Introduction

I occasionally encounter someone who asks: Who would follow a celebrity on Instagram? Lady, I WOULD. I do! I follow celebrities who I actually like and celebrities who I find weird and complicated (Gwen Stefani, hi) and celebrities I wrote about or profiled at some point in the last ten years and now know all about their workout routines (hi, Brie Larson). But I didn’t follow Kevin Bacon — until a reel of him dancing, back-lit in his barn, to “Footloose” (in celebration of the end of the Actor’s Guild Strike) took over my field. Over the weeks to come, I let the posts of a man fundamentally at ease wash over me. Here was Kevin Bacon, playing me an LP from his collection. There was Kevin Bacon, slow-dancing with his wife of many decades (Kyra Sedgwick) in their modest farmhouse kitchen. There he was, with his shaggy graying hair and well-fit jeans, just effortlessly existing, seemingly free of the anxiety of public social media performance.

Of course, I’ve studied stars long enough to know there was something more complicated going on — in the performance of a particular kind of masculinity and progressive semi-agrarian whiteness and heterosexual romance and so much more. So I asked Sarah Mesle, one of my favorite culture analysts (also, crucially, a Gen-Xer like Bacon and a practitioner of “hair studies”) to come on the pod to unpack it all.

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