In one of the VH1 Behind the Music episode, one hair metal band decided to keep the problems down and put in a rule that any female that came backstage that wasn’t employed by any place that put on the concert had to be basically nude and he said they were shocked when women from 12 to 60 would be undressed behind the stage waiting for them
in fact, he said pointing to a few photo albums and a VHS tape that he was glad for the statute of limitations because they had a lot of women that were related joining in and he said they didn’t worry about ages much since mom, etc was joining in
the encounters were during the concert because apparently, 2 members of the band had their own mini set that would last about 45 or so minutes and said "We felt sorry for those 2 because they rarely got laid "
What makes you imagine that women who want to get pregnant by a celebrity are going to be anywhere near a majority of the women who are interested in, or successful in, having sex with said celebrity?
There are FAR more groupies who just want a sexual encounter with their idol than conception-seeking “plotters” of the sort you describe. I’m not claiming that there don’t exist any such plotters at all, but I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt that they make up more than a small minority of the female fans trying to hook up with any well-known star.
Looking at today’s celebrity worship, I do think there are many fans out there who would love to have the child of a superstar athlete, musician, or actor, if that opportunity arose. You may regard them as “plotters” and find their thoughts/actions unacceptable or irrational, but just a few dozen women per year over several years would yield a large total.
Very likely, but ISTM that that’s still going to be only a very small fraction of all the fans who would love to have a sexual encounter with their superstar idol without signing up for twenty-plus years of motherhood as an aftereffect.
In theory, sure. But in real life, I find it very implausible that any superstar celebrity’s casual (unprotected) sexual encounters include anywhere near as many as a few dozen women annually who are actually seeking to get pregnant by them.
If you’ve got evidence to the contrary, feel free to produce it. Otherwise, I think Occam’s Razor strongly suggests that we should default to inferring that superstar celebrities are not in fact impregnating dozens of women annually.
That seems more reasonable than engaging in slipshod speculation along the lines of “well theoretically they could be causing all these conceptions, so let’s assume that that’s what they are doing, and now let’s discuss the big mystery of where all the secret celebrity babies at!!!”
Yeah, I’ll get right on that as soon as I’ve finished speculating about the layout of all the secret Bigfoot cave tunnels that explain why nobody ever sees more than a glimpse of Bigfoot. Mm-hmm.
Def Leppard. I remember that episode, and thought the orgy story was a bunch of bunk. After the show? Maybe. DURING? I doubt it.
Prince, who wasn’t exactly a sexual paragon of virtue, had no known living biological children.
When I was in college in the early 1990s and R.E.M. were at their peak, a co-worker asked me if any of them had kids. I made a lot of people squirm when I said, “They probably all have kids that they don’t know about” and then told him something I know now is erroneous, which was that the drummer, Bill Berry, had a daughter. (He didn’t, and still doesn’t AFAIK, although he has a son who was born after he left the band and is a rising musician in his own right.) Mike Mills, the bassist, already had a son but didn’t make that knowledge public until some years later.
Having a baby outside wedlock was actually shocking for a lot of society
There were no paternity tests
The tabloids were in the pocket of the film studios to the degree where stories could be permanently buried
I mean it still happens I’m sure but generally nowadays it’s considered generally a memeworthy aside (e.g. Nick Canon) not some career ending dark secret that must be hidden forever
Just as another, fairly recent athlete example: Antonio Cromartie, who was a successful defensive back in the NFL for ten-plus seasons, has fathered fourteen children – he and his wife have five children, and he also apparently has at least nine children with other women.
The first article below, from 2016 (Cromartie’s last year in the NFL) says that he was paying $336,000 per year in child support, and it appears (according to his Wikipedia entry) that he has had one more out-of-wedlock child since that 2016 article was written.
To what extent those nine out-of-wedlock children were the result of women intentionally seeking to get pregnant with an NFL star’s child is unknown. But, it also demonstrates that it’s all more-or-less public knowledge at this point, and not “hidden,” as per the OP; when Cromartie was an active player, it was pretty well-known that he was prolific at fathering kids.
GQ Magazine isn’t Sociology Today, but this story does sketch a rather chilling portrait of the groupies out there. Mind you, this is but one of many such groups.
