American romance has evidently degraded to the point that the new king of suburban hearts is none other than an unemployed trust fund baby who is resolving a midlife crisis by running for president.
Ladies, we need to have a chat about standards and Robert Francis O’Rourke.
It began pretty normally: An insurgent young candidate was running against a personally unlikeable incumbent (sorry, Ted). The insurgent performed well in debates, was comfortably Gen X, and telegenic enough. A magazine cover here, a celebrity cameo there, the Beto buzz was very high, but still within the range of Rubio 2013 or Obama 2008.
But then Beto lost, and that’s when it got weird.
First there was the Beto-Avenatti sex tweet, which I will not relay here — this a family friendly news organization, folks — but I did opine on it back in November. Whatever, it was a dumb, thirsty tweet from one person, shared more in jest than anything by thousands on Twitter.
Beto spent the better part of the winter musing on his Medium account about the vicissitudes of life like a discount Jack Kerouac, only to emerge from his period “adrift” to announce that he’s in fact running for
vice
Now it’s no longer just horny housewives. The media, which spent the entire past year fawning over Beto in fluff pieces masquerading as journalism, have finally escalated their love to lust. Literally.
“He is hot for sure,” Anna Silman declared in a roundtable transcript of New York Magazine writers.
“I have spent my entire life being attracted to skinny indie rock guys and it’s really weird to see one run for president. I can’t tell if I’m horny for him or just horny for the opportunity to make Fugazi jokes in the year 2019,” wrote Izzy Grinspan. “I feel like I’ve had an entire one-sided relationship with him over the past eight or nine months. I had such a crush on him, I donated to his campaign, he lost and I was sad.”
“For me, Beto’s attractiveness is in the details — I weirdly like his extremely long teeth and he has nice feet, as evidenced in that Vanity Fair spread,” Allison Davis concurred. “I zoomed in on his bare feet and sent the picture to friends and said ‘Beto has nice, smooth feet.'”
These aren’t the random women who wax poetic to reporters about Beto the “dreamboat” as their “boyfriend[s] looked a bit uncomfortable.” These are legitimate journalists at well-respected magazines.
Look, I know the social science showing declining fertility, less sex, and the rise of swipe-right culture. I get that Americans are missing intimacy. But this projection of Beto, not as an icon or an aesthetic object, but as one of obsession and personal lust is not only crossing the line of a healthy electorate’s skepticism of people seeking power. It’s glorifying a guy who got a DWI while on a booty call.
And what’s the media’s spin on it? To do a fawning profile on his marriage, including the fact that he stuck poop in a bowl and told his wife it was an avocado as a supposedly charming detail in their relationship. The story literally opens with an anecdote about Beto’s mom dating the man who would one day be his billionaire father-in-law only to meet another man when the couple went on a double date, the man who would go on to be Beto’s porsche-driving dad. This primary season is supposedly about workers of the world uniting to kill all the farting cows and spending $93 trillion on socializing a plurality of the American economy, but we must take a quick detour to lust after the failed punk rocker.
To quote the great Megyn Kelly, you all need to settle for more. I understand that between the #MeToo movement and the rise of social media, very few men look attractive these days. But please stop glorifying mediocrity in the absence of other figures to idolize. Demand better.
[Also read: Beto O’Rourke ate dirt after losing to Ted Cruz]
