Solange and Jay Z’s recent elevator fight is the talk of the town. Because Solange and Jay Z are Beyonce’s sister and husband, respectively, it has been easy to speculate about the imperfections of the entire family. We see only perfection portrayed in the media, so when we see a family brawl that can happen to any average family, we are astounded to learn that the seemingly perfect celebrities like Queen Bey and Jay Z had an imperfect moment.

For one, this is an issue of privacy. Clearly, the employee who leaked this surveillance video clip to the media was in the wrong. To make matters worse, celebrity gossip website TMZ and other mass media outlets took advantage of the situation, recognizing it was a highly interesting piece of private lives rarely made public. We have come to accept a lack of privacy as the status quo. Rather than something that people can naturally assume or take for granted, privacy has become something people, especially celebrities, must actively search for. Privacy is something that can be sold by people who originally did not have the right to do so. We often see someone else’s privacy being sold off to multiple people and media outlets.

But on another level, this incident shows how we have formed unattainable standards of perfection. Humans make mistakes, and we are not perfect. That’s what makes us humans. Somehow celebrities and public figures seem to get no leeway. Beyonce and her family are human beings, too. We want to see ideals in the form of our idols. We want to see the concept of perfection embodied. We can’t get enough of public images, say in concerts or red carpet scenes. So mass media has moved on to share elements of celebrities’ private lives, including what they look like and do in private. Many celebrities control and extend their polished and perfected looks to private lives that are exposed to the media, further creating the seamless images celebrities are by and large associated with. It’s difficult to say which came first, the chicken or the egg. One way or another, we can’t deal with reality, we want fantasy and for the most part we get plenty of fantasy in the media. Media — especially fashion magazines — take it a step further with photoshopped images. Models and celebrities already have above-average looks, bodie, and personas but with tweakings and selection, we see and are flooded with unattainable ideals. What makes it worse is that we aspire to be like these celebrities and their polished images.

Combine idealism with hyper-obsessiveness and you get danger. As we deny reality and its “faults,” we leave no room for anyone to breathe because we first impose a strict standard of perfection onto the celebrities, and then we force ourselves to live up to a certain trickled-down standard of perfection.

“Like in a movie” used to be an expression for something that was ideal but that we clearly knew would not happen in real life. But it isn’t anymore. Now, we cannot differentiate between the actual reality and the “movie” reality. By mixing up the two different “realities,” we do things that are unhealthy for our minds and bodies. When I was a child and I read the “Ozma of Oz,” there was a scene where Princess Langwidere was asking to switch heads with Dorothy. The thing is, the witch had a whole closet of heads. She changed her head whenever she felt like it. Back in the naive days when I did not know about plastic surgery, I could put away my horrors because I believed it could not happen in real life. What horrifies me is to know that we are changing ourselves to become a false sense of “perfection” that we condone and see in the media.

Rather than butting through someone else’s life by saying what should or should not be, we should let the individuals themselves figure out their own problems. Intervention in a private life should not be a thing, especially on a mass scale.

Heiwon Shin is a Medill freshman. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to opinion@dailynorthwestern.com.