What does it mean to get ‘Yoko Ono’d’?
I’m coining the term ‘Yoko Ono’d’ or ‘Yoko Ono-fication’ to refer to the cultural phenomenon where the female romantic partner of a male celebrity is blamed for the downfall or decline of any kind of his public career.
Yoko Ono, the blueprint for this phenomenon, is an artist, musician, and the widow of John Lennon. The couple met in 1966, began a relationship in 1968 that overlapped with John’s marriage, and got married themselves in 1969. Since The Beatles’ break-up in 1970, Ono has been lambasted by many as the cause of the band’s split.
I grew up hearing a version of The Beatles’ story in which they were four best friends whose time in the spotlight ended solely because of John’s weird new wife. When I was younger, I accepted that version of events and was amused by the online clips of Ono ‘howling’ while those around her looked on with bewildered disbelief.
However, as I got older, I began to question the intensity of the hatred aimed at Yoko Ono, the refusal to accept her as the partner of a Beatle, and the sheer scale of blame and responsibility the public attributes to one woman in the downfall of the biggest band ever. While I’m not suggesting that Ono had no part in the band’s split, I think it is unfair to single her out as one of the many reasons for the break-up, and the public attitude towards her feels laced with misogyny. Wikipedia has a whole page dedicated to the many reasons behind the band’s split: ‘the strain of the Beatlemania phenomenon, the 1967 death of their manager Brian Epstein, bandmates’ discontent with McCartney’s leadership of the band, Lennon’s heroin use and his relationship with Yoko Ono, Harrison’s increasingly prolific songwriting, the floundering of Apple Corps, the ‘Get Back’ project (renamed ‘Let It Be’ in 1970), and managerial disputes.’ Amongst a plethora of tensions and differences of opinion, why has the public singled out ‘his relationship with Yoko Ono’ as being the main issue to focus on?
The fact is, it’s the easy option to blame Ono. It’s so easy it’s almost comforting. Of course, everything was fine until she showed up. Of course, it was her intrusion into the ‘masculine’ space of their studio that made everything go downhill. Of course, the only friction the group ever experienced was due to her. Of course, they would have stayed happily together forever if it weren’t for her.
It sounds ridiculous, because it is. The Beatles were arguably among the earliest widespread examples of parasocial relationships in mainstream pop culture. In the craze of Beatlemania, the band members’ wives and girlfriends were treated horribly by parasocial fans. The powerful grasp of the parasocial bond not only affected fans throughout the period the band was active, but it has also maintained a hold over the public consciousness ever since, resulting in a blatant bias in favor of the men, whilst harboring suspicion, resentment, and hatred towards the ‘interloper’ Ono.
In no way am I suggesting that Yoko Ono is a morally flawless person who should be immune to any criticism. I’m not even suggesting that she had no part in The Beatles breaking up. However, to single her out as the main or only cause of their split feels like a malicious way to place all of the responsibility on her while maintaining an idealized image of the four men as a blameless, harmonious unit. It minimizes major issues such as The Beatles’ growing creative differences with one another, and removes the agency of four fully-grown men in a viewpoint that is ultimately both infantilizing and misogynistic.
A pattern emerges
From Meghan Markle receiving the majority of the blame for Prince Harry’s exit from the royal family, to American football WAGs past and present, such as Jessica Simpson and Taylor Swift, being blamed for the poor performances of their partners, the ‘Yoko Ono-fication’ of famous women has become a recognizable pattern. The public would rather scapegoat the wife or girlfriend of the male celebrity than accept that he might not be such a nice person, or that he’s not as talented, popular, successful, or acclaimed as we would like to imagine. It also helps if the public didn’t like this man’s partner in the first place. His career failure provides the perfect excuse to criticize her: a tangible example of his decline that can be falsely correlated to her ‘ruining’ him.
Timothée Chalamet’s Decline
Prior to the 2026 awards season, Timothée Chalamet seemed to be riding a wave of perpetual career success. Chalamet established himself as a Gen-Z favorite with roles in films such as Call Me By Your Name (2017), Lady Bird (2017), and Little Women (2019). He not only became the internet’s go-to celebrity crush, he also received the ultimate seal of approval: being declared a “man written by a woman.”
For a while, it seemed he could do no wrong. He took on starring roles in high-budget projects, such as Dune (2021), Wonka (2023), and A Complete Unknown (2024), and started dating Kylie Jenner in 2023. Most recently, he earned an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’ for his portrayal of Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme (2026).
