The Company You Keep

Empowered to own her power - not just the girl in the red dress

So she's never going to pull her head out from up her hind end? At least not in public. This is the persona. Trust Tessa Virtue to carry on about her internal conflicts over winning her second Olympic gold medal. Very 2014 of her but Virtue Moir are not big on new material off the ice.

I was hunting for but cannot find another article I read from a year ago portraying Tessa as stressed (tension lines around her eyes!) from the (oxymoron alert) Canadian superstardom she has not pursued - it just keeps coming at her against her will. But never fear, she's polite and professional no matter how much she wishes it would all go away.

I'm not calling her out on the privilege of being a massively talented, classically beautiful three time Olympic medalist/two time gold medalist in ice dance (really three times gold if we counted the actual skating), accomplishments achieved with her husband and the father of her kids (well, in 2010 just her husband, in 2014 and 2018 the father of her kids) who bores everybody rigid naval gazing in public about her faux ambivalence afterwards.

I'm calling her out on her negging her own choices for the sake of some vacuous branding. This woman who constantly promotes herself a la every basic influencer and minor celebrity (though they pretend she's major) on the planet, dedicated herself heart and soul to something she passionately wanted (the 2018 Olympic gold). Once achieved, here comes the whining. She did the same with the "Is all I am a skater - I want a balanced life as a socialite!" shtick in the W Network's 2014's demented fan fiction "Tessa and Scott" and now she's doing "Is all I am the girl in the red dress." Her conflicts are so esoteric I have no idea what they accomplish for her in terms of business. People just end up sighing, "She's so beautiful."

What is the problem here? What else will people remember you for? Your scintillating interviews? Your neverending "Will we or won't we" with your own husband and baby daddy?

I compare Katia Gordeeva and Tessa Virtue because I believe they are similarly talented and obviously share other commonalities.  Katia Gordeeva won two Olympic golds by the time she was 22, but she has been an accomplished businesswoman in the decades since, earning a more than comfortable living and retaining a sufficiently high public profile. Do we ever hear Gordeeva bitching that she's mostly remembered for her matchless partnership with her husband, Sergei Grinkov, who has been deceased since 1995? No. Do you ever hear Katia Gordeeva complaining that she's mostly seen as a skater? No. She adores being a skater, as much as Tessa adores being a skater, it's in her blood as much as it is in Tessa's blood, and somehow she doesn't feel the need to make up shit about how that's a problem because there's other things she likes. Go ahead and do those things! You ARE doing those things. You get to do those things because you were the girl in the red dress and before that the pink dress and before that the white dress, and those moments in your career are responsible for your opportunities today. Come up with better problems other than this solipsistic garbage. Besides, that is rude to your fans. Maybe that's a value add to her. They really love to gaslight fans with the push/pull.

For the fans who love and rewatch that performance as all great performances are loved and rewatched, who were, as fans, ecstatic for themselves and for Virtue and Moir, it's a sour note. Oh, the skater herself is over it and doesn't even relate anymore.

No, she doesn't have to be Katia but as they share many of the same factors vis a vis the public, their resumes, their beauty, the preoccupation of much of the public with their respective love stories, and their skating, the difference between how one handled it - like an adult - and the other handled it - like a control freak only also like a cossetted, insulated, blinkered and sheltered dimwit - are instructive. IMO.

This Hamlet routine is stupid. She's making bank off her looks and fame by collaborating with beauty and fashion brands who, from time to time, partner with some socially conscious initiative and that's the whole nut. It's not that serious. If she were going to be fulfilled by doing something other than being"The Girl in the Red Dress" she'd do it. Instead it's an MBA in business she's going after so she can make even more bank off her looks and fame by collaborating with more beauty and fashion brands who ambulance chase the latest cause and recruit their influencers and brand faces to buzzword the hell out of it. That is all the thought and investment that goes into it.

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I don't know how transactional Tessa Virtue's friendship with Jessica Mulroney has been but it's something I've always side eyed, mostly because of the terror that Tessa would incrementally transform her beautiful self into an injected, be-fillered, fake-tanned, inflated frozen mess, destroying her looks before age 35. I was dreading inchworm Joker lips stretched ear to ear, as even some of her current images evoke that aesthetic. Perfectionists have been known to be dysmorphic, and there's a little bit of a disconnect between Tessa's social media messaging of "you are enough" "Blah blah makes you unique" "empower" "feminist" - and her super filtered images. Even her "Look ma, no make-up! posts (in her case it's no eyebrows and pale lashes and freckles and some super self-consciously adorkable attire) are filtered into glowed up holograms. When a woman as beautiful as she is constantly puts out images of herself that look the way Tina Fey described the aesthetic - "a blank white paper plate with eyes and lips painted on", the empowerment rap rings hollow.

