A therapist on what the Hailey Bieber vs Selena Gomez drama says about us

Spoiler: it says a lot more about us than it does about them

The Selena vs Hailey drama says a lot more about us than it does about them. Image: Tyrell Hampton

Gossip - an addiction as old as time and as unhelpful as ever. Relationship therapist Diana Benjamin on why the manufactured 6 year Hailey Bieber-Selena Gomez-Justin Bieber ‘feud’ still has a chokehold on Gen Z and how the generation can evolve.

Let me take you back to the year 2017. Ed Sheeran’s folk-pop-rap album haunts the speaker systems of every supermarket you enter, freckle pens are all the rage, Beyonce is pregnant with twins and Justin Bieber begins talking to a then-Hailey Baldwin while still dating Selena Gomez.

Who knew that six years, a marriage, and many faux freckles later we’d still be talking about the Hailey-Justin-Selena love triangle that has Gen Z gripped by its curved tech neck. But here we are: the two women are back in the media after Hailey Bieber posted a series of  poorly-timed Instagram videos that feud manufacturers have alleged were insults directed at Gomez. 

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Need a quick refresh? Justin Bieber and Gomez were a heavily ‘shipped’ on and off couple between 2010 and 2018. Six months after their final break up, Bieber married Baldwin, a model he’d also been dating on and off while with Gomez. Suffice to say Jelena fans did not like this, with Gomez depicted as the clear-majority favourite partner for Bieber.

In the ensuing years, pundits of the love triangle have analysed every picture, video and piece of publicity from the three celebrities to create salacious rumours that satisfy their ultimate desire for Gomez and Bieber to end up together. 

The devil works hard, Kris Jenner works harder, but manufacturers of the Bieber-Gomez feud work the hardest. Their recent labours have resulted in 750 million TikTok views on #teamselena videos and hundreds of thousands of unfollows on Hailey Bieber's social media accounts. Similarly, #teamhailey TikTok videos have amassed 57 million views and Selena has gained 15 million followers since February. 

There are a lot of people still flying the flag for #jelena. Image: Getty

Watching #teamselena and #teamhailey videos can make you want a martini and a lobotomy. I watched hours of content in which young women tore both Gomez and Hailey Bieber down for everything from micro-body language, to their eyebrows and their weight.  In an effort to understand why this ‘feud’ has such a stronghold on my fellow females and what it says about Gen Z as a whole, I spoke to licensed relationship therapist Diana Benjamin.

“This behaviour is not new. People, especially women, have been gossiping for centuries. You only need to look at the Ancient Greeks and early photos of hunter-gatherer tribes in which women are pictured communing around campfires or tables talking,” says Benjamin.

In fact, just like the Bieber-Gomez feud manufacturers are prying into the lives of celebrities, the Greek goddess of rumours and gossip, Pheme, is said to have pried into the lives of immortals. Greek mythology suggests Pheme spread favourable gossip about the gods she liked and created unfavourable rumours about those that defied her.

Why are humans drawn to gossip? “We all want an escape,” says Benjamin. “It’s like any addiction. It gives us dopamine, similar to a high after taking drugs. It’s also an immature way for us to maintain a caste system. Humans have a concerning primitive tendency to want to grade each other. We want to give each other an ‘A’ or an ‘F’ in all aspects of life.”

Fans were quick to villainise Hailey when she started dating Justin Bieber. Image: Getty

If everyone from the Greek god Pheme to @teamselena75 is scratching their innate human itch to investigate the lives of others and spread rumours, then what’s so bad about it? Why should we stop? “We disempower ourselves by investing our time and brain energy into fiction, because that’s all this [the Bieber-Gomez feud] is, it’s stories. The fiction is alluring because it’s better than confronting the reality of our lives,” says Benjamin. We need to ask ourselves how we would otherwise be spending our time if we weren’t participating in this, she advises.

Would Bieber-Gomez feud manufacturers be better served by turning their attention to their own struggles in their personal relationships? Or could they lend their skills to careers as successful publicists? It’s bittersweet to think about what the women who’ve manufactured the feud could do instead, with the massive amount of power, persuasive storytelling and perseverance they possess.

In her collection of essays, The White Album, author Joan Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” According to Benjamin, the people involved in the Hailey Bieber vs Selena Gomez drama are doing just that. “They are creating stories about these celebrities in order to escape, in order to live,” she says. But this 6 year old fiction is not a good one.

With an audience within the hundreds of millions, this story of two female celebrities pitted against each other has resulted in mass cyberbullying, body shaming and the promotion of romantic viability as the most important attribute for a young woman. “This ‘feud’ serves as a cautionary tale to think about the ways we escape,” says Benjamin, or as Didion would put it, the stories that serve our lives best. 

Amira Stevenson is a Sydney-born, New York-based freelance writer with a Bachelor of Communication (Media Arts and Production) from the University of Technology Sydney. Amira has five years of experience working in the TV/film industry and as a freelance writer in Australia and abroad.

Originally published as A therapist on what the Hailey Bieber vs Selena Gomez drama says about us