Offerings #3: What are we doing to our beautiful princesses

Recently I logged onto social media to see something very depressing, two time Academy Award-winning actress Cate Blanchett doing a “Subway Take.” The short-form videos are pretty inescapable online and quickly becoming another stop on the endless, increasingly inane press cycle. Subway Takes is a web series where influencers, celebrities, and normal people alike say one controversial opinion on the subway. Notable guests include Charli XCX, Hasan Minhaj, and Governor Tim Walz.

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Subway Takes is the most recent example of gimmick-based shows — I hesitate to call this genre “interviews,” but that’s how they market themselves — dominating press cycles. Rather than providing illuminating context to the project someone is promoting, these shows are in pursuit of viral soundbites. 

Subway Takes joins the ranks of well-established and more effective gimmick-based shows like Chicken Shop Date and Hot Ones. And while I like Chicken Shop Date as much as the next girl, it initially stood out because of its unique premise, now we are inundated with the genre. Everything can’t be eating chicken, riding the subway, and flirting with talent. Someone needs to be asking hard-hitting or at least relevant questions.

To make matters worse, the creator of Subway Takes, Kareem Rahma, said the quiet part out loud in an interview with The Guardian : “Everyone wants to make podcasts so they can clip out the best bit for social media, so I wanted to make a podcast where there was no podcast, it was just the clip.” This is so sad! I spent much of my time at Mashable lambasting the clip-economy. 

Previously, I argued against the use of influencers on the red carpet. I wrote, “Red carpets and press junkets might not be sites of hard-hitting news, but reporters losing any access to powerful people should always ring alarm bells about our ability to hold those in power accountable.” I see gimmick-based interviews in the same way.

And on a less serious note, the fodder for an interesting celebrity — and a parasocial bond —  isn’t a 10 second clip, it’s an artfully revealed detail!

If Harry Styles was confined to gimmick-based interviews when he released his debut solo album we would’ve never gotten arguably the first ever glimpse into who he is, where he pushed back against the criticism of his fanbase saying, “How can you say young girls don't get it? They're our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going. Teenage-girl fans — they don't lie. If they like you, they're there. They don't act 'too cool.' They like you, and they tell you. Which is sick." And if he said that while eating a chicken wing instead of in print in Rolling Stone, it wouldn’t hold the same gravity…or have made thousands of teenage girls smile just as hard.

No matter your relationship with celebrity, we all suffer from the degradation of entertainment “journalism.”

I previously wrote about influencers on the red carpet here.

Apologies for the hiatus, the Oscars were wildly uninspiring and then I went to Miami! Honestly celebrities haven’t moved me much in general — maybe because I can’t fully engage in the fantasy anymore because The Altar Boy Josh O’Connor is constantly out and about in my beloved city — but this is way more fun to write than cover letters and beats the actual news. 

SPEAKING OF THE DANGERS OF INFLUENCERS ON THE RED CARPET: On the Vanity Fair Oscars after-party red carpet, comedian Hannah Berner and her Giggly Squad podcast co-host Paige DeSorbo interviewed Megan Thee Stallion. In the short interview, Berner said, “When I listen to your music I want to fight someone.” Stallion quickly shifted the conversation saying, “You wanna throw that fighting shit out the window. You want to get cute and be a bad bitch.” In the days after the interview many argued that the interviewer’s question was a microaggression, perpetuating the notion that Black women are inherently more aggressive and violent. In an excellent essay in Rolling Stone, CT Jones used this example to point out, “Pushing untrained creators out onto the red carpet in the hopes of virality is making a bleak media landscape even worse. Just because you give someone a microphone, it doesn’t make them a journalist — and it most certainly doesn’t guarantee a good interview.”

I’VE BEEN SAYING: Balding treatments are the new Botox per The Cut. Please don’t give me the if it makes men feel good then they can do whatever they want with their bodies excuse. I won’t sit by and let choice feminism happen to balding men. Any good feminist knows you must interrogate why it makes you feel good.

Clearly many men missed the lesson of 2024: Bald men are back. The popstar behind brat summer got engaged, not to the evil, full-head-of-hair-ed frontman of The 1975, but to his sexy, bald sidekick George Daniels. Furthermore, Russian Timothée Chalamet was the decoy hottie of Anora, the real heartthrob of the film was bald Russian Heath Ledger. 

SAM FENDER, THE MAN THAT YOU ARE: Loved this profile of British musician Sam Fender in The Times. He puts his politics behind his music in a way that feels really rare in this cultural moment where so many famous white men are bending towards the rightward shift (See Timothée Chalamet on Theo Von’s podcast). Fender openly interrogates what’s happening with white masculinity arguing that we aren’t talking about class enough. He said, “That’s a lot of the reason that all the young lads are seduced by demagogues and psychos like Andrew Tate. They’re being shamed all the time and made to feel like they’re the problem. It’s this narrative being told to white boys from nowhere towns.” I recommend reading the full profile!

THE WORST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD GOT MEN ADDICTED TO ZYN: I could not shut up while I read the New Yorker’s deep dive into ZYN in the back of an Uber in Miami in standstill traffic. I gasped, I forced my friends to listen to me quote statistics and ZYN slang — very that one friend you regret bringing to Miami of me — and I locked in. It comes as no surprise that ZYN’s popularity in the U.S. is in part due to a collaboration between manosphere giants like Andrew Huberman, the Nelk Boys, Tucker Carlson, and Dave Portnoy. 

PAUL MESCAL FANS CAN’T AFFORD BAM TICKETS: I recommend indulging in this fabulous scene report from opening night of “A Streetcar Named Desire” starring Paul Mescal at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from Cat Zhang in The Cut, which includes the line, “Loitering in BAM’s Harvey Theater three hours before the show, I saw Mescal eating Mediterranean food from a paper plate, looking like a normal guy in Brooklyn.”

INDULGENCES: MY ALTAR BOYS

Former Skins cast members, anyone Irish, British actors whose breakout role was “playing gay,” rappers from Kentucky, and men in Ocean’s Eleven (and their codependent best friends) are all fair game.

ROLE MODEL covered Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridger’s “Nothing New” with a country twang transforming a song I used to cry to in the car a lot into a comforting warm hug. He manages this because a man singing a song about how the music industry treats young women strips it of its emotional impact! 

Congratulations are in order for the singer as he was finally promoted to Altar Boy — although he’s more of the papa’s orchard variety — due to his unbelievably charming music video for “Sally, When The Wine Runs Out.”

DREW STARKEY starred in HAIM’s music video for “Relationships.” Drew Starkey is in Altar Boys on a probationary basis, mainly because it would’ve felt like a huge oversight if I didn’t mention it. I love the trend of up and coming heartthrobs quite literally playing the role of love object in music videos by female pop stars! There’s something great about his blank face or as Fran Hoepfner wrote in Vulture, “Starkey makes for the perfect ex: somehow both doe-eyed and a jock.”

TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET is clean shaven. I learned this thanks to a push notification a member of my girls trip received in Miami. Such a perfect way to find out the news.

MIKE FAIST is employed…as a model?

As always I’m open to your feedback and suggestions of what to include in Altar Boys. I’m still of social media, so if you see an Altar Boy, say something! Thank you for reading <3