Which celebrity would you trade places with?

(Mike Marsland/Wire Image)
(Mike Marsland/Wire Image)

Not Kate Middleton, that's for sure. Despite being a 29-year-old woman with her very own Barbie and the title of princess waiting for her on the other end of her wedding, most women wouldn't want to be in her shoes.
According to a new poll, 86 percent are happy they're not about to walk down the royal aisle. "Most women realize Catherine has an unenviable task ahead of her, having her every move, not to mention every outfit, picked apart by the press," the poll's editor Carla Bevan says atTime.com.

The more we know about celebrities, the harder it is to envy them. They may be rich, famous and internationally worshipped, but they're also microscopically judged, and their minute actions can cause ripple effects of ridicule. That's the trade-off for living in a castle, or in Gwyneth Paltrow's case, a bunch of townhouses. Paltrow herself has stirred up the question recently, when an interviewer suggested her team of angry critics are merely jealous. Are people jealous of Paltrow? "Maybe we all are just a teensy-weensy bit jealous of her and her life," writes Keli Goff on the Huffington Post. "Why wouldn't we be? Her life is pretty great and she didn't have to work as hard as the rest of us to earn hers." But with her millions of dollars and perpetual at-home yoga sessions, comes an international swarm of haters. Not everyone is jealous of that.

In the pre-internet age beautiful women with fluffy jobs, public relationships and mind-boggling bank accounts were the focus of fantasy and envy. In the case of starlets, their jobs were to foster that envy. It tapped into a very high school notion of popularity and beauty, and fantasizing about their perfect lives was just a pleasant way to pass real-life time. But now that we've gotten a glimpse of life without privacy thanks to social networking, and the nightmarish side of fame thanks to Britney and Lindsey, their magnifying glass world seems way too pressurized. The potential for cracking very publicly looms greater than ever. As a result, being wildly famous for little more than beauty and relationship success seems like a really bad idea.

With that in mind, if you had to trade places with one female celebrity, who would it be?


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