When reflecting on the year 2021, there’s much that could be said about how it will be remembered in the realm of popular culture.
It has blessed the world with some truly random celebrity couplings—looking at you, Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson—and the nostalgic reunification of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, aka Bennifer.
Musically, it’s given us the teen sensation that is Olivia Rodrigo, who in the span of 12 months went from a relatively unknown Disney Channel actress to one of the industry’s hottest names with the release of her breakout single “Driver’s License” in January, going on to earn six Grammy nominations and Time’s Entertainer of the Year.
And it’ll also be marked as a moment in time when society was forced to re-examine its treatment of young Hollywood women, such as Lindsay Lohan, Janet Jackson, Brittany Murphy, and especially Britney Spears, who after being the butt of countless cruel jokes throughout the years was finally freed in November from what she described as an abusive 13-year conservatorship.
But there’s a very strong case to be made that the past year has been defined by a concerning trend: celebrities oversharing very personal details about their lives.
One can’t fathom if this is simply the latest fad in multi-millionaires’ never-ending quest to seem more relatable, now that no one is falling for the “I love pizza” shtick anymore. Or perhaps, could they actually be like us normal folks, who don’t know how to behave in public after months of being cooped up at home, their only company being annoyed partners, streaming television, and uninterested pets?
Regardless of the reasoning, boy did they deliver.
Most recently, Orlando Bloom left a very unnecessary comment—which for his sake, is hopefully just part of an advertisement deal—on the company Frida Baby’s Instagram video that detailed how to use its snot sucker device. He admitted that he and fiancée Katy Perry frequently used the contraption to extract mucus from their daughter Daisy’s nose.
“I’ve sucked out so much snot with this thing,” Bloom commented. “Katy and I take turns to see who can get out the biggest booger. So far she’s winning or maybe that means she’s losing? Lol Parenthood is weird but at least our daughter can breathe at night.”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Over the summer, a whole news cycle was devoted to serious journalistic work: finding out who in Hollywood didn’t regularly bathe themselves after Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher confessed out of the blue that they rarely bathed their children, and often only hosed down their essential bits.
And for those keeping a running tally: Kristen Bell is in favor of “waiting for the stink” when it comes to bathing her and husband Dax Shephard’s kids, and Jake Gyllenhaal believes the human body naturally cleans itself, finding bathing “more and more less necessary.” (Don’t think Taylor Swift will be wanting that scarf back anytime soon.)
Fans have finally had enough of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, with a petition rattling around online begging the couple to stop talking. More than 22,000 people have signed their names in support, with one writing, “Everything I learn about this couple is against my will. Free us.”
Smith has been a fountain of TMI during his press tour for his memoir Will and promotion for the film King Richard. In his book, Smith admits going “full ghetto hyena” after he was cheated on by a girlfriend, and his logical solution to dealing with his heartache was by having “rampant” sex.
“I had sex with so many women, and it was so constitutionally disagreeable to the core of my being, that I developed a psychosomatic reaction to having an orgasm,” he writes. “It would literally make me gag and sometimes even vomit.”
He wasn’t much better on talk shows, recounting a tale on The Graham Norton Show of how he decided to have Pinkett Smith meet his very religious grandmother for the first time by having her walk in while he was playing one of Pinkett Smith’s movies that contained a steamy love scene featuring her.
“When she walked in, my grandmother was in the middle of the scene and she looked up and said to Jada, ‘When I was growing up people didn’t have to take their clothes off to make a movie,’” he recalled, adding that Pinkett Smith has never found the encounter funny.
Months earlier, Smith (somehow) bared even more, stripping down to his undies to showcase his slightly jiggly belly—but in the name of an eye-roll-inducing quarantine weight-loss partnership with YouTube.
Pinkett Smith hasn’t done much better, supplying a steady stream of news-making headlines for topics discussed on her popular Facebook show, Red Table Talk, where she is joined by her mother Adrienne Banfield Norris and daughter Willow Smith. She’s discussed almost everything under the sun, including getting mommy-daughter Brazilian Butt Lifts.
Speaking of couples, Meghan Trainor and her Spy Kids actor-hubby Daryl Sabara took things to new lows when the singer revealed they requested a plumber to install side-by-side toilets at their home.
She explained that because of their newborn son Riley, who was born in February, the new parents were up all hours of the night and were increasingly growing tired of having to wait for one another to use the restroom.
“There were so many moments where I was like, ‘Move!’ [and] I was like, ‘I have to go,’” Trainor reasoned to Jimmy Fallon on his talk show.
“So, when we moved to this new house, I was like, ‘I have an extra toilet, can I just pop them next to each other?’ And the plumber giggled, and I was like, ‘I don’t see why you’re laughing. Just do it. Get it done.’ And they did it, and it’s the best thing I ever did.”
“We got two toilets sitting next to each other, and we’ve only pooped together twice,” Trainor added, as if that made things any better. “We pee at the same time a lot.”
Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker presented a different type of oversharing: over-the-top PDA. The world’s favorite pop-punk couple (sorry Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly) have continually been horny for each other since becoming an item earlier in the year, frequently posting photos of themselves making out and straddling each other all over the globe.
“All day I dream about sex w/ you,” the Blink-182 drummer captioned one post of Kourtney. For her birthday, he uploaded a steamy video of his new fiancée seductively sucking on his thumb.
It was all too much for Scott Disick, the father of Kourtney’s three children, who seemed to shade his former partner to her fellow ex-boyfriend Younes Bendjima by forwarding him a paparazzi photo of Kourtney straddling Barker on a boat.
“Yo is this chick ok!???? Broooo like what is this. In the middle of Italy,” a DM appearing to be sent by Disick read. (Disick, who has a teenager fetish, isn’t exactly one to talk.)
But Bendjima wasn’t interested in gossiping, responding, “Doesn’t matter to me as long as she’s happy. PS: I ain’t your bro.” He then shared a screenshot of their conversation on his public Instagram story, writing, “Keep the same energy you had about me publicly, privately.”
Ah, stars—they’re just like us.
