This is not a book about.., p.11
This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, page 11
If I had months to live, I would want to use that time to do what I love. After all, what could be more worthy of my time and attention than that?
There’s just one more thing to sort out. I tell Emma, “Please, wait, I have to ask another question, my last one,” before she disappears back into her university campus.
chapter nine
this is a chapter about other people
“What does your husband think about all this?”
You want to know what my husband thinks about all this. That’s okay, you’re not the only one. In fact, I am asked the question so often that I have had to develop a stock response to deflect it. “He knows that good things come to those whose wives are obsessed with Benedict Cumberbatch,” I say. It’s so icky that few dare to continue their line of questioning for fear of what/who might come next.
It’s a recurring problem for Benedict Cumberbatch as well. “I have boyfriends coming up to say, ‘My girlfriend is obsessed with you,’ ” he told Vogue, “and I say, ‘I’m so sorry.’ ” Benedict Cumberbatch is sorry, and I’m sorry too. We’re sorry for what we’re doing to the boyfriends and the husbands. We know it doesn’t look good for them, to be cuckolded by Bendy Dick Cum On My Baps, as he was apparently known at school.
At this point, I have spoken to a lot of people with a thing for Benedict Cumberbatch, many of whom are married, heterosexual women. There usually comes a time in the conversation when, having talked about nothing other than Benedict Cumberbatch for an hour or so, they assure me that despite how it may sound, they actually do love their husbands. (Although there was that woman in Western Australia who seemed to love Benedict Cumberbatch almost to spite her husband. “When he’s giving me the shits,” she told me, “I just say, bugger this, and I go read some gay fanfiction.” An icon. A legend.) One woman, talking to me over the phone, cupped the receiver when she heard her husband come in the front door. “This is the kind of conversation I try not to have in the marital home,” she whispered.
“Why?” I replied, also whispering, unnecessarily.
Because, she said, her relationship with Benedict Cumberbatch is akin to “an affair of the mind.”
“Is it?!” I hissed back, now very stressed about my own marital home. I’d just finished reading a New Yorker story about British explorer Henry Worsley’s all-consuming obsession with walking across Antarctica. My conclusion was that “crossing things” is a type of obsession I’ll never be able to understand. Anyway, in the article, I was struck by how Worsley’s very supportive wife, Joanna, referred to Antarctica as her husband’s “mistress.” I suppose if you can cheat on your spouse with a chilly continent, then, yes, you can cheat on your spouse with a celebrity you’ve never met. Then there’s that thing where women describe themselves as “football widows” during the appropriate seasons. Here, football isn’t the other woman but the cause of death: the murderer, even. A mind affair seems pretty tame by comparison. In any case, it’s clearly possible for a passion to get in the way of a relationship.
The woman on the phone asks to remain completely anonymous before saying goodbye. She’d said she’s not ashamed about her feelings for Benedict Cumberbatch, but at one point she’d also said that when she wakes up in the morning and turns on the computer to look at photos of Benedict Cumberbatch again, it’s “like my frontal lobe is very disappointed in my cerebral cortex.” She feels like she’s letting herself down. Or maybe I’m just projecting.
Is it an affair of the mind? Another woman tells me she knows she’s not doing anything wrong by having feelings for Benedict Cumberbatch—literally, she says, “I know I’m not doing anything wrong”—but still, she keeps it from her husband. She doesn’t want to make him feel bad. She loves her husband! And how would you feel if you found out your wife knows exactly which minute to fast-forward to in Doctor Strange so that she lands, just perfectly, on that scene where Benedict Cumberbatch is wearing only a towel (00:43:30)?
“I wouldn’t like it if he did it,” someone else tells me. Actually, a lot of people tell me this, meaning they wouldn’t like it if their husband had similar feelings for a celebrity, like, for example—and then they always say “Scarlett Johansson”—Scarlett Johansson. It’s true, I wouldn’t like that.
People without partners can feel bad too, of course. They feel bad for what they’re doing to Benedict Cumberbatch, objectifying him. “The idea of being in an art gallery, and looking at a piece of art, and turning around and seeing people taking photos of you, is really perverse,” Benedict Cumberbatch has said. Just because someone looks like a piece of art doesn’t mean you should treat them like one. Objectification turns people into things, and don’t women know the cost of that all too well? Now you’re letting down the whole of feminism. We look; we’re sorry; we feel bad. Almost makes you wonder if it’s worth it.
Why do you want to know what my husband thinks? I’m not getting you into trouble—I wanted to know too. And even though I obviously know the answer now, I still don’t understand why it mattered to me so much. How can it, really, have anything to do with him? But also, it seems like it’s entirely about him.
