America is so far gone, we’ve learned to tolerate outward female objectification as journalism. It’s no new thing, really, but the way it has manifested as Professional Trolling feels directly symptomatic of 2016 and the Twitterverse we live in. Writing about women with your dick as the pen, it’s a gambit now. It gets the curious few interested in your topic to click, and it gets the enraged feminists of the world to click harder.
Last month, LA Weekly came under fire for a beyond-offensive essay on pop singer Sky Ferreira's sex appeal, eventually inspiring the publication to issue a weak apology—but not before reaping the benefits of infuriated people everywhere sharing the article. And now there’s this, Vanity Fair’sAugust cover story on the incredible acting talent Margot Robbie. It’s written by Rich Cohen, the co-creator of HBO’s fantastic failure Vinyl (why anyone would spend money to revisit the classic rock and roll days of the ‘70s in an era where literally no one cares about classic rock and roll of the ‘70s is beyond understanding).
To put this into perspective as an ongoing issue: Cohen is guilty of these sexist writings as far back as 1995, when he wrote about Alicia Silverstone in Rolling Stone, “Silverstone is a girl you could conceivably date, a girl you did date, even, raised to the highest power. She has the brand-new look of a still-wet painting—touch her and she'll smudge.” It’s a masturbatory cycle that needs to end.
His 2016 story on Robbie serves a brilliant, shining example of how not to write about young female celebrities. Let’s dive in.
The first cringe-worthy moment arrives at the very beginning. It opens:
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"Girl next door?" Might as well have used “manic pixie dream girl” and won the antiquated-language Olympics. The rest of the paragraph just doesn’t really make any sense; not sure what “minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance” means when describing a person’s beauty, but hey, whatever, man. “She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes,” literally means she is average height or shorter—that’s not a defining characteristic. Then he goes on to insult Australia in some poor attempt to make his piece read with some gorgeous (?) golden glow of nostalgia. Fifty years ago, 1966, America was not “sunny and slow.” We were nearing the end of the Civil Rights Movement. We were in Vietnam. Who wants to return to that? The old days were the worst, okay?
When Cohen meets Robbie for the first time, it’s at a hotel restaurant in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He describes her as being like “a second-semester freshman.” He continues, “I don’t remember what she was wearing, but it was simple, her hair combed around those painfully blue eyes. We sat in the corner. She looked at me and smiled.” Now we have to wonder if he blacked out for their chat because it seems odd that a man so preoccupied with her physical appearance would fail to note her ensemble (must’ve not been sexy enough). The freshman comment—about a woman who is 26 when the average age for that collegiate experience is 18—is a gross purity assigned to Robbie, a virgin fetishization. She is a woman, not a young adult readying to leave her teens. She’s not some naive human stepping into adulthood. She is, once again, a famous actress.
Thus begins a downward spiral into unnecessary “beauty” detail. When discussing her role as Naomi (“the Duchess of Bay Ridge”) in The Wolf of Wall Street, he mentions that in the screenplay, Terence Winter describes her character as “the hottest blonde ever.” At the end of that paragraph, he refers to her other roles as not that memorable, before labeling her “one of Scorsese’s women,” literally concluding with an ownership clause. Earlier on, he refers to her breakthrough character on Australian drama Neighbours as “a kind of groupie,” never actually detailing what that means or how it could be accurate.
Like the freshman comment early on, the story concludes with an infantilization of Robbie. He writes: “In her, [late-Tarzan producer] Jerry [Weintraub] may have seen a kind of lost purity, what we’ve given up for the excitement of a crass, freewheeling, sex-saturated culture.” He uses this observation to kick start his conclusion, which—and you cannot make this stuff up—is about sex scenes, how awkward they must be. When she agrees that yes, getting naked and feigning intimacy with co-workers is fucking weird, he writes, “We sat for a moment in silence. She was thinking of something; I was thinking of something else.” (Are you literally implying that you are thinking of fucking your interview subject?) “Then she stood, said good-bye, and went to see a friend across the room.” (Did you scare her away?) “She looked just like Audrey Hepburn going away.” (Come on, dude, there’s gotta be a better way to express this sentiment, or were you really just looking at her ass?)
Thankfully Margot Robbie won’t be written into history the way Cohen sees fit—her talent is far too immense for that. What is unfortunate is that this presumably passed multiple edits, no one once giving the note “maybe there’s too much of your penis in here.” It’s an isolating thing, one that attempts to invalidate or, at the very least, make harder the work of women everywhere. It’s the very mentality that painted both Sky Ferreira and Alicia Silverstone as sex objects before her. This form of writing ignores the person behind the art and others them into bodies, merely to be used and gazed at.
In the case of Margot Robbie and Vanity Fair, someone else could’ve written this. Someone else could’ve actually let us in on her story. Hopefully someone will.
