Celebrity Burner Accounts Are Good, Actually

An aquamarine butterfly, an elegantly placed underscore, an abrasively winking handle: were these harbingers of a crisis of millennial celebrity masculinity? Many denizens of internet culture found themselves pondering this question last week, at least until the salaciously woke rigamarole over mask mandates at a Massachusetts lesbian bar took over the feed.The facts of the case are as follows: internet sleuths noticed that an Instagram account entitled @bidness_nonya—with the vaguely nonsensical bio “I’m nosy…in private”—was leaving derogatory screeds in overly formal full sentences on images of Zoë Kravitz and Jenna Dewan, two of Channing Tatum’s exes. The same account was leaving positive comments, in a direly twee and craven tenor, on content featuring Tatum. The account’s sole follower? Tatum himself.Among other acts of petty deviance, Nonya accused Dewan of trying “to grift his money” and suggested, below a photo of Kravitz and her fiancé Harry Styles, that Kravitz is something of an operator. “When I see these two I think back at how her former fiance called her the most intentional person he knows,” wrote Nonya. “I wonder how contextual he was being…” When another instagram user requested clarification on this ostensible but opaque insult, Nonya replied: “intentional=calculated.” Meanwhile, the account called Tatum “so genuine…and funny as hell, too 😆.”The general flavor of online reaction was gleeful schadenfreude and petty parasocial satisfaction. Hunter Harris called herself “the first in my bloodline to Google Channing Tatum’s mom’s birthday.” An X user wondered, “What level of washed is this?” Another declared that “we need the mess more than ever.” Beyond the #blessthismess ethos in #uncertaintimes, that user makes a good point: in an era of artificial authenticity from celebrities, many of whom often claim to run their obviously burnished, professionally cleansed and curated Instagram accounts, are celebrity burners artifacts of genuine authenticity? The detritus of eminently relatable jealousy, of simple boredom, or poor decisions made in the crucible of heartbreak?Nunya-gate is not the first time a potential celebrity finsta has sparked an outpouring of exhilaration and delight. The discovery that Lorde ran an onion ring review Instagram account in 2017 increased her quirky, down-to-earth cachet. Normani and Stella Lefty, meanwhile, both recently faced allegations that they were running their own fan accounts, inspiring bursts of both derision and compassion from the online commentariat. Personally, the onion ring bit was too manic-pixie-pick-me for my taste, though I can sympathize with the idea of women in the public eye moonlighting as their own biggest cheerleaders.Waking up in a world where nunya_bidness was in fact everyone’s business inspired other questions, questions about performances of masculinity in the age of looksmaxxing and incel culture, gooning and world-historical rates of loneliness. Was this downstream of the recent Drake resurgence? Or was it about the convergence of dark woke and millennial cringe?When I posed these questions to the heterosexual men in my life, I was exhorted to do my own research more thoroughly—i.e. get conversant in the historical text that is Kevin Durant’s series of burners—before they’d deign to comment on the matter. A feminist cultural historian friend pointed out that while celebrity once expanded an individual’s access to a range of experience, today’s iteration of fame instead winnows it, turning burner accounts into rare avenues for semi-public catharsis.As I do whenever I find myself in an intellectual quagmire, I also looked to the wisdom of gay guys. Writer Rob Franklin noted that what might be so “satisfying to all of us” about celebrity burners is the comfort of knowing that “no level of beauty and fame takes insecurity away.” What such accounts do, he continued, is “puncture the ultra-polished image of a celebrity, and the notion that an extremely hot, famous guy would not be threatened by his ex-girlfriend’s new pop star boyfriend.” Equally germane is the fact that all of this is also extremely entertaining.Once I familiarized myself with Kevin Durant’s long digital footprint—he originally used the admittedly hilarious handle @getoffmydickerson to fight with random fans and critique his fellow players; once exposed, he doubled down and started trolling plebs from a series of alt-burners—I circled back to the straight community for more analysis. The difference between Tatum and Durant, they surmised, is that Durant has leaned into his villain reputation (I’m using the word villain as defined per Chuck Klosterman: the person who knows the most and cares the least) where Tatum clearly and desperately wants to be liked. With his duck-face thirst traps and obviously airbrushed abs, Drake falls somewhere in the middle of this continuum, embodying the clumsy earnestness of an elder millennial in what amounts to performance art about the fragility of the male ego.Ultimately, Nunya is likely not Tatum’s alter ego: the Magic Mike star took to “create” mode on his main account to dispute the allegations. “I truly can’t believe y’all think this is what I’m doing with my free time,” he said, somewhat unconvincingly. Fans, drawing on astrological but empirical evidence (which I refuse to acquaint myself with—y’all think that’s what I’m doing with my free time?) are now speculating that the account may be run by his mother, some other close associate, or even just be a rabid fan. But regardless of who’s behind bidness_nunya, the greatest cultural revelation to be discerned from this hubbub over celebrity burners might just be the reminder that cringe comes for us all, and curiosity about our public perceptions is a universal affliction. As a friend put it, it’s a relief to know “super famous 40-year-old old dudes are sitting around reading their comments.”