HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Megan Fox suffered ‘psychological breakdown’ from being hypersexualized.
“I think I had a genuine psychological breakdown where I wanted just nothing to do,” the 33-year-old actress shared.
“I didn’t want to be seen, I didn’t want to have to take a photo, do a magazine, walk a carpet, I didn’t want to be seen in public at all because the fear, and the belief, and the absolute certainty that I was going to be mocked, or spat at, or someone was going to yell at me, or people would stone me or savage me for just being out … so I went through a very dark moment after that.”
Fox felt like she spiraled into an even deeper hole when she spoke out about being treated poorly by “Transformers” director Michael Bay, saying she felt like no one cared. Even worse, her career suffered for opening up about Bay.
As Jim Geraghty recently noted:
The cultural power of celebrities — or more specifically, the average American’s misplaced trust in the judgment of people who they recognize from being on television or in the movies or hearing their music — is profoundly disturbing. I suspect that the process of becoming a celebrity is almost inherently psychologically damaging. They enjoy the cheers and adoration of large crowds but have difficulty developing and sustaining real behind-the-scenes relationships. Their fans love the characters they play, sometimes oblivious to the fact that the actor is not the character. Most of them are constantly evaluated based upon their appearance by strangers, developing all kinds of obsessions and disorders and frequently going under the knife to preserve their youthful looks. Their ideas for maintaining good health would give the American Medical Association nightmares. Addictions flourish and are almost endlessly enabled. Almost everyone they encounter wants something from them — an autograph, a picture, sex, to read a script, to play a role, or to offer help breaking into the business. And this is before we get to the point that their world lets the likes of Harvey Weinstein thrive and flourish.
Most of the people who create our popular culture are constantly marinating in a culture of exploitation, greed, envy, objectification, abuse, hedonistic excess, and runaway lust of every kind. It’s amazing any of them come out of the process of becoming famous with their head on straight. And yet so many of our fellow countrymen are endlessly fascinated with the inmates of the asylum.
Fascinated, but increasingly often in a watching a train-wreck sort of way, as the late Andrew Breitbart once told me in 2005:
We certainly need our diversions in the age of Terror, where most Americans are worried that an American city will be annihilated by nuclear bombs, by people who are fanatics that are ten times worse than the Christian Right.
I think that you need to divert your attention; you can’t be 24/7 focused on the impending problems that exist in our culture, and that exist within world politics.
So I think that what Americans have done, is that when handed lemons, they have made lemonade. And so I think that by taking the sourpusses of Hollywood, the ones who refuse to deign to treat the average American as worthy of their focus, I think that Hollywood has created a vacuum that has been filled by entertainment that is basically Schadenfreude. I think that we now look to watch people fail, especially celebrities, the people who have been handed the most, for the least amount of contribution to society. In the past, we used to look up to them, and wanted to dress like them, and wanted to imitate the way that they spoke; they way that they dressed. We’d have pin-ups.
I think that now, we’re willing to pay Paris Hilton an enormous amount of money, just so long as she behaves like an idiot on film. And I think that most successful reality shows that have involved celebrities, who are no longer going on cattle-calls to be in sitcoms, are going on cattle-calls to be in reality series. And the ones that they choose to pick are the ones whose lives would be the most manifestly dysfunctional.
So I think that what you see now is an adversarial relationship between the audience and the celebrities themselves. The celebrities are rewarded out here for maintaining a certain political posture. And so, the more they talk up left-wing politics, the more they are going to warm up to the hiring infrastructure.
Hollywood is the one place where affirmative action really couldn’t work. If a casting director wanted to pick a black person who’s pregnant, who’s 32 to 33 years of age, they’re allowed to. You’re not allowed to do that kind of thing in the real world. And if you’re Woody Allen, you’re not going to get sued if you hire the same ten actors for all of your movies.
And that was over a decade before we discovered, after Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein became household names, that “Hollywood Is a Sex-Grooming Gang,” as Kyle Smith noted last year.
