“I’m sick of the tabloids saying I obsess over guys. Why would you obsess over guys? They don't like it.” — Taylor Swift

Well, I guess there goes any possible friendship with Meghan Markle. 

Last month, The Duchess of Sussex called tabloid media “toxic for your mental health.” She went further to say that “Hopefully one day they come with a warning label like cigarettes do.”

I mean, I was kind of hoping to ask her a bunch of questions like, “DID CHARLES ORDER MEGHAN’S DIVORCE!” — while we shared cigarillos, suntanning topless on the beach.

Then she made me feel bad by saying that certain parts of the media have become about "creating the news rather than reporting the news,” and that “the damaging effects of that specifically for women, and especially for young girls, is impossible to even quantify.”

Crap.

As I write this, I’m stoked that pretty soon, I'll be mentally checked out in Mexico. There is nothing I love more than travelling, aside from thinking about travelling, talking about travelling, and reading tabloid magazines…while travelling.

The only time I'll buy or read tabloids is when I’m on vacation. It's not that I have an insatiable appetite for celebrity gossip (which I do), but my entire goal for any vacation I take is that my brain cells will become so relaxed, I’ll forget how to work when I return.

Maybe I need a reality check, but reading tabloids helps me reach that goal. My rational mind knows that Brad and Jen were done over 15 years ago, and no, she is not carrying his baby through a “secret IVF journey.” (We realize Jennifer is now 50, right?) But reading tabloids to me is like people getting so drunk they don't know where they are. Tabloids are much safer.

I don’t care if people see me enjoying The Enquirer or The Globe or InTouch. I’m okay with looking like I’m a “low brow" reader who only cares about stars, sex, and other scandals. I know what I'm reading is complete garbage. Who cares? Who am I trying to look smart for on vacation anyway?

And reading tabloids are completely mind-numbingly fun — nothing more, nothing less. Or so I thought. Turns out there is a scientific reason some of us are attracted to tabloid reading. (Why does there need to be a scientific reason behind everything these days? Can’t a girl read trash without an analysis?)

Jennifer Aniston, who according to my beloved travel tabloids over the years, has been pregnant with Brad Pitt’s child about 135 times, and once said, “My world. My rules. I would command everyone to do so many things! Be kind. Oh, I would command everyone to stop buying tabloids!”

Crap! I always thought Jen and I could be friends. Whenever I see a photo of her in Cabo, I think, “We’d really get along. We should hang out!” And I truly believe this.

Meanwhile, Adele has said, “I no longer buy papers or tabloids or magazines or read blogs. I used to, but it was just filling up my day with hatred.” 

Crap! I thought we could have been friends.

At least there’s a chance I could hang out with Brad Pitt, who has said that after years of being in tabloids, he’s become a "Zen master of it all.”

There’s a chance I could hang out with Chelsea Handler, who has said, "My whole life is reading tabloid magazines. It's really sad because that’s what my show is all about — what is going on with celebrities. So I have to know everything.” (How fun would it be to banter over tabloid stories with her?)

Even Kim Kardashian, who would not have all that she possesses without the tabloids (plus a sex tape), doesn’t want that kind of attention. “I really feel I’ve done so much that I'm OK with not having everybody's attention. Sometimes it's overbearing. I used to think that I would never feel this way. Before, I used to buy all the tabloids and see if I was in them.” (See? Stars are just like us!)

Linda Evangelista started modelling again because of tabloids. “I got sick of seeing really ugly pictures of myself in the tabloids. I got to the point where I'd look in the mirror and think "Where'd she go? Because she's still in there. I knew she was still in there, and it didn't take much to get her out,” she said.

Even Khloe Kardashian has tabloids to thank, in a way. “When I started working out, it wasn't about weight loss; I was going through a really hard time and needed an emotional release. Once you start getting in the tabloids claiming you have fake body parts, then it’s like, ‘Okay, I made it. Now I'm really working out.’”

Christina Ricci even enjoyed her first tabloid experience. "I really liked it. It was awesome — my first tabloid story. If you're going to have a tabloid story written about you, it might as well be with Johnny Depp,” she said. 

I could definitely be friends with author Julia Cameron — genius behind The Artist’s Way, which I write about here — who once said, “Buy tabloids. Celebrity gossip is engrossing. Celebrity cellulite can make you forget turbulence.” 

Jerry Seinfeld said that people who read tabloids deserve to be lied to. Sure, if we actually believe what we read.

All of this did make me think (which is the last thing I want to do on vacation) why do I — and others — love reading tabloid magazines? Stories run without bylines, sources are anonymous “insiders” or “friends” of stars and are so far-fetched, and rivalries or romances are built up between celebrities who have little to do with one another. 

I’m a smart cookie — way less smart on vacation — so when I see headlines in my beloved tabloids reading like, “Michelle Obama’s $17-Million-Dollar Divorce Ultimatum” or “ROBERT DENIRO’S DIVORCE FROM HELL! $500 DIVORCE WAR” I don’t give them much credence, if at all. 

I mean, you'd be an idiot to believe that Hilary Clinton adopted an alien baby. (Although, it’d make pretty damn good fanfiction.)

