Thanks for reading. Will you upgrade to a paid subscription to support the work I do here every week? Paid subscribers get full access to my weekend roundups, as well as a discount on Dire Straights, my new podcast with Amanda Montei. Brad Pitt would like you to remember that he was a heartthrobThe actor's appearance on 'Thirst Tweets' shows that gamely reading horny fan comments is a ploy for virality—and trying to get everyone to forget that you were accused of abuse.
Brad Pitt was a heartthrob once, and his PR team wants you to remember it. That’s what I’ve been thinking since reading Angelica Jade Bastién’s smart piece on how Pitt’s F1 press tour has doubled as an image-rehabilitation campaign. He’s done a series of friendly softball interviews that entirely avoid allegations that he physically abused one of his children and threw his ex-wife against a wall. The most softball media moment of them all had to be when Pitt and co-star Javier Bardem sat down for Buzzfeed’s Thirst Tweet, a series that started in 2017 with celebrities—overwhelmingly men—sitting down on camera to read out horny fan messages. “I want Andrew Scott to crack my back like a glow stick,” read Andrew Scott last year, alternating between a gasp and a grin. “Andrew Scott owns my hole,” he reads out, before looking into the camera and going, “Wow.” This is the same phenomenon that helped spawn Pedro Pascal’s viral red carpet moment, where a reporter from Entertainment Tonight showed him a horny fan tweet. “Yep, I am your cool slutty daddy,” he replied, a mix of comedy and flirtation. This formula has worked quite well for men in Hollywood: gamely engage with rabid expressions of desire from their fans, many of them women and some of them men. As Neta Yodovich wrote in an academic article on the phenomenon, the tweets tend to feature “lascivious language that mixes violence and sex, including desires to be choked, kicked, or run over by a beloved celebrity.” It’s interesting to note, though, that Pitt wasn’t confronted with any tweets involving physical violence. Instead he got stuff like, “Brad Pitt? More like Brad Spit.. on me, in me, near me.” The tone, wrote Yodovich, “is usually so exaggerated that they could be easily read as jokes rather than actual sexual invitations or fantasies.” There’s a dual quality to these absurd expressions. The hyperbole can feel like a genuine and desperate effort to express the intensity of the desire (a la the classic “chop me into pieces” comment left on videos of the viral wood-chopping guy). But these expressions can also feel minimizing—there is no real intent. It turns desire into an unserious joke. On Thirst Tweet, these actors often buckle over in laughter or surprise. Sometimes they offer a winking, flirtatious comeback. Only very occasionally does someone go off script, as with Shawn Mendes, who looked deeply uncomfortable during his Thirst Tweet episode. Sometimes the formula works a little too well for actors. After gamely fielding endless questions about being “the internet’s daddy”—in part because of his viral “I’m your cool slutty daddy” moment—Pascal eventually resisted the related trend of journalists confronting him on the red carpet with horny comments. Asked to read one aloud, he finally said no, but with a smile on his face. Women rarely show up on the Buzzfeed series and those that do are often comedians, like Jennifer Coolidge and Aubrey Plaza, and they get tamer comments than the men. There’s a reverse double-standard here that has everything to do with the ways that women are oppressed and objectified in the world at large. That isn’t novel or funny; it's everyday. And so is the threat of violence associated with desire. As Yodovich puts it, there is a sense of a “balancing of the scales” by objectifying men in this way. I wonder if these violent expressions of desire actually express something of the tension between pleasure and danger in women’s lives. It occurs to me that these text-based overtures also offer a way around the gendered discomfort that arises with men being treated as sex objects. Men—hetero men, especially—are supposed to be subjects and women objects, right?¹ Well, these comments make their objecthood feel active. They’re cracking your back like a glow stick and chopping you into pieces. Or, in Pitt’s case, they’re spitting in your mouth—not an act of violence that might recall his alleged real-life violence, but something active and assertive, nevertheless. It makes perfect sense for thirst tweets to be part of his redemption tour. It’s a way to remind the public of his former heartthrob status and invoke all sorts of good nostalgic feelings around his celebrity. The footage of him laughing about being a sex object, light-hearted and charming, conveys confidence and stability. It’s the opposite of the physically violent and emotionally toxic figure alleged in court documents. 1 Interesting, no, that the two men who have been most celebrated in the “thirst tweet” genre are Andrew Scott, who is gay, and Pedro Pascal, who has faced frequent speculation around his sexuality?
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četvrtak, 17. srpnja 2025.
Brad Pitt would like you to remember that he was a heartthrob
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