YOUR FAVORITE MTV SHOWS ARE ON PARAMOUNT+

Delete Your Account: It’s All Over

In which Ira retires the column

Delete Your Account is a weekly column that takes the hot air out of celebrities, the media, and their social media shenanigans. Every Friday, I decide whether each perpetrator should delete their account and never grace the internet again. This week, Lena Dunham needs a reset button, Alec Baldwin takes a page from the Woody Allen playbook, and the White House releases war porn.

LENA DUNHAM

dya47_1

Sis, isn't your show over? Why are you still here? I'm not even going to address this nonsense. Instead I'm going to talk about how Elijah is my favorite part of the current season of Girls and I really want him to move to Los Angeles and star in a spin-off called Gurls. Elijah can pursue an acting career and live in West Hollywood until he realizes that he really belongs in Silver Lake. He then marries a young black writer with glasses. Maybe this person is me, maybe I've gotten offtrack.

Leave Barry Manilow alone, Lena.

SHOULD LENA DELETE HER ACCOUNT?

dya47_2

ALEC BALDWIN

dya47_3

In his new memoir, Nevertheless, Alec Baldwin writes that he'd have never done the sex scenes he filmed with actress Nikki Reed in the 2006 film Mini's First Time if he'd known she was underage at the time of filming. A producer of the film, Dana Brunetti, was quick to call bullshit on that, and said that Baldwin knew Reed was 16. According to The Hollywood Reporter: "Though nudity under 18 is potentially allowable under California law, it would need to be approved by the Child Labor Board. At the age of 17, Thora Birch briefly appeared topless in American Beauty, but it was not in a sex scene. But because Mini's First Time involved sex scenes between Baldwin and Reed, nudity would not have been approved."

This naturally led to Alec Baldwin calling out Brunetti online, which led to a rather INTENSE back-and-forth between the two.

dya47_4
dya47_5
dya47_6

First of all, Baldwin filming sex scenes with a 16-year-old is gross, whether he knew it or the producers knew it. What kind of Woody Allen bullshit is this? Second, once you found out … why would you put it in your fucking memoir? Did Baldwin get bored playing Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live? Commenting on this in the first place is what led to this idiotic fight. Two grown men going back and forth about the legalities of filming a 16-year-old in a sex scene is nauseating. Even if Brunetti is right, his claim to "bury" Baldwin reaches Real Housewives levels of ridiculousness.

This would normally be an enjoyable Hollywood fight, but once again, it's about whether Baldwin knew that Reed was underage when they filmed a sex scene. So it's hard to find any enjoyment in something so gross. I'd like to forget that this fight even happened.

SHOULD BALDWIN DELETE HIS ACCOUNT?

dya47_7

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

dya47_8

Is this war porn? What in the goddamned hell is even going on here? I can't … do this anymore.

I can thank Kanye West and Kim Kardashian for why I started Delete Your Account. Back in the halcyon days of early 2016, Kanye and Kim provided enough fodder to make you think that Twitter was going to stay fun forever. I mean, it was still a hostile environment for women and people of color, but somehow most of us were resilient enough to enjoy celebrity nonsense as the election raged on in an increasingly comical fashion. Donald Trump winning? It seemed out of the question. He was a buffoon.

So I created this column as a fun way to mock celebrities for making racist comments and starting fights with one another, or to praise them for excellent clapbacks. And for a while, it was pretty enjoyable, until that moment when Hillary Clinton's social media team tweeted "delete your account" at Trump. At that point, the election stopped being serious. The subtext became the text, the memes became reality — whatever phrase you want to use. But it turned into an internet cage match that we all enjoyed, and Twitter seemed to relish the fact that Trump and his alt-right nutjob fan base were dominating every corner of the internet.

There are fewer celebrities to make fun of each week in the age of Trump. Most of my time on Twitter is spent finding out what incomprehensible thing his administration did this week, reading his furious early-morning tweets about said thing, and then watching the jokes and hot takes fly. Who has time to look up what Mischa Barton is doing? Or whether Zayn congratulated Harry Styles on his new single? Or if Roseanne has finished her transformation into Rita Repulsa? And now I have to deal with war-porn Twitter? I'm not participating in that.

All of this is to say that this will be the last Delete Your Account for the foreseeable future. At least, until the great words of Prophet Maxine Waters come to pass:

dya47_9

Until then, I don't know. Go buy Ivanka's stuff? I think she's selling her line from the back of a Pinto outside the White House these days.

Latest News