It’s the law of the internet: whenever someone or something becomes popular, there will be an inevitable backlash, fairly or otherwise. Usually, it’s ‘otherwise.’ Honestly, I’ve been waiting for it to happen to Pedro Pascal. He’s the man of the moment, a talented and handsome actor of infinite charm with good politics and a universally beloved reputation among his peers. He’s in everything, wears thigh-high boots on the red carpet, and called J.K. Rowling a loser. Pascal is great and we love him, and any backlash we expected to happen was always going to be suspicious. So, as we started seeing weird social media comments in the lead-up to the release of Fantastic Four: The First Steps, my initial thought was, ‘oh well, here we go again.’ But then I saw the backlash and was even more confused. This is the molehill you’re calling the hill you want to die on?
Usually, we’d see the backlash start with claims that the person involved is overexposed. Certainly, Pascal has been very busy for the past two years, and one could get tired of that. But that’s not what’s happened here. What we’ve gotten instead are claims that Pascal is ‘creepy’ because he’s seen as initiating too much contact with his co-star Vanessa Kirby. Yeah, that’s it. That’s what has suddenly filled my social media feeds (and the comments section of Pascal’s own Instagram account). A bunch of fake body language experts and blue check-paying weirdos are trying to spin a guy having a good relationship with his colleague as invasive and predatory.
Given how quickly this backlash sprang up, it’s easy to theorise that this is a concerted campaign against Pascal. The newsletter Garbage Day called out an AI-generated video being shared around Twitter to make Pascal seem aggressive towards Kirby and other women. I’ve seen no evidence of a deliberate campaign in place on the site, but it’s possible that one wouldn’t even be necessary on the nightmare platform, where hate of all kinds is regularly boosted, and the owner has shown himself to be a rank misogynist and transphobe. Latching into Pascal, who has been loud and proud in his allyship and progressive stances on a variety of issues, is, indeed, heinous loser behaviour. But we are more cognisant of how such campaigns work in the aftermath of Amber Heard, Megan thee Stallion, and Blake Lively. It takes pathetically little effort to get a few bots and women-haters to rile up the masses.
I’ve seen a lot of presumably straight men on social media grandstanding over Pascal and being confused as to why people, mostly women, like him. It reminds me a lot of every piece of faux-discourse had over how Pete Davidson managed to pull so many gorgeous women who were deemed ‘out of his league.’ The stark gender binary pushed by right-wing fake culture war fury online has sought to offer a rigid definition of manhood in celebrity. Just look at how the manosphere and its podcast goons push dodgy supplements, all-meat diets, and caveman rhetoric in pursuit of an impossible-to-maintain physique that 100% has nothing to do with steroid abuse. We’ve never not been in an era of toxic masculinity, alas, but the second Trump era has certainly pushed forward a renewed kind of commodified rot that permeates every corner of culture. It’s MMA, the Liver King, Andrew Tate seminars, getting mad at female video game characters with square jaws, transvestigations, RFK Jr., tradwife propaganda, and calling Trump an ‘alpha male.’ Me man, you cuck.
So, when people publicly proclaim their fandom for a middle-aged Chilean-American actor who loves his trans sister, favours androgynous fashion, gets candid about his anxieties, and is embraced both physically and emotionally by his colleagues of all genders? That must seem threatening as all hell to these losers. Wait, so it’s not my lack of abs that puts women off? It’s my corrosive personality? Ding ding ding!
It speaks volumes that the faux outrage is centered on Pascal being comfortable around women in public. The desperation behind spinning Vanessa Kirby holding his hand as an act of aggression would be funny if the intentions weren’t so obviously gross. But it’s genuinely disturbing to see the same people who claim that transphobes are ‘protecting women’ wilfully spread misinformation and AI-generated videos showing what they claim is a woman being harassed and traumatized. What, her victimhood you’ve insisted she embodies doesn’t count because you need to score some points against Mr. Fantastic? Nobody buys your sudden feminist allyship after you’ve spent years insisting that women are always lying about being sexually assaulted and that Sean Combs was the real victim, actually. Conspiracies don’t need to be consistent but they do need some level of plausibility. This one had none.
This hate campaign was mercifully shut down almost immediately, a fate I wish would happen more when the targets are women. If nothing else, it has further exposed how the right-wing seeks to weaponize pop culture as a battlefield of endless discourse to radicalize young men. That they had to dig deep to make up something so easily disprovable to spin Pascal as a bad guy is telling, both of their intentions and of Pascal’s authenticity. And he’s only gotten more vocal in his support for so-called ‘divisive’ political issues has his star has risen. He posts regularly about trans liberation, Gaza, immigrant and refugee rights, and the crimes of the Trump administration. A Disney publicist probably told him to avoid controversies and he hasn’t. He’s wearing his ‘Protect the Dolls’ t-shirt, supporting UNICEF, and sharing fundraisers for the Trevor Project. The more popular Pascal gets, the more he lets the world know where his heart lies. All that and people like hanging out with him? No wonder misogynists hate him.
We have to get better and more efficient at calling out these ginned-up smear campaigns the moment they start. We’ve seen what happens when people, usually women, are thrown to the wolves to serve an agenda, and how this hate empowers dangerous political ideals that hurt us all. Pedro Pascal is beloved enough and the targeting was clearly daft as all hell, so he’s mercifully been spared a drawn-out cycle of harassment and lies that could have left a tangible impact on his career. But will the next target be so lucky? Because there will be another one. And another one. And another one…