* * *
♥
Idling online one day, I find a post asking people to fill in a survey about their experience of having a crush on a media figure. I click on it because, sure, I’ll answer some more questions about what I’d like to do with Benedict Cumberbatch’s dirty napkin. But this is a very different survey from the one about celebrity worship syndrome. It’s not a mental health check; it’s more like couples counseling. The couple in question is me and Benedict Cumberbatch.
Right up top, the survey asks you to name the media figure you’ve had romantic feelings for. It can be a fictional character or a real person. Then, from that point on, the survey becomes personalized. This is how I find myself contemplating the following: In general, how satisfied were you with your relationship with Benedict Cumberbatch? I chuckle, and select Extremely satisfied. You know it. The next question is How well did your relationship with Benedict Cumberbatch meet your needs? Hmm, this is getting a bit freaky, I think, and then I answer with the highest available option on the scale, number seven: A great deal. When I see that the next question is How good was your relationship with Benedict Cumberbatch? I can only reply with a question of my own. Okay, so who wrote this survey and why are they making it sound like I’m in a real relationship with Benedict Cumberbatch?
“Imaginary love is real,” says Dr. Riva Tukachinsky Forster. She’s an associate professor at Chapman University in California, specializing in media psychology. She’s also the author of that survey. Dr. Tukachinsky Forster studies parasocial romantic relationships, which is the technical name for a crush on a media figure. She believes that these relationships, like between me and Benedict Cumberbatch, can generate feelings as meaningful and profound as reciprocated, unmediated relationships, like between me and my husband. Her survey questions aren’t buying into a delusion; they’re simply recognizing the existence of these feelings.
When we speak, Dr. Tukachinsky Forster begins by telling me, with raised eyebrow and a coy look, that she fully endorses Benedict Cumberbatch as a love object. And here I was, thinking I was finally speaking to someone outside the Cumberverse, but truly, it seems safer to assume that everyone is a Cumberbitch. Her first love, though, was MacGyver, she says: the original one, played by Richard Dean Anderson. At school, she used to dream he would turn up and rescue her from the bullies.
She didn’t give much thought to MacGyver after puberty. But then, decades later, she became a mother. “I was getting Netflix DVDs to get me through the nights of breastfeeding and colicky baby-burping,” she remembers, and MacGyver was among them. At first, it was hard to watch the show because the acting isn’t great and the production values are laughable now. “But then,” Dr. Tukachinsky Forster says, “I just felt like, he’s been there all this time.” This experience sparked her research interest in parasocial romantic relationships. It’s a “quest for self-understanding,” she says.
“This same thing happened to me when I became a mother!” I tell her. “That’s why I want to speak to you!”
“Yes, of course,” she says, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. “There’s a section on maternity in my book on parasocial romantic relationships,” she adds, like it’s a standard part of child-rearing. You have a baby, you feed the baby, you burp the baby, you fall in love with a man on the television. “It’s an important way to renegotiate a new identity. I didn’t experience it that way in real time, but now, in retrospect, when I hear other women speaking about it, I think maybe it was that for me as well,” she says. “I definitely was lost, so it was a good thing.” I feel like her quest for self-understanding is progressing at a faster pace than mine.
Dr. Tukachinsky Forster believes that while there definitely can be negative experiences associated with parasocial romantic relationships—just like there definitely are fans whose behavior is delusional or antisocial—for the most part, they’re understudied, stigmatized, and normal. The term “parasocial relationship” has a pathological tilt to it, she says, because it was coined by psychiatrists in the 1950s. But you can be perfectly fulfilled in your real-life relationships, and totally satisfied with your romantic partner, and still seek out a parasocial romantic relationship; it doesn’t have to reflect badly on your spouse. And, Dr. Tukachinsky Forster says, such relationships aren’t usually a substitution or surrogate for low self-esteem or loneliness either, even though this is how parasocial romantic relationships were characterized—like a kind of security blanket—by research on “media uses and gratifications” in the 1970s and 1980s.
Maybe a celebrity crush is compensating for insecure real-world relationships for some people, Dr. Tukachinsky Forster says, but it’s simply not the case for most people. “The numbers are not there. I can see it from study after study. However you measure it, there is no correlation between all the things we would expect to be a deficit that calls for a substitution relationship and having parasocial romantic relationships.
“What we do find consistently is that people who are more prone to forming strong real-life social bonds are also more likely to form strong parasocial bonds. Parasocial relationships are just an extension of our social relationships; the same mental models that organize our non-media-based relationships, they also organize our media relationships. We didn’t evolve long enough with media around us to develop a different part of the brain to handle imaginary relationships and imaginary people. We’re using the same infrastructure to handle both.”
“So hang on,” I say, “doesn’t that mean I really am mind-cheating on my husband, then? If I’m storing him and Benedict Cumberbatch in the same part of my brain?” This, Dr. Tukachinsky Forster says, is a personal question, not one she can answer with empirical evidence. “But,” I ask a little anxiously, “do you think these are the kinds of feelings one should keep to oneself?”
