savior through someone like Roan, a straight white man finds it in someone like Andrew Tate.
 | A guest post by
|