Virtue Signalling

This must have been a blog heading a bunch of times before, but it's always apt. Obviously also low hanging fruit, but nevertheless.

Screen shot of Katia Gordeeva working out
while in quarantine. She doesn't
always get the video framing right. I can
relate.

Per instagram Gordeeva practices her skating program on the living room carpet and figure skates down an ice coated hill. No humble bragging - she's sharing some of her life and it all looks fairly amateur with no enhancement features on. Her social media is not full of "positivity." It's full of gratitude, encouragement and support. None of it looks like product.

More than anything else and even now, she's a figure skater and works her ass off to remain one.

It's compelling to watch someone who was once such a guarded personality even before the trauma of early widowhood be so open, so appropriately, on social media. She's just being social on social media. She's not prostituting her private life, She maintains natural boundaries.

I know I'm practically a stan, but I'm so impressed by Gordeeva. Nobody had more of a right to lie her ass off and manipulate the shit out of her enormous and obsessive fan following. For years she was stalked (it's archived on an old usenet forum as well as fan forums - fans would go to her rink in Connecticut, hang out, watch and follow her, then come back and report). After Sergei Grinkov's death, fans were obsessed with her dating life. In the way of figure skating fans, many hoped she'd marry a comforting, companionable sort of sexless dude so they wouldn't have to think of her being attracted to a man other than her late husband. Somebody attractive was by many considered a betrayal.

She was by all accounts a dream to work with but fan-wise she was a closed book. She was also raising her younger child and her fatherless older daughter. She kept her mouth shut - she's the poster child for never complain, never explain. Dave Lease (Skating Lesson) once wrote an account of her at a sponsor meet and greet and remarked, "She was beginning to not understand English." which was one of the few times he's ever been truly on point and cracked me up.

Never complain, never explain is a psychologically sound approach for people in public life looking to keep their private life private. It's "Let them talk." It works. It's the opposite of being a control freak and it also limits the shelf life of people's obsession with you. Gordeeva did that, and then at some point decided she wanted to live proactively as a public figure instead of guardedly and reactively, and of course she's brilliant at it.

****
I feel if they'd been more famous, V&M would have said yes to this in a second.

The infamous "Imagine" celebrity circle jerk.
This facial expression alone.
There are some great parodies.
A fave is Nicole (Derry Girls) Coughlin's.

For anyone familiar with astrology they'd know that Scott Moir is practically the avatar of a Virgo and Tessa is classic Taurus - creature comforts, loves sleep, loves food. And stubborn. When they're dug in, they keep digging.

I haven't read this about them, but to me a Taurus woman is as clutch as it gets. Tessa has been in three Olympics and delivered perfect, and absolutely full on  performances each time. No other Olympic skater or team has done that. Her commitment in the crunch is absolute. Not every performer or public personality has her talent, but most Taurus women seem to be notably all in even if the building is burning down around them. Cheryl Burke - a DWTs dancer - could break two limbs in performance and you'd need a stun gun to get her to quit or drop her game face. Queen Elizabeth is another Taurus. Tina Fey - I wax hot and cold on her lately but she's got that laser focus. There wasn't a shadow of nerves in the two live performances of 30 Rock. Indistinguishable from the filmed show, while allowing for the rhythms of having an audience. I think Taurus women are the least likely type to ever ever choke when the stakes are highest. But there's a flip side.

She has the Taurus total commitment when engaged in her job, but Queen Elizabeth was famously stubborn during the whole Diana's death debacle. Yes, the public reaction approached mass hysteria, no, the flag didn't need to be at half mast, sure, it made sense to keep Diana's sons in the country versus taking them to London to experience the frenzy. But. Some common sense. There was ambiguity in Diana's status - she wasn't just an ex. She lived on crown property, and was mother of the next heir. Something about Her Maj's stubbornness short-circuited her emotional and practical intelligence. I'e read there was a come to Jesus to get her to bend, and it got ugly.

***
Tessa and Scott surely have various rationales to keep this going, but it's plain reverse engineering by now. No narrative they could produce would stand up to even casual interrogation, but they don't need to be concerned. Any rationale would be accepted on face value by the only media that covers them - the entertainment media. They could go all out. Kidnap threats, nervous breakdowns, stalkers - anything at all. Could contradict themselves seven times over in in one go and nobody would point it out.

I do think in this instant Tessa's stubbornness is a cloak for being chickenshit. That's all it is. She's hiding behind her CV.

 Courage as a human being is a more impressive accomplishment than spectacular performances on Olympic ice. A human being is an integrated entity. You can't have integrity "here" and be a smarmy manipulator "there" and still have integrity. You can't blithely appropriate a global respiratory pandemic to lend some manufactured credibility to your ten years and counting fauxmance scam while rah rahing front line workers and local businesses, and still be a genuine person.

What entitlement looks like.

And I don't know how grown a man can be if his sense of humor, common decency and self-respect has regressed since 5th grade. Scott's current faux girlfriend is just a calculated trigger. They couldn't resist the "partner" joke aimed at inciting distress in what they consider a low-information audience. It's small.

I've said before I think they believe all their public niceness and faux earnestness and courtesy and politeness somehow sanitizes their lying and the really malicious streak that's always been an unsettling facet. But it's the opposite.

While Virtue and Moir and Gordeeva Grinkov have been compared endlessly, when it comes to integrity, authentic strength, genuine courage and living out what you say you believe, they're a universe apart.