Katy Perry and the KatyCat Boyfriend

Today’s site open was about the BTS Boyfriend, and Tyler Chin’s piece for GQ about being the partner of an ARMY and the other BTS boyfriends who have been accompanying their girlfriends and wives to see the band. Rather than mocking his girlfriend’s devotion to RM, Jin, Suga, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook, the BTS Boyfriend doesn’t just encourage it, he indulges it, to the point of his own participation. Nothing is reluctant – it’s his unbridled willingness that is the story: he is happy to be there, he’s not the guy at the mall, waiting in the corner, a bag holder scrolling his phone, perfunctorily performing a duty. He has entered her world, and embraced it.

The same could be said of Justin Trudeau, LOL FOREVER.

Vanessa Friedman wrote about this in the New York Times last week, describing JT’s “rebrand” after leaving office and the way he has “remodeled himself to slide seamlessly into the world of his pop star girlfriend”. It’s a sharp observation because, as she notes, this is not the usual playbook for a former world leader. When you have been the CEO of an entire nation, the way it usually goes is that your companion adapts to your life. And, well, that’s just most of history until the last, I dunno, 50 years or so. Becoming the KatyCat Boyfriend in Chief, then, makes JT kinda of an outlier. But also totally tracks.

As Alex Marland, of Canadian politics at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, tells the NYT:

“While he was prime minister, feminism was a big part of [Trudeau’s] platform. To portray himself as a dominant male in this situation would go against the values he claimed to represent.”

Vanessa continues:

“Instead, his choices underscore his identity as a modern man able to sublimate his own fame and ego in favor of his partner. And live his best life while romping in the sand.”

Still, Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry have both been criticised over the years for being deeply unserious, engaging in what their detractors describe as performative feminism… and there is no way that JT isn’t keenly aware of what his image is right now; he’ll never admit it but he’s seen every angle of every pap photo taken of himself with his shirt off frolicking in the water with his popstar girlfriend and to quote her lyrics, he liked it. But he can’t look like he likes it too much.

Here they are in Italy, arriving in Olbia on a private jet. That shot of him, clocking the paparazzo, is sending me...

Because my Photo Assumption read on his expression is that, come on, it’s not he hates that it’s happening. But he also has to control how much he doesn’t hate it on his face.

I don’t hate it either, from the jump Katy and JT have been good for gossip, a corny gossip delight. We need all kinds. It’s not MBJ and RAYE but it’s what we have right now. It’s mac and cheese from a box, let them keep cooking!