Gwen Stefani Syndrome: No Doubt it will kill us all

By: Eamonn Rockwell

Posted: 4/6/07

I decided to humor my older brother during the break and sat down to watch American Idol. Before you send me off to a nunnery as if I were an unwed young maiden with child, I remembered to leave my Man-Badge and Man-Gun in my room so that I could watch the show without having to deny it and eventually turn them both in to the Man Association of Nevada, widely regarded as the manliest group in the manliest state in the Union. But while watching the flashing lights and colors behind these D-listers, it was revealed that the guest judge for that episode would be Gwen Stefani. To my surprise, Ms. Stefani looked much better than usual, almost as if she was a woman. It was at that precise moment that I remembered her condition and how it affects many women worldwide and plays hell with their lives. It's called Gwen Stefani Syndrome, and though it is particularly widespread in the celebrity community, the efforts to cure it and help these women rebuild their lives have been excruciatingly slow. The world needs to act now before this disease destroys all that we hold dear.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with GSS, it is a condition in women where one can appear to be incredibly attractive at one moment, but in the blink of an eye can transform into the love-child of Bigfoot and Jack Nicholson. To quell more accusations that I'm a misogynist pig with a miniscule Johnson, the condition exists in men as well, but I don't remember what celebrity it's named after. I think it might be called Jude Lawtism. The condition is more apparent among celebrities, but it affects over ten billion women around the globe. This is devastating because the world only has around three billion women, making this disease more than three hundred percent effective at ruining their chances for normal social interaction. Men have not evolved to the point where they can handle constant change in their lives, and having friends and lovers who constantly change appearances from one end of the spectrum to the complete opposite end can lead to schizophrenia, erectile dysfunction and eventually suicide by poisonous-Spiny-Sea-Urchin-bath.

Men excel at ensuring that everything stays exactly the same for as long as possible, and GSS thrives on creating chaos, which makes it an incredibly difficult virus to fight. The speed at which it has spread across planet earth has also slowed any progress against this horrendous condition. Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore and Uma Thurman are just three of the trillions of women affected by this wretched disease. If the scientific community does not drop whatever they're doing right now and help each other to find a cure, the confusion and paranoia that GSS creates will consume the entire world, causing panic the likes of which has never been seen. People will be too paralyzed with fear to even look at a celebrity, much less take hundreds of pictures of her from various angles while yelling obscenities at them hoping for a reaction. While the advantage of this situation is that there will be almost no paparazzi to worry about in our daily lives, this brings up the difficult question of whether or not western civilization can even survive in a climate that does not ceaselessly document the lives of people who, no longer having their looks, are rendered worthless in a cold and merciless land. Forced to survive on what little skills they have, the lucky ones will endure the misery of a solitary existence and live a life that could have only been dreamed up by Dostoevsky during the middle of one of his vast valleys of depression.

But why have scientists been unable to counter this disease the way they countered polio in the 1950s? Many important sources say the lack of funding and research towards a cure is caused by jealousy and apathy, though not necessarily in that order. Many leading scientists were socially rejected and taunted by people who went on to be celebrities, and therefore are in no hurry to help the people who made them find solace in the emptiness of a laboratory. Being isolated from pop-culture in the pursuit of finding vaccines for AIDS and cancer (if we create a vaccine, then we won't need to waste money finding a cure and distributing it every time someone gets infected, numbnuts) has made the scientific community unaware of the importance of these Spray-tanned idols whom the common man latches onto like a remora to a shark, thus making them unprepared and disinclined to want to synthesize a cure for GSS. We had this problem before when all the world's vaccine producers during the late 1970s and early 1980s were unbelievably homophobic, which prevented them from wanting to make an AIDS vaccine and stop it before it could spread. Because of their bigotry, we now have millions of people with AIDS and HIV and are still far from a vaccine despite improvements in medication to help those with the disease live longer and healthier lives. One killer disease that threatens mankind's very existence is enough, and I don't know if I have the chutzpah to deal with another.

We know our enemy, but knowing is only half the battle. The things we do know are severely overshadowed by the numerous facts that we don't know, like why it affects famous people 76% more often than commoners and how celebrities manage to still be photographed when the ravages of the disease are obvious to any bystanders. These are the hard questions that American citizens should be asking. While we distract ourselves with allegations of corruption and favoritism among the fat-cats in Washington, the physical appearance our own blue-blooded celebrities is taking on the look of a post-Civil War Atlanta. If we don't stop the ugliness, the only one who will is the Grim Reaper, and he will not be kind.

Eamonn Rockwell is a freshman majoring in communications. He can be reached through ed-op@thetriangle.org.