I know tabloids are not a reliable news source. Still, there’s a special place in my heart for tabloids that print straight-up lies about the rich and famous. They are oh-so-fun to read! I mean, not just about celebrities, but crazy-ass stories like, “Woman trapped in a fridge says Ketchup kept her sane!” or "Adoption agency selling shaved apes as babies!”

And who doesn’t love learning about a faded child star checking into rehab, yet again, and then reading months or years later about their comeback? Everyone loves a comeback story.

I mean, do people have such a hard time distinguishing between something that is plausible but unlikely to be true? (Charles Orders Meghan Divorce! Pa-lease.) 

Our appetite for A-List gossip is still insatiable, which is why in this article, we left it to some of our favourite female celebrities to share what they've been reading throughout 2020/2021.

After all, research has shown that by reading tabloids, we are actually seeking to learn from celebrities in order to become more like them — what a style icon! — and therefore move up the social hierarchy ourselves.

But according to this article, there is a science behind why we love celebrity gossip and tabloid magazines.

This may be why tabloid newspapers still outsell the competition, their websites still get the most traffic, and sensationalist TV news still has the most viewers.

The human brain is hardwired to tune into gossip. However, there’s something different about celebrity gossip that makes it original from everyday spilling-the-tea office rumours. 

Our interest in celebrity gossip has been a constant throughout history. In the book, FAME: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity, author Tom Payne traces “our fascination back to early human civilizations and our ancestors’ love for martyrs and saints…”

Daniel Kruger, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, says our desire to know about the activities of high-status individuals is a trait we share with other primates, and that it’s due to an evolutionary tactic that may have helped us live throughout the years. 

There are two evolutionary benefits to celebrity gossip, according to Kruger: The first is for our own personal benefit: “learning what high-status individuals do, so you might more effectively become one,” he says. The second relates to our complex social circles. “Knowing what is going on with high-status individuals, you'd be better able to navigate the social scene,” he says. 

But reading tabloids and celebrity juice does affect our brain.

In one study published in the journal Social Neuroscience, researchers had 17 student volunteers hear bits of gossip about themselves, their friends, and a famous celebrity who they knew of but not previously expressed any special interest in, all while undergoing brain scans.

While the students said they had no preference over who they heard negative gossip about, their brain activity showed otherwise. When they heard celebrity gossip, their brain scans showed the students were trying to hide just how much enjoyment they got hearing about a celebrity's public downfall.

I also read an article where a 20-year tabloid veteran John Isaac Jones, author of the 2014 book Thanks, P.G.! Memoirs of a Tabloid Reporter, spoke on the evolution of tabloids and how the tabloid industry shifted in 1995 “spurred by the cultural phenomenon of the O.J. Simpson trial, which was covered everywhere, including on the news. (And the internet was on the horizon.)

Jones started working for the Enquirer in 1977, almost doubling the salary he was earning at an Alabama newspaper, with an “essentially unlimited expense account.” Some expenses included payoffs for tips and access, he said, admitting he has paid gardeners, housekeepers, and nurses to buy stories.

While a mainstream journalist would never pay for a story, Jones said he’d “gotten a lot of stories that I paid for, [that] I would never have gotten them if I didn’t pay for them.”

That being said, the best publishers and editors in traditional news outlets realize one universal truth about readers that has never changed: We love drama.

Movie and TV sets are also hotbeds for tips. “People on sets would say, ‘They give you $100.’ I think that was the going rate for a tip,” says Mary Murphy, who worked as a journalist for years at outlets including Entertainment Tonight.

The O.J. Simpson trial, during which the Enquirer tracked down photos of the star in Bruno Magli shoes he had denied he owned, “was the moment that those tabloids moved from just a supermarket checkout joke to ‘Hey, let’s pay attention to this,’” she says.

And then there is something in tabloid-land called “catch and kill,” which is when a tabloid gets a damaging or negative story about an A-lister but decides not to run it — in exchange for other exclusive stories straight from the celebrities mouth.

Since celebrities and politicians are public figures, it makes it harder to sue for the types of stories that tabloids print, says Kavon Adli, an attorney with the Internet Law Group in Beverly Hills.

“If celebrities were to sue every tabloid that had a false story, it would become prohibitively expensive,” Adli said.

That hasn’t stopped Meghan Markle from taking tabloids to court. Earlier this year, a British judge ruled in Meghan's favour in a privacy and copyright infringement case involving articles published by U.K.'s The Mail on Sunday in 2019. It included parts of a handwritten letter she had sent to her father. The publication filed an appeal.

"This issue, frankly, has been going on when I had no children at all, I now have two children as you know, so it's an arduous process but again it's me just standing up for what's right, which I think is important across the board,” Markle said of the legal battle. "Be it in this case or in the other things we've been talking about today…if you know the difference between right and wrong, you must stand up for what's right and that's what I'm doing."

Or, celebrities can trust that most of us, going into idiot brain vacation mode, know tabloids are tabloids, and let us enjoy our vacations NOT STANDING UP but lying on a beach reading low-brow trashy slanderous stories about stars, sex, and scandals…before we go for our daily siestas. 

Which is something else I only do on vacations.