There were two lanes on social media on Sunday: processing the events that led to an attempted coup in the world’s most powerful nation and Armie Hammer’s alleged DMs. I will be in the Armand express lane. If you saw “the Michael Phelps of f-cking” on Twitter and don’t know why, I am here to explain as best I can.

 

Lainey and I were texting about this last night as Armie Hammer was trending on Twitter because the tweets about the alleged DMs are, per usual, better than the DMs. I’m not going to get into Armie’s kinks or sexual desires or the content of his messages, but we have to acknowledge that the reason they are getting so much attention is because they deal with cannibalism, drinking blood, domination, and rape fantasies. It appears he calls his sexual partners “kittens.”

In these alleged messages, he’s both needy and fickle, sending multiple texts to someone, begging for their attention and then, going by some accounts, ghosting when he arrives in their city. Here are some of the screenshots, including audio. These have not been independently verified by anyone and, because Armie is so “active” in this realm (his DMs have been leaked before), catfishing accounts could use him to lure people into conversation. 

 

Here is an audio clip of what sounds like Armie. 

And a very long screen recording. 

These are screenshots from an Instagram story from a woman who said she was one of Armie’s “kittens”.

 Instagram story from one of Armie Hammer's "kittens:"
 Instagram story from one of Armie Hammer's "kittens:"
 Instagram story from one of Armie Hammer's "kittens:"
 Instagram story from one of Armie Hammer's "kittens:"
 

Some people are reacting strongly, believing that Armie’s fame puts him in a position of power to manipulate these women. The DMs are not super clear-cut in terms of timelines or relationship and power dynamic (in terms of what partners were into and what they weren’t). Again, I’m not here to comment on the kink but rather the behaviour of a celebrity who has done some whacky sh-t on social media. 

It kicked off, for me, with the toe-sucking video, which made USA Today and was framed as Armie being “dad shamed”. Now do kids do stuff like that at home? I guess. But we didn’t need to see it. Armie is famous and that video will carry into his children’s adulthood  - he and his (now ex) wife cannot play dumb and aggrieved about that. Posting it with a foot fetish hashtag is not going to go well for parents of any toddler, let alone someone with millions of followers.

There have been other missteps too, like trying to lambaste actors for posting tribute photos to Stan Lee. This past summer, before he announced his divorce, I wrote about him golfing and chugging beer in the Cayman Islands as the US was grappling with the first wave of COVID-19. But we can go further back, all the way to 2017, when he got upset about a piece Anne Helen Petersen wrote for Buzzfeed and, as Lainey said at the time, he picked up his toys and went home. He quit Twitter back then. Maybe he should have stuck with that instinct? 

Or, if we look at it from a gossip perspective, he knows exactly how it works. He’s all over Deux Moi (and I strongly suspect he knows this) and seems to be unafraid to put his stuff in writing, multiple times with multiple people, knowing that it could be leaked (even inadvertently) with the click of a button. Is this part of the kink? Is he into the danger of being found out? Or the rush of the trending?

 

It’s interesting because social media is pretty anti-sex (and very anti-sex worker) and yet Armie is putting it out there, thirsting over Timothée Chalamet and rubbing his divorce dad pheromones all over the place. 

As I mentioned above, the tweets about the leak are what give the story life. He should contract out his DMing to these writers. Meow.