Where Do Celebrity Feuds Come From—and Why Do We Keep Clicking?

According to social media, celebrity “feuds”—like the one between Gwyneth Paltrow and Meghan Markle—are very real and something to be taken very seriously. Never mind that the people involved often go to great lengths to dispel the gossip—we still tend to devour it. Where does that instinct come from?

Maybe from the same place that made us pay attention to the Charli vs. Taylor, Selena vs. Hailey, Gaga vs. Madonna, and Britney vs. Christina storylines; the misogynistic depths of pop culture that have always pitted women against each other. The idea that there can only be one woman at the top of any given pyramid is something that’s been borne out for as long as women have been alive, but now that we’re able to just look down at our phones and get real-time “news” about female celebrities feuding, it feels not only insidious but dangerous.

“Before the internet, you had a couple of TV shows about celebrities and you had some monthly magazines,” says Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, out April 29. “And then, at the beginning of the decade, you had all these gossip blogs and infinite posts that could theoretically be written,” she says. Which is how we wound up here, watching an entire economy be built on real-time celebrity “news” that’s often made up of unsubstantiated claims about women in the spotlight hating each other.

But who does it really serve to fuel this content-creation machine with rumored feuds between women, and why do we keep clicking? Glamour spoke with Gilbert to try to find out.

Glamour: I assume you’ve read about the Meghan Markle and Gwyneth Paltrow “feud”?

Sophie Gilbert: I have. What astonished me most about the coverage of Meghan’s show—which I wrote about, so I’m by no means innocent here—was how much people noticed the tiniest details and used them as ways to tear Meghan apart.

I’d click on the Daily Mail—for my shame!—and there would be like eight different pieces attacking Meghan for what she wore, or the particular utensil that she used, just really finicky details that journalists were using to overreach with real tear-downs of Meghan. I understand a lot of it is just to fill content, but I think anything Meghan does at this point seems to make people a little bit deranged, and I’m not sure entirely why that is. But she seems to have both a particular fandom and a particular anti-fandom that plays out in really unique ways online.

I feel like it’s similar to the anti-fandom, as you call it, that Gwyneth Paltrow has—especially on the internet. I understand there are real reasons why people might dislike her, but the vitriol often feels outsized for someone none of us know. Something about her inspires a rage that I find interesting, similar to Meghan Markle.

Yes. The idea that they’re too perfect. Maybe what people are picking up on regarding Meghan in the same fashion is the promotion of herself as someone who’s similarly flawless and radiant and lovely in her clothes and making these gorgeous bountiful gift baskets for her friends, with lavender towels in her fridge. Which is lovely, but it’s not necessarily something a lot of other women can possibly connect with. The aspiration makes it appealing for some of us, but it also makes it easy to lampoon it as inauthentic. So that’s the tension—do we crave that kind of aspirational content or does it put us off? And sometimes it’s both.