Reminder: Alec Baldwin doesn’t owe you an explanation over Tanya Sweeney
‘secret’ baby
Twitter rarely fails to surprise me, but this week I’ve seen normally level-headed women that I respect and admire frothing at the gills over a ‘baby mystery’.
“I HAVE to know all about the Baldwin baby!” is the basic gist of their exhortation.
You might have missed the revelation this week that Alec Baldwin and his wife Hilaria became parents again.
Nothing too seismic there — they have five other children, after all — but once people started doing the maths, the fun really started.
Newborn baby Lucia, number six, arrives into the family six months after the birth of her brother Edu, in September.
Hilaria posted a photo of her six children to Instagram earlier this week, and almost immediately, ‘fans’ demanded some sort of explanation.
Other more strenuous celebrity followers got to work on “uncovering the truth”, surmising that adoption, or surrogacy was involved in bringing Lucia into the world.
Because they weren’t in on the whole thing, the media promptly got to work on peddling a Secret Baldwin Baby narrative, which is about as helpful as a handbrake on a canoe.
Certainly, if baby Lucia was indeed born via surrogate, it would be refreshing if the Baldwins used their considerable influence to talk openly about this, and break down the stigma and silence that seems part and parcel of gestational surrogacy.
As the story of the Baldwins’ newborn percolated on the internet and the commentary got louder and more colourful, Alec took to Instagram.
“I believe that people should simply say congratulations, or just shut the f*** up,” he wrote, noting later that people should “mind [their] own business”.
Really, imagine having to divert energy from your newborn child for this crap.
Here’s a gentle reminder: celebrities don’t owe you an explanation on their personal life. There is no contract that states that they are obliged to offer up every aspect of their personal lives for public delectation.
In this Insta-age, where a certain cohort of celebrities overshare their every waking thought, we have somehow gotten it into our heads that every last one of them should follow suit and let us in on their families and innermost lives — that it’s the unspoken cost of a life of untold wealth, power and privilege.
Sorry to break it to you, but it’s really not.
And, if a celebrity does decide to keep some part of their life private for whatever reason (I’m looking at that other canny ‘hider’ of pregnancy, Ellie Goulding) it is not them attempting to get one over on us.
Yes, people are bored, but their lives are not something that needs to be decoded and brought out, trembling, into the light for everyone to pore over for sport.
If a celebrity has had a baby and we haven’t been made aware of it from the third month of pregnancy, this is not them ‘keeping a secret’ from us. They simply haven’t felt the need to inform the press about it.
And that’s completely fine. Celebrity culture has become so weirdly voyeuristic, with the barrier between Them and Us now dissolved to a gossamer sliver, that there’s a bewilderingly cruel and ungenerous slant to it all.
Showbiz, celebrity and gossip from the entertainment world were once a pleasing distraction. But with everyone determined to be a pundit on people’s real lives, things have become gladiatorial.
And, if you think about it, what exactly does getting to the bottom of the Baldwin Baby mystery bring to a regular person’s life? Not much. Their curiosity is sated. They can get on with their day.
Which is a lot more than can be said for the Baldwins.