One moment. Really, one moment. Are you telling me that Ferraz has hired, with public funds, a Twitter persona going by Mr. Handsome who spends days praising Pedro Sánchez as if his beauty were a public achievement? Yes. That is what is being revealed, and this was reported by journalist Ketty Garat. Take a breath. Let’s collect the shards of disbelief and exhale slowly.
Online behavior often leans toward manufactured praise. People build fake profiles to boost their own standing. Writers with multiple accounts on Goodreads and Amazon flood their books with positive ratings. Business owners buy packages of favorable reviews to turn their small ventures into celebrated spots, be it bars, hotels, or eateries. Production companies hype their films with Twitter bots. Above all, there is a shared, almost anxious hunger for social validation that threads through the internet.
Recently I watched a remarkable short documentary by Gala Hernández, which earned a César in France. It examines incels, men who feel scorned by intimate outcomes, told with a perspective that is rarely heard from a feminist lens: through empathy and compassion for the lonely, the socially isolated guy who, in his solitude, could slip into despair. I plan to write at length about this delicate work, but for now I note a tiny observation: within incel ideology, Pedro Sánchez would be a “Chad,” a shorthand for the archetypal alpha male who dominates and imposes scarcity of sexual attention on the average man.
So, the Chad figure may be implicated in deception. Why would Sánchez need to pay a Twitter commentator to call him handsome six times in a single day? How vast must the chasm be between inner narcissism and outward image for a public figure, even one admired by adversaries, to resort to spending taxpayer money on a Twitter account that extols his looks?
Reviewing the activity of MrHandsome (@pdrsnche) with the knowledge of who funds it leaves a lingering doubt and a sense of melancholy. If all those compliments are self-generated, what emptiness, what hunger, what banal vanity would reside there? Perhaps, someday, someone will tell us this whole saga was merely a dream.