The Sexman, a.k.a. Pruane2Forever
Hey, kid. We love to hate you
This is a biweekly column about microcelebrities – the often accidental stars of the viral videos and jpegs crowding our inboxes.
He's 14, he's got blue-green braces, a face that looks wind-tunnelled at the best of times and a grating, whiny voice straight out of Saturday Night Live.
All of these qualities could stand a chance of transmuting into something lovable. But no.
I revile “Sexman,” a.k.a. “Pruane2Forever,” and, judging by the comments posted under his videos, so does everyone else on the Internet – and yet he is Canada's No. 1 most-subscribed-to partner on YouTube.
This is a confounding fact. Do people really just want to watch someone to get their hate on?
Apparently. Sexman and his fans – if we can even call them that – are locked into a relationship whose dynamic I can only describe as sado-masochistic. Sexman must know he is reviled to the point of receiving death threats (albeit the toothless kind that proliferate on YouTube). Yet he continues to post videos faithfully. The viewers detest him, and yet they can't stop watching.
His rants are topical: Whatever happened at school that day, the latest Hollywood gossip, video-game reviews.
He's opinionated – he gets why Christian Bale tore a strip off the “stupid” crew member who walked through his shot. “It's stressful making movies,” he informs his audience. “Most people don't understand that.”
He's occasionally inarticulate, as on the topic of Rihanna: “It's an endless cycle,” he says of the R & B singer's alleged abuse at the hands of her boyfriend. “A horrible circle that just keeps going round and round until someone decides to just – to make a hole between the circle so it can't go round any more. Not between the circle, but, you know, cut one side or something.”
Usually, I feel protective and fond of the misfits, who are so often more creative and interesting than the popular kids at school. But Sexman seemed a dyed-in-the-wool pariah. I just couldn't find it in myself to sympathize. Or so I thought, until I saw him filming a man he calls “Father John.”
Red-faced Father John tells rambling, slurred, curse-larded anecdotes while Sexman, off-camera, alternately taunts him and eggs him on. This family portrait – presumably Father John is Sexman's dad – is the stuff of hard-hitting documentaries, and it evokes a fresh raft of feelings.
Sexman, you realize, is a surprisingly functional unit. He becomes a sympathetic character, if not likable.
My former irritation is transmuted into a more academic interest: Is he able to withstand hateful comments because he has grown up needing to have a thick skin? Does he film his father at his worst as a form of retribution? Do the tiny percentage of people who have found him through the Internet and genuinely, for whatever reason, like him, make all the vitriol worthwhile in his eyes?
Of course, this is a much more layered perception of him than most viewers might admit to. But it's tempting to think that Sexman emerges the victor, somehow, in this apparently pointless death match between exhibitionist and voyeur, hated and haters.
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