Anyway, Jessica Mulroney has been cancelled. Her bride show is over, her collaboration with Smash & Tess is over

Mulroney and Tessa for
Smash & Tess

There's pictures on social media of Mulroney behind the scenes at an arena and Tessa interacting with her young daughter, and images of Mulroney, Tessa and others in a grouping with Mulroney looping her arm through Tessa's leg.

Jessica Mulroney was known to be a piece of work so I did at times wonder about Tessa's public affiliation with her. Did she not pay attention to how Jessica Mulroney handled other people? Did it only matter how she kissed Tessa's behind?  Remember when Jian Ghomeshi, another Canadian public personality with a problematic reputation behind the scenes long before he was publicly outed? And his flirtatious drive-by in the W Networks's "Tessa and Scott"? Why "empower" these people?

Here's what Mulroney did. Behind the scenes, she threatened an influencer, Sarah Exeter, less well known than she, a social media "friend", a black woman, from discussing Black Lives Matter. Exeter had made the most generic imaginable post of of BLM support. Mulroney DM'd her to quit it or she'd speak to Exeter's brand partners and end her career. After making one of those "I'm backing off from social media to reflect" moves, she went to Exeter's DMs and threatened her with a "liable" suit, which is just embarrassing. Come on lady. Even with a few glasses of wine in you, it's not a difficult word to spell. If you know the word to begin with.

I don't know Tessa, maybe it's time to have more than a "difficult conversation" (seriously?) about the "idea" (the IDEA???) of privilege, but what I really think is you are superficially well-intentioned but not well-informed, not even in your semantics.

Part of Mulroney's apology:

"You are right when you say 'this s— needs to stop,' " Mulroney said. "As leaders, we need to join hands and call out wrongs. I know we have different experiences. And that is something that, even in the course of a heated argument, I need to acknowledge and understand. I am unequivocally sorry for not doing that with you, and for any hurt I caused."

Yeah. What the hell is Mulroney a leader of?

More Exeter:

"Listen, I'm by no means calling Jess a racist, but what I will say is this: she is very well aware of her wealth, her perceived power and privilege because of the color of her skin," Exeter continued, adding that these aforementioned traits gave Mulroney the "confidence to come for my livelihood in writing."

How do you hang with someone who weaponizes privilege as Mulroney does but you remain oblivious? Someone who, when she issues a threat, undermines the whole thing because she can't spell? She's not benign, she's terrible. Even the bits that can be seen of her instagram, she's TERRIBLE.

At some point having it both ways - existing inside a protected little bubble of you, your husband, your kids and whatever else resides inside there is irresponsible when you insist on living a public life and profiting from a public life and engaging in public life by lining yourself up with a progressive profile, promoting (buzzword alert) authenticity, AND feeding a completely phony narrative about yourself.

Tessa and Scott's kids will never go hungry, will have their education paid for, and will live comfortably, materially, all of their lives, and none of that is due to Scott and Tessa's lies. So, in a way, they're hiding behind their own family to camouflage their immaturity, snobbery, cowardice and exploitation.

There are no excuses. IMO she should withdraw from her little messaging sideline of empowerment and just do her sponsorship and branding tie ins, and own that neither she nor Scott are interested in becoming adults, and prefer the business model they've had all their lives - other people map it out for them, do the screening and vetting for them, and they have input on areas of concern but don't own their shit.

Very much looking forward to Scott's "wedding" this summer, as Tessa will bring her "Bfriend". I envision a classic facebook skater wedding throwback - a local hall/cafeteria, familiar Moirs, potluck, solo cups, nobody from their competitive career. All of it photographed at some convenient point this past February.

 I don't think even Max Trankov could stone his way up to attend this one.

P.S. I used to think this could go on as long as Virtue and Moir wanted it to, which at this time, more than ten years on, appears indefinitely. But I think tides and times are against them, and there's going to be a breakout at some point against all social media garbage. And it won't come from the media, but through their own bad judgment.