Jenna Dewan: Global Emissary of Hope, Abs, and the Art of Distracting a Doomed Planet
Jenna Dewan and the Soft-Power Ballet of Planet Earth
by Dave’s Locker Global Desk
PARIS — While COP negotiators in Bonn argue over commas in the climate text, and the BRICS+ bloc quietly re-carpets the world in yuan, a far more potent form of soft power pirouettes across our collective attention span: Jenna Dewan’s career. Yes, the American dancer-turned-actress whose abs once launched a thousand Pinterest boards. To dismiss her as mere pop-culture confetti is to ignore the grand, tragicomic opera in which we all have balcony seats.
Consider the geopolitical backdrop. China’s TikTok armies curate Dewan’s pregnancy-announcement videos for 1.4 billion potential consumers. India’s matrimonial apps splice her wedding aesthetic into matchmaking algorithms. In Lagos, street vendors bootleg Step Up DVDs because, apparently, even hyperinflation can’t kill the dream of a perfectly timed body roll. Dewan—smiling, inexhaustible—becomes the United Nations of aspirational abs, a one-woman trade route for hope, spandex, and the eternal delusion that choreography can solve structural inequality.
Europe, ever the fretful chaperone, watches with monocled suspicion. French cultural theorists—those exquisite vampires of joy—write dissertations on “Dewanism” as late-capitalist ritual. A Berlin gallery mounts an installation: a single Louboutin heel suspended over a map of the Middle East, looping her Instagram stories on a cracked iPhone. Critics call it “a meditation on the weaponization of relatability.” Everyone drinks warm white wine and agrees the world is ending beautifully.
Meanwhile, the Gulf monarchies—bored with yacht lengths—hire Dewan to choreograph halftime shows for their emerging football leagues. It is, after all, cheaper than actual diplomacy. One Emirati official confides, off the record, that nothing dissuades human-rights questions faster than a well-executed grand jeté. Soft power, meet softer thighs.
Back in the United States, the culture wars grind on. Fox News pundits denounce Dewan’s latest wellness brand as “witchcraft for suburbanites,” while NPR frames it as “embodied feminist praxis.” Both sides buy the collagen powder anyway; the market, like God, works in mysterious grifts. Somewhere in Ohio, a teenager live-streams herself imitating Dewan’s morning routine, monetizing her own exhaustion at pennies per tear. The algorithm notes the uptick in despair, serves her an ad for antidepressants endorsed by a former backup dancer. Circle of life, sponsored by Pfizer.
And still the planet spins, indifferent. Antarctic ice shelves calve with a sound like the gods clearing their throats; refugees reenact Dewan’s dance routines in detention-center courtyards because muscle memory is cheaper than therapy. A UN subcontractor proposes a pilot program: “Trauma-informed Zumba,” filmed by drone for donor reels. The grant proposal cites Dewan’s “cross-platform resilience narrative.” Nobody laughs; the check clears.
Is this all absurd? Certainly. But absurdity is the lingua franca of the 21st century. In a world where billionaires race to Mars while the oceans swallow Tonga, Dewan’s brand of elastic optimism is not escapism; it is the final stage of grief—choreographed denial. She twirls, we watch, the stock market hiccups, somewhere a glacier commits suicide. Yet the beat drops on time, because it must.
So here we are, dear reader, orbiting a dying star, clutching our phones like rosaries, mainlining curated joy from a woman who can do the splits without smudging her lip gloss. If that isn’t a metaphor for the international order, nothing is. The curtain falls, the lights dim, and the only encore left is the slow, graceful collapse of everything we pretended mattered less than a perfectly executed pirouette.
Bravo.