“A lot of women are comfortable telling their significant other about what they’re going through, and it’s taken okay. They tell me their husbands tease them about it, and it becomes a funny thing,” she says. “But if you have internalized the negative social stigma that you’re behaving in an immature way, then maybe you won’t want your husband to know about it. Or, maybe you want to keep it to yourself, in a corner of your soul that’s just for you. Or, perhaps your husband would be threatened by it, I don’t know. My question to you would be, how would you feel if your significant other had similar feelings toward—”
“Scarlett Johansson,” I say, preemptively.
“Yes, Scarlett Johansson? It’s a personal thing.”
* * *
♥
Out of all the people I ask to speak with me about their feelings for Benedict Cumberbatch, Linda is one of the very few who don’t want to talk on the phone. She’s seventy-four, and her husband is with her most of the time at their home in a rural area of the southern United States, so private phone calls aren’t really possible. She emails me instead. Her typing is impeccable—she used to work in the software industry. I’m a bit worried about why Linda has to be so secretive, though. Is she afraid of what her husband will think? No, she writes back. She just wants to keep it to herself.
“I’m of the opinion that I’m not required to explain why I feel or think the way I do,” she says. She found it hard to answer the questions I had emailed her, she says, for this exact reason. “I give what I can of my love, time, and support to my family and friends, but reserve the right to have a private, inner life.” For over thirty years, her family and her work consumed her. “Most of the adult privacy I have had was in my own head.” Later, she tells me that she and her husband decided long ago that “it doesn’t matter where you get your appetite as long as you dine at home. And we don’t necessarily share where we get our appetites.”
Emma, the professor, says something similar to me when she answers my final question, about whether her husband knows that she writes fic. No, she says, it’s private. “Some women write diaries, and I write fanfiction. It’s only for me.”
“But then your husband doesn’t really, fully know you?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says, “but you know what? I’m fine with that. I think the reason that he and I are so constantly stimulated, and pleased with our complicity, is that we still bring a lot of mystery to the relationship. Even after all these decades.”
“You don’t feel like there’s any betrayal there when you write explicit love scenes?”
“Not at all,” she says. “I think fantasies are free. He, no doubt, has an erotic imagination, stimulated by lots of people. It’s none of my business.”
The woman on the phone in her marital home—the one who wanted to remain so anonymous that I honestly can’t think of how else to describe her—she says she keeps her thing for Benedict Cumberbatch on the down low because “people would start wondering questions I don’t want them to wonder about—about my marriage and why my husband allows it. I know how people’s brains work, so I keep quite a big moat around me. It’s about a sense of being in control of who I am as an adult.”
And then there’s Jade. Years after that night at her house, when she didn’t tell her husband I was there, I eventually ask her about it. We’re at a weekday matinee screening of The Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, enjoying our complimentary tea and carrot cake (which they apparently put on for the senior citizens who attend movies at this time). We are better friends now than we had been that night, thanks to the passage of time and the continual release of new Benedict Cumberbatch content. “Why didn’t you want your husband to know about what we were doing?” I ask Jade.
“Because I didn’t want him to ruin it,” she says.
“Oh, I thought you were ashamed,” I say.
“No,” she says. “I didn’t want to have to hear what he’d say.”
Dr. Tukachinsky Forster is right: it’s a personal thing. But I still can’t work out why it matters so much to know what my husband thinks of all this.
* * *
♥
It’s not necessarily a bad thing to wonder what other people think, of course. It’s considerate, empathetic. It’s practically the definition of “feminine.” There’s a study about that: researchers asked American women to consider the messages they receive about how they’re supposed to act, think, and feel, as women, and used their answers to develop a list of perceived “feminine norms.”
Steel yourself, because here’s the result, an inventory of how women are supposed to be: nice in relationships, thin, modest, domestic, caring for children, invested in romantic relationships, sexually faithful, and invested in our appearance.
Awesome list. Love it. I think “thin” is my favorite, because it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Just: thin! Another highlight is how many of these feminine attributes aren’t even about women but about other people and how women make them feel. Taken together, caring a lot about how you make other people feel comprises a good chunk of what it supposedly means to be a woman.
It’s pertinent to note that the original study was conducted over a decade ago, and with mostly straight cisgender women, but in further, more recent research on these norms, LGBTQIA+ women and gender-nonconforming people have endorsed them to the same extent as, or in some cases more than, straight cisgender women. It isn’t surprising, really, that we all care so much about other people, especially men. You know the quote often attributed to Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Keeping one eye on how you make men feel might be necessary to your survival. But conversely, if you don’t care a lot about how you make other people feel, it might end up seeming kind of wrong, transgressive. Shameful. Like you might want to keep that information to yourself.
* * *
♥
