Celebrity Moms

We've all seen the pictures of Katie Holmes, who is wearing a nursing bra and according to maternally inclined friends of mine, looking plausibly like a woman who's just had a baby. So here's an article that doesn't mention her at all, but does mention the "celebrity mom" hero worship thing that's all the rage these days.

"'The theory I use to explain all this is "parasocial interaction,"' says David Giles, a psychologist and celebrity-worship researcher at the University of Lancaster in Britain. Parasocial is the process by which we come to feel we 'know' celebrities even though we have never encountered them in an actual real-life social context. 'We see and hear so much about celebrities that we sometimes feel we know them as well as, if not better than, people in our immediate social circle'...

In previous times we would use neighbors, friends and family as benchmarks for our own behavior — the 'keeping up with the Joneses' phenomenon. That was hard enough. But now the new Mrs. Jones is Mrs. Smith (Angelina) — or Gwyneth or Sarah Jessica Parker...

If celeb moms like Denise Richards and Reese Witherspoon lose pregnancy weight in a flash and don’t skip a beat in their careers, the rest of us start to think that’s how life should be. If Angelina is globe-trotting, flying planes, saving the world’s children throughout pregnancy and mothering two young tots already, we start to ponder why we’re such losers."

I definitely do feel like a loser when I stop to ponder that Angelina Jolie and I are the same age. If there was every anyone born to make a woman feel inadequate, I'm thinking it's her. But I'm mostly just fascinated that there's a such thing as a celebrity-worship researcher. I totally want that job!