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Rules For Literary Non-Hotties, And More Of This Week's 'One Main Character'

Molly Bradley
Molly Bradley
Rules For Literary Non-Hotties, And More Of This Week's 'One Main Character'
This week we've also got New Yorkers mad about bikes, a mayor who dunked on Kansas, a Republican sticking up for fascism and a virtual homeowner.
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Every day somebody says or does something that earns them the scorn of the internet. Here at Digg, as part of our mission to curate what the internet is talking about right now, we rounded up the main characters on Twitter from this past week and held them accountable for their actions.



This week’s characters include rich New Yorkers furious at bike accessibility, a mayor who felt the need to dunk on Kansas, a Republican standing up for fascism, a virtual homeowner and a writer who says “literary non-hotties” have no business writing about hot women.



Monday

Bonnie of Gramercy Park

The character: Bonnie, part-time NYC resident, full-time opinion-haver

The plot: Being the best city in the world means you will invariably, at many points in time, house some of the worst people on the planet. Unfortunately, some of those people live near an uber-exclusive private park (less than 400 individual keys) in Manhattan.

Recently a bike-sharing rack was installed on a corner near the park, and it sent the locals in a tailspin.



Locals were sad because no one asked for their input, and they think it’s going to make worse traffic even worse. In an email, local vigilantes also hinted at joining forces to legally take on big bike-share.


The repercussion:

Long story short, even though the bike-share is owned by a corporation (Lyft), any anti-bike take will most likely be initially met with humor and hostility.



Also things like this make New York look bad, erm, internationally.



Adwait Patil




Tuesday

Eric Adams

The character: Eric Adams, Mayor of NYC, controversial figure, troll, possible crook

The plot: NYC Mayor Eric Adams opened his mouth and something came out of it that created a whole ordeal. This tends to happen often when he speaks. Here is the quote that kicked the hornet’s nest.



The repercussion:

As a proud lifelong New Yorker, I can say that Eric Adams sucks. In my humble opinion. I do not speak for Digg or anyone else when I write those words, but it isn’t too hard to find a similar sentiment among Kansas residents, New Yorkers, or really anyone. Why say this? Who cares? Don’t you have things to do, Eric? Who asked for this? I need to lie down; it’s exhausting to never get a single good politician elected in this city.


               

Jared Russo




Meghan McCain

The character: Meghan McCain, Republican, television personality, writer, person with quite bad takes

The plot: This week, far-right politician Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s new leader — and not everyone is happy. She’s the leader of Brothers of Italy, a political party with fascist roots, and has herself expressed strong opposition to immigration, abortion, same-sex parents and more.

In the wake of her victory — and following widespread anger in response to her win — Meghan McCain took to Twitter to claim that people were against Meloni not because of her extreme right-wing views, but because she’s a conservative woman.



Umm, no.


The repercussion: Some people reminded Meghan that Meloni isn’t just conservative — she is fascist-adjacent.



Others accused Meghan of supporting or defending Meloni’s far-right political stance.



And then there were the ones who don’t want any conservatives in power at all — and they agreed with her.



Darcy Jimenez




Troy Osinoff

The character: Troy Osinoff, tech guy, virtual homeowner

The plot: At this point, I hardly blink an eye when someone involved in tech and crypto posts something endorsing Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. But this post made me double-take:



The repercussion:

To cut to the chase here: two days after Troy Osinoff said he’d bought a home in the Metaverse for “only $290k,” he followed up with a tweet saying he had not, in fact, bought a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar virtual home, and that it was in fact a publicity stunt for his new company Zurp.



Zurp invites you to “Unlock unique experiences with your favorite creators.” I can’t tell you much more than that, because in order to learn more I’d have to input my phone number, which I will not be doing.

But honestly, people are spending buckets of real money in the fake Metaverse, and that people were ready to believe Osinoff’s tweet is pretty embarrassing for him.



Molly Bradley




Wednesday

Terese Marie Mailhot

The character: Terese Marie Mailhot, writer, self-implied literary hottie

The plot: In the wake of the release of “Blonde,” a movie from director Andrew Dominik about Marilyn Monroe adapted from the novel by Joyce Carol Oates (herself a frequent and notorious main character of Twitter), there were a lot of bad reviews and critique of the film for failing to break away from the media’s habit of fetishizing and (re-)exploiting women even as they endeavor to criticize past media portrayals for doing exactly that.

But one take blew the rest out of the water. Terese Marie Mailhot, herself a writer, made the claim that Oates should never have written “Blonde” in the first place, because, as she put it: “What could a literary non-hottie know about the exploitation of femme, highly sexualized women?” She went on to say that “women who look and act like Oates” — meaning, given the prior text of the tweet, literary women who aren’t hot — are “just as bad as men at writing” beautiful women like Marilyn Monroe.



There is a lot to unpack in this tweet. First is the assertion that people who aren’t “hotties” — a fairly subjective measure — shouldn’t write about women who are. Second is the implication that women not subjectively assessed as “hotties” know nothing about being sexualized by men, or media, or whoever else. No, not everyone looks like Marilyn Monroe or goes through the experience Monroe did — but that’s exactly the point: different women have different, but equally treacherous, experiences with this kind of thing, whether they’re celebrities or sex workers or anyone else in myriad different walks of life.

None of this is to defend Oates’s fictionalized take on Monroe’s life, or to defend Oates — who posts very bad takes at a very high frequency — for anything at all. It doesn’t matter what was going on in Oates’s head when she wrote “Blonde.” We can say that the book (and the movie) was bad for a lot of specific reasons — including ignorance on Oates’s part about what Monroe went through — without making a very broad, ungenerous and almost cruel claim about women overall that pits women against each other.

Also not crazy about the implication that hot women are universally somehow oppressed. Something about it just doesn’t sit right. Gonna have a good, long think about that one.


The repercussion: The timeline was not kind to Mailhot. Some of the unkindness went way too far and was beside the point: for instance, whether or not Mailhot was implying that she herself was a “literary hottie” about whom “literary non-hotties” should not attempt to write is irrelevant. But there was a whole lot of very valid criticism.



Mailhot followed up on her tweet claiming that her tweet was mostly a joke — and then wrote a bunch more tweets doubling down on the core claims of her original tweet.



People didn’t buy it.



Molly Bradley



———

Read the previous edition of our One Main Character column, which included an angry Republican who uses pronouns to denounce, er, em, pronouns, the National Football League making a big mistake on day one of Hispanic heritage month and a Southwest Airlines flight from hell.

Did we miss a main character from this week? Please send tips to [email protected].

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