Politicians Aren't Your Boyfriends
The moment the internet saw how Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy reacted defiantly to Russia's hostile invasion, it almost instantly turned him into a sex symbol. "So hot," someone half-joked in a TikTok video with over a hundred thousand likes. "BREAKING: every woman in your life now has at least a small crush on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it," quipped a viral tweet with an even greater reach on Twitter.
Regardless of whether these posts are ironic or genuine, many people are putting forth the narrative that Zelenskyy is a snack, and this type of reaction is exceedingly common online. We have seen the same response with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, where it's possible to find dozens of articles about how sexy he is. You could also point to former President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and even Sarah Palin.
People on the internet love to turn politicians into romantic crushes, and it creates an unhealthy culture that deifies the very people who deserve the most criticism. The last thing we need is to treat our politicians like our boyfriends.
On the one hand, I understand why this obsession happens. The internet is built on parasocial relationships (i.e., one-sided relationships, where one person spends a lot of emotional energy and the other doesn't know they exist). The entire influencer profession is predicated on the idea that one person can maintain a one-way relationship with thousands, potentially even millions of people. Social media actively encourages people to prioritize these relationships because they are immensely profitable, which is why they have become so ingrained in our lives.
Politicians may have a different job from most entertainers (although even that gap seems to be lessening as more and more entertainers like Trump and Zelenskyy become politicians). However, they are still competing for the same social capital as every other influencer out there. Politicians have social media accounts. Many of the big ones tweet, create content, and pose for selfies. It makes sense that some of us would develop a parasocial relationship with them in the same way we do other "celebrities."
More so, many of us might seek a hero during times of uncertainty. Someone to turn complex issues like geopolitics into a straightforward narrative of good and evil. Russia is the aggressor in its invasion of Ukraine, but the debate surrounding how to respond to that aggression is complicated (i.e., the ethicality of sanctions, the "right" amount of mobilization, etc.). Although not impossible to understand, these issues require some work to figure out, but if you treat your politicians like celebrities you can worship, it removes the burden of having to do this work.
Why worry about geopolitics when you can stan Daddy Zelenskyy and Justin Trudeau instead?
Yet it's unhealthy to “stan” politicians (i.e. being an overzealous or obsessive fan of a particular celebrity) because, unlike other celebrity crushes, the stakes here are very high. Politicians aren't your boyfriends. They aren't even your friends. They are people who have power over you, and when we stop criticizing their actions and instead worship them, we remove them from accountability.
Infamously, a recent "politician boyfriend" was Andrew Cuomo. During the height of the first COVID wave, people were calmed by Cuomo's daily press briefings. Some people joked that they were "Cuomosexuals." Comedian Stephen Colbert quipped that he was "Andrew-curious." Influencer Randy Rainbow even put out a song about falling in love with Andrew Cuomo, remixing Disney Hercules' song I Won't Say (I'm In Love), with cringeworthy lyrics like "I hope they make you king."
However, this celebrity worship covered up a bitter truth: Cuomo wasn't actually handling the COVID pandemic that well. A scandal emerged in 2021 about his administration obscuring the number of nursing home deaths in New York. This coincided with a sex scandal where multiple women came forward and accused him of sexual harassment. He would resign shortly after the story became too big for him to ignore (later criminal charges against him would be dropped).
Yet none of this information was new to us in 2020 when this celebrity worship began. We saw critical reporting early on that accurately depicted his administration's problems with COVID. In the words of Russell Berman in August of 2020 for The Atlantic:
Cuomo's initial response to the coronavirus outbreak was slow and mistake-filled. He initially balked at issuing stay-at-home orders while cases mounted and then ordered sick elderly patients out of hospitals and back to nursing homes, where the virus spread like wildfire.
That last point became the central focus of the nursing home scandal, and again, this article was released over five months before the scandal would break major headlines in January of 2021.
We can see the same pattern for many "boyfriendified" politicians. People may have the hots for Trudeau, but self-inflicted scandals have plagued his administration. From being the only Canadian PM found to have formerly broken ethics rules to his approval of a controversial pipeline expansion, there are plenty of reasons to kick his ass to the curb. Obama likewise may have been considered sexy, but his administration was mired in mistakes. History has not looked kindly at his interactions with the GOP or how he did not press charges against many instigators of the 2008 financial crisis. The deification of politicians whitewashes these conversations of accountability that are always bubbling just below the surface.
Furthermore, these conversations are harder to have when we must first wade through an "ironic" discourse on how hot these leaders are. Some might argue that saying these "politicians are boyfriend material" is all just a joke, but the internet is a toxic place where no one ever knows when someone else is joking. It is filled with manifestos and memes of the vilest stuff imaginable, protected under the banner of "humor." One person's totally obvious "joke" is another person's call to action, and it's clear that there were plenty of people who took the "boyfriendification" of politicians like Andrew Cuomo very seriously.
Those "Cuomosexual" jokes were a symptom of a much larger cult of worship that the governor took advantage of for nearly a year. Since Trump's handling of the pandemic was so disastrous, even Cuomo's mediocre response was depicted as this masterful stroke of leadership. "Why We Are Crushing on Andrew Cuomo Right Now," wrote Molly Jong-Fast in Vogue. "Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now," quipped Ben Smith in the NY Times.
It's incredible how a cult of worship can make even a milquetoast response to something into an act of genius. If Cuomo had politically survived his scandals, he'd still be kicking around — remembered fondly through the prism of the "Governor that got us through COVID" in much the same way Rudy Giuliani was "America's mayor following 9/11." And that would be a shame because, as we have seen, Cuomo's leadership wasn't particularly good.
In a way, all of this posturing is just an indirect form of hero-worship. The difference between fawning over how "Trudeau is your daddy who will always treat you right" and comparing more authoritarian figures such as Trump to Jesus is a matter of degrees. One of these is undoubtedly worse than the other (The Trump one is worse), but it's still leading in the unhealthy direction of worship. We are uncritically stanning our favorite politicians, and that road can get cringy quite quickly.
I will say it again: your politicians are not your boyfriends. They are not your friends. They're not your bros. They are not your heroes. They represent systems of power, and although sometimes you might be aligned with those systems, there will inevitably be times when you are not.
Sometimes you will have to fight against the very people who claim to represent you (and yes, even the ones you voted for). And when that happens, your imagined parasocial relationship with them inside your head will not help you.
Dump your imaginary boyfriends, and treat them like people instead.