It seems the general public is always running very hot or cold on actress Megan Fox. First she becomes Hollywood's hottest woman after the premiere of the first Transformers movie, then she gets universally hated on by girls and young women who are jealous of all the attention she got. She recently came back into the public eye after an unsettling interview clip from Jimmy Kimmel resurfaced, and everyone decided that actually, it was wrong to hate on her for how she was portrayed in media, because it was the media that sexualized her all along, and she was actually very cool.

Now, it seems, people are flip-flopping again: Megan Fox went trending on Twitter last night, in response to a newly published GQ shoot she did with her current boyfriend, hip-hop artist Machine Gun Kelly. Fox and Kelly began dating in 2020, and to hear them tell it - which they did, in the GQ interview that started all this - it was love at first sight...or, really, second sight.

They actually were originally introduced briefly at a party years before, and they amusedly recalled not being able to see each others' faces. Fox remembered simply commenting to Kelly, who was obscured by smoke, "you smell like weed." He replied, "I am weed," and promptly disappeared.

The next time they met was on set for the movie Midnight in the Switchgrass, an action film they were both in. Each star confirmed in the GQ interview that when they saw each others' faces that time, it was like they knew they were soul mates. MGK later texted her "I am weed," as a throwback to the first meeting, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The GQ shoot and accompanying article portray a happy couple very much in love, that singular kind of love that is immediately evident as soon as the two people are in a room together. So why, then, did all of last night's trending tweets look like...this?

Twitter Error

 

It's one thing to find PDA annoying - it's a well-documented human phenomenon that most people get embarrassed looking at displays of intimacy in public settings - but it's another thing entirely that the whole of Twitter hated seeing the results of this GQ shoot so much that everyone took to bullying and making disparaging shots about them all at once.

It is very easy for one person to sit back and say, 'my words won't affect this celebrity, I'm a nobody;' but in a world where every person who says that has their thought aggregated by a social media bot to be displayed in a neverending popularity contest with no rules, that's not exactly accurate. It's not necessarily wrong for any one person to make a snide comment about seeing something that made them uncomfortable or that they didn't like, but that doesn't change the fact that the end result now constitutes something that definitely feels like a smear campaign if you're on the wrong side of it (and it doesn't help that Fox went through something similar before she left the public eye about a decade ago.)

This is an incredibly interesting incidence of this phenomenon as well, because normally when a topic trends as high as number three on Twitter, somebody involved has had some kind of scandal. Looking into the trend page, however, reveals only a few feeble attempts to criticize Fox (who is bisexual herself) about biphobic comments she made in an interview from 2009 - in spite of the fact that she has since spoken at length about how badly she was doing mentally during that time, specifically because of all the hyper-sexualized attention she was getting in the media.

(Not to mention - if this writer, who is also openly bisexual, could insert her two cents - Do y'all remember 2009? I thought some problematic stuff about bi girls back then too. It was incredibly brave of her to be out at the time at all. Those receipts are so stale you should be throwing them in the oven and putting them on a salad.)

Why then, if nobody involved has committed any recent infractions to speak of, were so many people so compulsively disgusted by one couple's interview? Could it be something as simple as jealousy that MGK is dating one of our generation's biggest 'sex symbols?' Or of the relationship in general? Or is this just more proof that there's simply something inherently cringey to most people about seeing public displays of affection? 

We may never know, but maybe people should chill out about Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly for a little while. They don't deserve this intense a microscope, and after everything she's been through, Fox REALLY doesn't deserve it. Besides, be honest: If you met your soul mate and found out that the first time you met you had been high as a kite and told her, "I am weed," you'd tell that story all the time, because that's hilarious.