However, during the film’s press run and throughout the awards campaign, Chalamet came across as pretty unlikeable to many people. While some people were split on whether his SAG acceptance speech about being “in pursuit of greatness” was refreshing or not, by the time he sat down for an interview and described his last eight years of performances as “really some top-level shit”, most people seemed to agree that Chalamet’s ego seemed over-inflated. Some blamed the arrogant, self-aggrandizing behaviors Chalamet displayed on a choice to method-act his way through promotion, while others just felt that a mask of modesty was slipping off.
The final straw came just weeks before the awards ceremony, when a video for Variety featured Chalamet making controversial comments about opera and ballet, stating that ‘no one cares’ about those art forms anymore. Ironically, Chalamet has female relatives who have worked in the ballet industry, and in a self-aggrandizing rap remix with EsDeeKid released a couple of months earlier, he had declared, “My life is an opera.” But he continued in the Variety video without seeming to think before he spoke, delivering the controversial judgment before adding an afterthought, “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there”. After sighing, he quipped that he had “just lost fourteen cents in viewership”. To finish out the word-vomit episode, he thought aloud, his reflection being, “Damn, I just took shots for no reason”. He then appeared to mimic an opera singer’s vibrato, covered his face, and finally brought the excruciating moment to a close.
It was truly like watching a trainwreck in real time. The comments were clipped into short-form videos and viewed millions of times across TikTok and Instagram. By the time the Oscars rolled around, fans were speculating that this moment would have lost him the Oscar (even though voting had mostly closed by the time the video was aired). On the night, he was the subject of jokes at his expense, and ultimately, it was Michael B. Jordan who won the Academy Award for his role as the twins ‘Smoke’ and ‘Stack’ in Sinners.
It’s not even necessarily the idea behind what Chalamet said that was the issue here so much as his poorly-chosen words, as well as his tone of voice and the context of his remarks. A lot of us can probably relate to the most charitable interpretation of Timothée’s behavior. We’ve all had moments where our words come out sounding harsher than intended, or we don’t phrase something with enough sensitivity, or we say the wrong thing, and instead of correcting ourselves smoothly, we just keep making it worse. However, the difference is that not all of us are Oscar-nominated actors with PR training on a seemingly endless press tour, facing more and more interactions with arrogance and entitlement.
Needless to say, Chalamet’s popularity is at an all-time low, and he just missed out on the biggest potential success of his career to date. So who is to blame? Surely him, naturally?
The Yoko Ono-fication of Kylie Jenner
It’s actually all Kylie Jenner’s fault, according to social media.
Following this plummet in Chamalet’s success and likability, fans were quick to suggest that his career will recover when he breaks up with Kylie. Many people agreed that she is a bad influence on him, or that ‘Timmy’, as they affectionately call him, has changed for the worse because of her.
Since Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner were first romantically linked to one another, a barrage of backlash and misogynistic rhetoric has been lobbed at Jenner. Fans of Chalamet felt that her background as a reality TV star and influencer, combined with all the baggage of the Kardashian-Jenner family, made her an unfit match for their classy, intellectual French boy. Once again, as in the case of Yoko Ono and John Lennon, this is a perfect example of toxic parasocial behavior laced with misogyny and unnecessary vitriol. Similarly, the two women were easy targets because of their already unfavorable public image. Even major publications questioned the relationship between Chalamet and Jenner as soon as it went public, with misogynistic undertones. In a now-deleted article, a writer for British Vogue questioned their compatibility, asking, “Does he hold her make-up brushes while she contours?” Comments such as these convey the negative attitudes of both the press and the public towards Jenner prior to Chalamet’s career-related blunders, making her the ideal and ultimate scapegoat for attitudes and comments that only Timothée Chalamet is truly responsible for.
No one is claiming that famous women such as Yoko Ono or Kylie Jenner are morally superior individuals who have never done anything to deserve criticism. The point is instead that you cannot blame them for the actions of the men they are romantically linked to. To do so is wildly unfair and results in a misogynistic hate train being directed towards these women while their male partners are idolized or infantilized. This issue speaks to a broader cultural attitude that expects women to shoulder many of the responsibilities of their partners without complaint, and which should be recognized and changed for the benefit of everybody.