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About a week ago, a seemingly wholesome clip of Doja Cat and a fan surfaced on social media. In the clip, we see this fan, who goes by Pablo, offers Doja Cat his shirt—which until moments prior he had been wearing—he wraps her in a bear hug, entertains her with vivacious small talk, and then offers her a kiss, which she obliges. As she leaves, she blows him a kiss and says “You smell great!” In the moments after the clip was posted, fans heralded the video, with fervent intensity, as proof that Doja Cat was not the snub her critics purported her to be. If she were a snub, they argued, would she be acting this down-to-earth, this friendly, would she be emailing and cavorting with a fan? Others, however, simply found it wholesome and spun reams of wistful comments about how they wished they had the opportunity to interact with Doja in a similarly unmediated fashion.
The conversation would however take an ominous turn when days after, Doja Cat posted, on X, a now-deleted tweet: “Threw that musty shirt away btw.” As the internet, shaken by the seemingly spontaneous tweet, groped around and bickered over whether her diatribe was aimed at Pablo, she followed with a string of tweets that made it all clear. In one particular excruciating tweet, she writes “Bottom line is i'll smile at you but it doesn't mean I fuck w you and don't touch me and man handle me when you don't even fuckin know me. iykyk. I honestly think I need to stand up for myself in the moment sometimes. And he didn't even know my fuckin name to be touching me and kissing me on my face like that is crazy.”
As has become almost standard practice on the internet, the conversation was split into two groups. Some have argued that Doja Cat is in the wrong. This line of reasoning mostly circles around the idea that Doja should have set clear boundaries with the fan. “People need to respect boundaries, but you need to TELL PEOPLE your boundaries. People can't respect something they don't know exists,” one tweet reads. Some others in this category chastised her for putting up a friendly demeanor when she felt differently about the fan—Pablo. Complimenting him and matching his effusive energy, only to end up launching a salvo of insults at him on social media, they argue, is backhanded.
Across the pond, however, those in support of Doja have wholly placed the blame on Pablo, who, they argue, put the singer in an impossible situation: cameras were pointed at her, capturing the entire interaction. If she had, in a bid to establish boundaries, rebuffed his seemingly friendly advances, social media would have labeled her a snob and piled on her. Both sides of the argument are justified. Social interactions can sometimes be tricky and the line between being overly friendly and encroaching on someone‘s personal space, as the video shows, is often thinly veiled. For this reason, it becomes necessary to communicate clear boundaries as opposed to putting up a front of mutual conviviality, pretending to be just as interested in the other person.
It's, however, easier said than done, we’ve all pretended to be interested in a conversation or a social interaction we couldn’t care less about—sometimes it’s just easier, in the moment, to go along with the charade. Doja being a celebrity further complicates this: celebrities are expected not just to be nice to be fans but to be willful participants in what is essentially a parasocial relationship. But the reality is that, however strongly you might feel about a celebrity—even if you’ve listened to their entire discography, or know details of their adolescent lives which they might have even forgotten, even if you have spent thousands of dollars on concert tickets or merch—the reality is that they don’t know you; you’re not friends. And so, acting as if you’re high school buddies might constitute impinging upon their personal space.
The incident with Doja Cat is the latest in a string of events that have seen celebrities claw back their autonomy from the public space and assert that they’re neither public property nor friends with their fans. Last year, in an interview with Mav Carter, Tyler the Creator bitterly griped about how much obsessive fans get on his nerves. “Because of the internet, people don’t know personal boundaries no more,” he says “and everyone thinks it’s cute but we don’t know each other.” Chapelle Roan has also been at the forefront of this campaign to establish boundaries between celebrities and the public,railing against everyone from obsessive fans to parasitic media personnel. In a recent clip that is increasingly becoming viral, an exasperated Justin Bieber, parries paparazzi who had been hounding him. “It's not clocking to you that I’m standing on business,” he says as he wards them off. The clip has since been spun into a meme. However, its memeification belies the more serious undercurrent of theconversation, which is that celebrities are starting to reclaim their personhood from the public and if the excruciating unraveling of stars like Whitney Houston and Britney Spears in the aughts left us any message, it’s that relentlessly hounding celebrities is not without consequences; they're neither our friends nor family (except in the cases when they are); and encroaching on their boundaries is not just objectionable but dangerous.
