Mocking of video reveals insecurities
A Toronto realtor named Anna Oliver was thoroughly mocked this week when one of her promotional videos, uploaded originally to TikTok last Friday, went viral.
Maybe you’ve seen it. In the 35-second clip, Oliver, a realtor with Sotheby’s International Realty who wouldn’t look out of place on the Netflix show “Selling Sunset,” walks down Bay Street in a white ruffled skirt, twirls around a scrawny sidewalk tree and talks up her “top” neighbourhood in Toronto.
“My top choice,” she says, “probably not a surprise, is King West. Wow. If you want to see and be seen King West is your neighbourhood. King West is home to the best restaurants. Think of the most exclusive clubs in Toronto, King West has it. Anytime you walk by (the restaurant) Lavelle the lineup is the most beautiful people you will see in the entire city.”
Alas, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Torontonians on the internet see none of it on King West.
The blowback to Oliver’s video and the notion that King West, an expensive club district with mediocre restaurants, is a desirable place to live was swift and, as these things tend to go, mean.
First came the virtual roasting of the neighbourhood, the suburbanites who go there on weekends (“greasy douchebags,” BlogTO called them) and then, of course, came the hateful screeds. Oliver is a woman, after all.
“I’ve had the most obscene things sent to my private email,” the realtor told me over the phone Friday. “About my looks, how I dress. It was hurtful because I work hard. You start reading comments about your appearance … I’m not a professional broadcaster. I’m doing the best I can.”
But there were other comments too, not hateful ones, just snobbish. “People saying ‘she must be from Thornhill … she must be from a small town.’ ”
There is a lot to mock about the clip: for starters, the fact that though its subject is King West it’s clearly shot on Bay Street in Yorkville, giving viewers the impression that Oliver is lost.
In addition, the notion that King West has the best food in the city is outrageous. I know this because I live in Scarborough, where the food sold inside the subway station closest to my house (which isn’t close at all, this is Scarborough) is a million times better than anything served at a restaurant with a DJ booth.
Still, for all the “cringy-ness” in Oliver’s video, there’s far more to mock in those mocking it.
Honestly, is there any urban demographic thinner skinned than Toronto snobs — or whatever you want to call a group of urban residents whose heads explode when they learn there are people in the suburbs who think it might be fun to live in the downtown core?
It’s one thing to poke fun at 905ers who dream of owning a King West condo with an unobstructed view of the CN Tower, or the realtor who caters to that crowd.
But to directly troll the realtor on social media and, worse, in her personal inbox? That takes a uniquely Toronto brand of insecurity.
Do you think anybody in New York City so much as rolls an eye when a realtor makes an Instagram post about living it up like Samantha Jones in the Meatpacking District?
Do you think they fire off impassioned rebuttals on Twitter alerting the public to the fact that “my neighbourhood is way cooler”?
No. Because they want it to stay that way.
The irony is, you’d think Torontonians who turn their noses up at King West and the 905ers who party there would thank realtors like Oliver for making tacky promotional videos about expensive mainstream neighbourhoods. If you want your cool corner of the city to remain so, it’s for the best that business people like Oliver don’t promote it. And she doesn’t. Oliver has yet to twirl around a tree on Geary Avenue (though I’m not sure there are any).
The other neighbourhoods she says she’s profiled include Queen West and Yorkville — not exactly undiscovered territory.
But the level of disdain directed at Oliver and her recent video suggest not so much that Torontonians in understated neighbourhoods despise King West, but that they’re deeply jealous of the attention it gets. They’re both too cool for school and desperate for mainstream validation.
A few words of advice from a born and raised 905er. Give it up. Stop trying so hard. And admit it: you like to see the CN tower lit up at night just like the rest of us.