Actress and singer Reneé Rapp went on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast in March 2023 to discuss her exit from the hit show “The Sex Lives of College Girls.” Now that the third season is moving forward without Rapp, her comments concerning the show are reemerging.
She spoke to host Alex Cooper about her character Leighton Murray, a closeted lesbian coming to terms with college and her sexuality, while Rapp was also coming to terms with some truths about herself.
She discussed being in a heteronormative relationship, which is the expression of male and female relationships as the only type of “normal” relationship. She was also questioning if she was really “straight” and going to a set surrounded by men who asked her about her sexuality.
“I was so freaked out by the idea of my sexuality not being finite or people laughing…I’m going through set doing these scenes and I’m also having gay men come up to me and say ‘So like are you really gay or do you just play one?’”
The interview where she spoke about this happened over a year ago, but as the new season is airing and people are getting excited to see where the show is going, it’s important to reopen this discussion about the personal lives of celebrities, the “need to know” basis everyone seems to have with them.
Why do men feel comfortable asking an actress whether she’s “really” gay or if she’s just pretending to be gay? What’s behind this treatment, and how has it affected female celebrities’ relationships with their work?
Think back to Lindsay Lohan’s rehab pictures and the People Magazine headcovers that you would see in line at the grocery store. It would be easy to blame all of this on social media, and no doubt it’s been exacerbated over the last few years, but the poking and prodding in women’s lives has always been around. From looking at pictures of the National Enquirer’s best and worst beach bodies with a headline about a messy divorce on the cover, to seeing TikToks questioning whether a celebrity got Botox or not, it’s easy to see that this culture has always been around.
As much as we would love to say that we have grown past the constant questioning and curiosity about what’s really going on with celebrities, specifically female ones, the truth is that we haven’t. Rapp has proven in her interview that there hasn’t been much change in celebrity culture, and her career has been called into question because of it.
