Page 42

The press team were staying in the same resort as the group, managers and liaison teams, whereas everyone else was staying in another hotel.

The resort was massive, but it didn’t provide as much separation as I would have assumed. He was always across the room, or walking down the same corridor, at the same gym, or at the restaurant at the same time. I couldn’t not see him. We orbited each other, and I realised that I had begun to look for him.

We hadn’t had a chance to speak to each other properly since Kyoto, and I wondered if our last conversation was occupying his thoughts as much as it occupied mine. I constantly rolled the words around in my head, trying to see it from any other angle, but it never changed the meaning, and I didn’t know what to do with the fact that he wanted me enough to try again after everything that had happened to break us.

Or perhaps he only thought he wanted me that much, because after all these years, how could he know? He knew the woman I was. I couldn’t help but wonder if the Kaiya he was chasing was the one he’d lost years ago, and I wasn’t her anymore.

I wasn’t too proud to admit to myself that perhaps I was scared. Scared that nothing had really changed to make the risk worthwhile. Scared that he loved a ghost. So much so that I hadn’t even told Becka about the ‘courting’ thing. It felt like it would make it too real. Something I’d need to make a decision about.

Easier to leave it in the realm of possibility than bring it out for speculation under a microscope.

To take my mind off the tour, off Jihoon, off everything in between, I did what always brought me comfort. I threw myself down the rabbit hole of the music world. Skimming publications for what was going on was something I did in my day-to-day life as a music journalist, and was as much a part of my routine as making a cup of coffee. I was subscribed to pretty much every publication that was worth it, but I’d been out of the loop since coming on tour, and the music industry was rarely quiet. There were new albums being released, comebacks being announced, a nineties pop sensation from the UK was regrouping for a new tour and something that managed to overshadow all of that – a scandal.

American pop starlet turned talk show host Harlow Harris had apparently broken up with her boyfriend – who was also one of the producers on her talk show. Normally, this was the kind of article I skipped, but GVibes was booked in to appear on the Harlow Harris Show next month when they performed in LA.

Harlow Harris was a well-known pop star, a respected singer and songwriter, but unfortunately, the media could rarely just describe a woman by her accolades, and often fell back on the buzz words and gossip that would sell papers and generate clicks. She had also gained the rather unfortunate moniker of ‘Whorelow Harris’. The nickname stemmed from the idea that she was either perpetually in love, going on high-profile dates, or embroiled in a public break-up. The nickname wasn’t particularly creative, but it was catchy and struck exactly the right tone for the types of people that attacked her for having a love life – misogynistic assholes.

Apparently two things were true of Harlow: she only released new material when she was going through a break-up, and she dated a lot of men. It might be reasonable to assume from those two things that Harlow released a lot of albums, but the truth rarely aligned with the salacious headlines. Harlow had, in fact, released only three albums in the past six years, and if the rumours that her dating history matched up with her release schedule were true, then having three boyfriends in six years didn’t seem deserving of being called a whore.

Every article I read about it painted her as somehow being the aggressor in the relationship because she was the big-name pop star, and the ex was just a show producer, completely ignoring the fact that both people had described the split as ‘amicable’.

The more I read, the more incensed I got. None of the articles bothered to point out that the couple had been together for two years, or that it was serious enough that they’d lived together. They all focused on the angle that Whorelow Harris had broken yet another man’s heart and speculated on how long it would take for her to fire him from his job on the show and bankrupt him.

I got so pissed that I opened up my writing software and started hammering away at the keys.

It remains to be one of the media industry’s most enduring magic tricks, and this journalist never fails to be amazed by it: take one famous woman, add a normal amount of romantic connections, sprinkle over some public entitlement and voilà. You have transformed a real person into a caricature: the poster girl for the hysterical, promiscuous woman.

It should be understood that Harlow Harris is not simply being judged for having a romantic life. She is being eviscerated for daring to have one in public. Make no mistake – the baffling mythology surrounding Harlow Harris’s love life has become far more profitable than the reality of it.

It is far more salacious to imagine a grown woman flitting from one innocent man to another in order to fuel emotionally-laden music records than to accept the truth: that sometimes relationships simply end, and no one is at fault.

When a man in the entertainment world dates a bevy of beautiful women, he is seen as a jack-the-lad. Desirable. Virile. Aspirational. When a woman is accused of doing the same – regardless of its proximity to the truth – she is seen exactly as Harlow’s nickname suggests: a whore.

We have built an entire entertainment economy on demanding access to the private lives of celebrities, then punishing them for the lives we invent in the absence of that access. They are condemned for imagined lives, imagined motives, imagined patterns of behaviour – whether or not any of it bears the slightest resemblance to reality.

What is most striking to me is the absolute asymmetry of the coverage. We rarely demand that famous men account for their failed relationships. Their heartbreak is framed as tragic. Female heartbreak, meanwhile, is treated as evidence of making poor decisions. Of being too emotional. Too much.

Harlow’s alleged dating history says less about her private love life than it does about the public’s appetite for access to it. Perhaps the most damning thing about the entire discourse is how little of it appears to require Harlow Harris herself.

It is my opinion that the real scandal here has nothing to do with whomever Harlow deems worthy of a relationship. The scandal is that the world feels entitled not only to know about it, but to fictionalise it – and then punish her for the fiction.

It took me less time than most of my articles as it was an opinion piece, and not a deep dive into media or an artist.

I did not often wade into celebrity gossip pieces unless it was somehow relevant to my interests. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but this felt personal.

But I felt no desire to unpack that particular feeling.

This was very much not related to GVibes or ENT, and thus did not infringe on my exclusivity clause with them.

I tidied up the article, attached it to an email and sent it to my previous editor at Frequency in London. If they didn’t want it, I’d just put it on my blog. But she responded by the end of the day with my freelance purchase rate and a promise to put it up once she’d edited it to catch the current Harlow scandal news cycle. Part of me was a little grossed out that its relevance would be aided by her misfortune, but another part of me was glad it would at least be a voice of pushback in a sea of derision.

Chapter 17

“Where are you going?” Sihyeon looked up in surprise as I walked past where she sat in the lobby, laptop propped on her crossed legs. She preferred working in the large, sunny resort lobby where she could observe people coming and going. Much like she had just observed me about to head out. I backtracked to reply.

“I’m heading out into the city for a bit.”

“On your own?” She looked around, as if looking for my invisible entourage. I grinned. “I’m a big girl, Sihyeon, I don’t need a grown-up. I want to see Manila before we leave.”