I had an experience recently that I really wanted to write about for this post so forgive me if my connections to the readings are a bit of a reach. On November 1st, I took my girlfriend, Madison, to see Sabrina Carpenter at Madison Square Garden for her birthday and while it was like the best night ever, I noticed a lot about how the people around us were using their bodies.

In Roxanne Gay’s ‘My body is a cage of my own making’ she writes, “I am, perhaps, self-obsessed beyond measure. No matter where I am, I wonder about where I stand and how I look…I am the fattest person. This is a constant refrain and I cannot escape it.” When we were assigned to read this for class, I definitely related to constantly being aware of how your body moves and what it looks like and in Madison Square Garden, a place that holds thousands of people, I was feeling it a little extra heavy. I know realistically that I was not the biggest person in that audience, but as I was standing there, it felt like everyone around me was aware of how much space I was taking up. This was not made better by the fact that I was holding a tote bag carrying the merch we purchased on my shoulder.

Everything seemed pretty much fine when the opening performers were on stage. My girlfriend and I had our space and were enjoying the show. Then, however, Olivia Dean exits the stage and a large ‘SC’ appears on the big screen on the stage. Sabrina Carpenter is about to come out and people are ecstatic. All of a sudden, everyone around us (for context, we were in the pit) is pushing and shoving their ways past us to get closer to the stage, seemingly not realizing that there is not enough space for the matter of their body to take up. It’s a little difficult to tell, but the pictures below show where we were while the openers were performing vs when Sabrina came out.

Now, I don’t think all of these people are just selfish scum of the earth. I understand that they were excited to see this person that they idolize so much. As I was standing there, still waiting for the main event to start, I began to think about how people desire physical proximity to the people they admire. For me, just seeing her up there on the stage was enough to conceptualize that she is a real person. I am left with the question of what is it about celebrity that makes one so desirable to simply being close to? Why did all of these 14-year-old girls feel so called to force themselves in front of Madison and I and why did they feel that they had a more of a right to be close to her than us?