One of many salacious quotes: "There have been too many love children born of a condom that, oops, had a hole poked in it to make that “mistake.” “You’d be amazed,” says a former Fly Girl I met in Houston, “how many women I know who actually do that. Because let’s face it, if you get pregnant, your life is made.”
Psst, Kimstu, I knew the 250 figure I tossed out in my OP was waaay high, but it brought you into the fray, and for that alone, I am eternally grateful.
It’s also unclear to me whether Cromartie was trying to avoid fathering those extra kids, and also whether the women were secretly trying to get pregnant, up front about trying to get pregnant, or simply careless about getting pregnant.
As well, with ten examples to choose from there’s probably at least one of each possibility from my taxonomy of female motivations. And of course Cromartie’s own attitudes to a pregnancy could shift over time or from woman to woman as well.
I should also note that, between the Bleacher Report article, and the Wikipedia article, it also appears that Cromartie had three children (including a pair of twins) with his wife, and at least one additional out-of-wedlock child, after allegedly undergoing a vasectomy.
If Cromartie was paying $336K / year for ~10 kids, that’s ~$36K/year/kid.
I don’t know about that GQ Fly Girl, but at least for me, it takes far more than a $36K/year stipend before I’d consider my life “made”. And doubly so if I had to raise a mostly unwanted kid on that money too.
It does also suggest to me that, if there are, indeed, women who are using this as a get-rich strategy, the vast majority of them are winding up disappointed at the actual payout. (Either that, or they are truly flat broke, and something like a $36,000 annual child support payment is, in fact, a significant payout for them.)
At the risk of sounding elitist, lots of both athletes and groupies come from the poor side of town. What number sounds big to them is perhaps different than what number sounds big to you or I.
As a separate matter, I’ll bet that during his heyday Cromartie had some lawyers or such that were very good at negotiating the settlement downwards. The women getting e.g. ~$36K/year are perhaps quite surprised and disappointed that it’s so much less than they’d expected / hoped for Fly Girl style.
I’d also bet that a bigger name with fewer offspring to pay for might be more generous on a per-kid basis. Both as a matter of capacity and of willingness.
Lastly, while we might guess Cromartie is a bit of an outlier on the high side of offspring headcount, we have no idea where he lies on the payout spectrum; so far we have a sample set of 1. He might be unusually stingy or unusually generous; we can’t say. Nor is there any evidence my simple-minded 336K/10 = 36K apiece even-split math is even remotely correct.
This. Lots of groupies think the celebrity is hot, and want to be close to him, physically and emotionally. Do some want a child? Sure. But i bet it’s a tiny minority of the women who’d be excited for a chance at a sexual encounter without being saddled with a kid.
I dunno; the whole reason why there’s such rigamarole around choosing partners is because people want their children to have the best chance possible. Now, part of that is wanting a partner who will help with the upbringing, and any one-night stand is giving up that part of it… but part of it is wanting the most fit partner possible, and it’s easy to come to the conclusion that Wilt Chamberlain is extremely fit.
Considering that an increasing number of women are choosing to have children with no further paternal input whatsoever, one would think they might try to do this, but now we do have sperm banks, which means they don’t have to worry about things like getting roofied, or getting any strange diseases.
You’re quite right that there are women out there, and more all the time, who are choosing random or anonymous sperm-bank driven single motherhood. But that’s not what this thread is about.
The point of getting pregnant by a celebrity is a LOT more the celebrity than the pregnancy. Whether the woman is seeking a golden settlement / support agreement for self+kid, or just some really great paternal genes for the kid (for rather limited notions of “great”), they’re looking for something connected to celebrity-ness in general and that particular celeb in particular.
A woman so inclined is not thinking that some random schlub’s juice from tube 345B at the local sperm bank is a suitable substitute. Not even remotely.
And, as @puzzlegal says, of all the women seeking to bed a celeb, it’s likely a very small fraction are seeking a kid from the encounter. Some are, and they can be frightfully expensive / inconvenient to the celeb if they succeed. So smarter celebs take aggressive precautions with everyone because they can’t know who’s in which camp.
