TikToker regrets getting Russell Brand tattoo, woman gets cheated on with sex bot scammer & Shakira features nanny in music video as one more ‘fuck you’ to cheating ex

The best cringe news of the past week according to yours truly.

Hello friend,

We’re knee-deep in reading and research for issue 6 and finding this the best pre-production of the mag so far (as you would hope when the theme is literally ‘pleasure’). Thank you to everyone who’s submitted poetry, prose, essays, photography, artwork and more!

While we do our little work behind the scenes preparing for the weeks ahead, let’s get into what’s been happening online and in the world of cringe this week, starting with today’s Would You Rather:

WYR have a tattoo of a famous person's signature who turns out to be a sex offender or get cheated on by an Instagram sex bot?

Georjia: How big of a tattoo we talking? Small and behind the ear? Chest piece? Whole back? Actually, I don’t want to know. I’ve never had a tattoo and I’ve heard it’s not super painful but getting it removed is meant to be so much more painful. Being cheated on by a sex bot scam - more embarrassing than painful. It’s their fault for falling for it. I just know my friends would never let it down and I’ll choose it for that reason. It’s just hilarious.

Annika: It’s really easy to undermine the severity of either case: A tattoo of a famous person you admire who turns out to be a sex offender is rough, not even mentioning the cover-up or removal this will require, but if it’s somewhere no one can see, surely that’s not as bad as losing your relationship to an Instagram sex bot? That being said, it’s not even necessarily the cheating I’m concerned about here; it’s the idea of falling in love with someone who’s stupid enough to believe that someone called hotmaddiewantsurdick69 is really looking for true romance. Maybe I would rather be wrong about my partner than a person I admired so much I got their name tattooed on my arm. Instagram sex bot it is.

Patrick: Right, so 100% the bot thing. It would be awful to be ‘Branded’ with the mark of someone like Jimmy Saville, Gary Glitter or Mr Blobby. I know you could easily get it covered up, but sat there for like 4 hours with the tattooist just shaking my head and tutting so they know I disapprove of the person, so fucking awkward. And like what do you get it covered up with? What’s the opposite to counteract it?

On the bot sex thing, hard pick for me, because the robot I interact with the most is the Google Maps person and I really hate their voice, it’s just so condescending ‘no, you take the next left you dick!’. But honestly at the end of it, it is a better story to have and makes your partner look like a fucking idiot for thinking that they were real and were gonna send them nudes. Unless they are into robots maybe? My top 3 sexiest robots are: 3. R2D2 (it’s the noise falling off stuff in the Lego games for me) 2. Noo noo from teletubbies (obvious) 1. The robot from Ex Machina, but not the Alicia Vikander one, the one that dances, mostly so I can dance with her, also she knows Oscar Isaac.

WATERCOOLER CHATS

Are you starting to keep shopping tabs with lots of knitwear open on your browser? Hoarding more tea than usual to prepare for hibernation season? Need something to keep you connected to the outside world which slowly discourages you more and more to leave the comfort of your home/screen? No worries friend, we got you.

Here are our favourite headlines you can bring up during conversations you’d rather not have:

• This week’s Would You Rather references

  • a TikToker sharing that they got Russell Brand’s signature tattooed on their arm (before the sexual allegations came out, obviously)

  • and a story about someone getting cheated on with an Instagram sex bot scammer (her friend’s responses are priceless)

• Every week another famous man tempts us to become misandrists: This week, Matty Healy’s latest L is an attempt at an edgy joke à la 2012 Reddit humour about someone he’s not even friends with (Lucy Dacus, singer and member of boygenius), only to deactivate his account in shame after she responded:

  

  @PopBase

• Speaking of famous men who are losers, after Joe Jonas has tried to feed defamatory content to the press about the mother of his children and soon-to-be ex-wife Sophie Turner (who only found out about the divorce through social media btw), she’s now forced to sue him for essentially kidnapping their kids and refusing their return to England. As reported in Page Six, the lawsuit documents explain:

  “The Father has possession of the children’s passports. He refuses to return the passports to the Mother and refuses to send the children home to England with the Mother.”

• If you’re still experiencing Succession withdrawal, we hope some of your symptoms have eased since immersing yourself in the news that Rupert Murdoch has finally stepped down from the throne of his media empire - only to secure its survival by handing it over to eldest son Lachlan. The 92-year old will now instead become chairman emeritus of Fox and News Corp.

• We’re shocked but not surprised about Russel Brand’s sexual assault allegations, and quite frankly, wished he had already been cancelled back in 2014 when his ex Jordan Martin wrote about his aversion to pissing in toilets or urinals like the rest of us, and instead prefers the bathroom sink - or his 2 litre bottle that Martin ended up having to empty, as the latest Pop Bitch reminds us (thank you for your service).

• Palate cleanser of the week: Our favourite cringe girl ‘Christian Girl Autumn’ Caitlin Covington is reportedly going to Vermont in October to take her annual photos to mark the beginning of Autumn <3

• Madison Beer recently owned the cringe of her viral “I Was Supposed to be in the Video” meme:

  “It was f**king cringe. I would never lie about something like that. That was what upset me the most. People started calling me a compulsive liar. I was like, ‘Wait a second, why would I lie?’ -I could’ve easily posted proof that I was gonna be in [the] [‘thank u, next’] [video].”

• Over the course of writing this newsletter, we’ve really grown fonder and fonder of Shakira: Now the icon has featured her longtime nanny Lili Melgar in her music video as one more ‘fuck you’ to her cheating ex. (Melgar allegedly knew about Shakira’s ex cheating after which he fired her without financial compensation - now Shakira will give her writing credits so she can obtain royalties to make up for it.)

• Ending on a light note: BBC Breakfast showed CCTV footage of a man getting hit in the head by… a pigeon. After the presenters were done losing it, Naga Munchetty reassured the audience: “The pigeon and the man are fine.”

CRINGE MEME

This week we’re honouring the Onion (not Russell Brand, just for the record):

That’s it for this week! Feel free to let us know what cringe content, memes, and headlines you’ve been enjoying lately. Until then, we’ll see you in your inbox next Sunday!

Your Cringe Team x