What happens when privilege distorts reality...Celebrities can’t stop showing us who they really are | VOX

Celebrities can’t stop showing us who they really are

Jann Wenner, Drew Barrymore, Ashton Kutcher, and what happens when privilege distorts reality.

By Aja Romano@ajaromano  Sep 21, 2023, 11:40am EDT 

Jann Wenner talks with Bruce Springsteen on September 13, 2022, in New York City.

 Taylor Hill/Getty Images

Aja Romano writes about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.

So much for the virtue of staying silent.
Several public figures have stepped in it recently by oversharing or making moves they simply didn’t have to make. The list has become so long that it feels less like they’ve committed a series of unforced errors and more like an entire unforced era.
The complete rundown includes a mystifying “you could have just stayed home” moment from 

• Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, who had to be removed from a performance of Beetlejuice for disruptive behavior. 
• Drew Barrymore and Bill Maher each incensed fans when they announced they would be crossing the picket line and restarting their talk shows just as the Hollywood strikes pass Day 100. (They ultimately both changed their minds after backlash.) 
• That ’70s Show actors Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis also absolutely did not have to write character letters in support of their former co-star and convicted rapist Danny Masterson, nor post a video response to the entirely predictable backlash.
  
  
• Then there’s Russell Brand, who faces multiple allegations of violent sexual assault. But it’s not Brand who is on this list: That honor goes to Anna Khachiyan, co-host of the popular (and contentiously “dirtbag left”-ish) podcast Red Scare, who responded to the allegations against Brand by tweeting, “Lol lmao I stand with Brand obviously,” prompting handwringing among her fanbase about the dirtbag left’s apparent hypocritical love of itself and its own proximity to power. Khachiyan has since doubled down repeatedly.
  
  

What all of these incidents have in common is a kind of tone-deaf self-assuredness that comes when a person’s level of societal insulation from criticism is so cushiony, so velvety and soft, that it becomes part of their worldview. 

• These are the mishaps that result when so many people have affirmed a person over the years that that person starts to believe that if they want to do a thing, that thing must be right and justified — because they’re the one doing it, and they’re a good, correct person.

To see the full extent of this limited worldview on display, let us look at the coup de grace of les erreurs du mois — the remarkable, jaw-droppingly obtuse decision of Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner to include zero Black artists or women in his forthcoming book, meant to represent the depth and breadth of Wenner’s career and his place in the legacy of rock and roll. 

The book, titled The Masters, releases September 26, and features seven interviews with rock legends like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. What speaks louder than the interviews themselves are the breathtaking gaps in Wenner’s concept of “mastery” and who is capable of attaining it.