In a profile for Vanity Fair’s August 2016 cover, writer Rich Cohen struggled to separate actress Margot Robbie from her existence as a sexual being, as many male writers have felt inclined to do about women forever. The feature on its own, which takes an odd tone and is not particularly well-written, was enough to attract considerable media attention. The thing is that it’s not an anomaly, rather, it’s synonymous with his style of writing about famous women in an oddly fantastical, idolizing tone.
The general idea is such: This woman is a fairy in a field, and look, she’s doing something quaint, and how lucky are we to have been there to witness it. The Robbie profile, a promo obligation to support her roles in Tarzan and Suicide Squad, features this descriptive passage about her looks:
She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character. As I said, she is from Australia. To understand her, you should think about what that means. Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback, which is why you go there for throwback people.
Cohen also describes Robbie’s wondrous movement through the air as if it’s weird she hasn’t been swept away:
She wandered through the room like a second-semester freshman, finally at ease with the system. She stopped at tables along the way to talk to friends. 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.
What is “painfully blue”? It isn’t the absolute worst of this incessant form of male celebrity profiling rooted in fantasy, but it’s nevertheless a prime example.
Cohen has profiled several famous women for Vanity Fair, including Madonna, Jessica Simpson and Angelia Jolie twice, all stories that bear the mark of a man who’s content to follow the gross, formulaic pattern of males writing profiles through the lens of a sexually focused idol worship, not to mention a generally blasé editorial tone that often reads like long, unedited stream-of-consciousness, as if he forced himself to write in a journal after coming home from a long day of work that wasn’t actually a long day but really seemed like it. Vanity Fair is perhaps more culpable than Cohen—after all, they’re editing, publishing and encouraging him. But for whom he’s writing is clear: old white male fogies who are similarly interested in how these women fit into their own narratives.
In a May 2008 Madonna profile tied to her album Hard Candy and two film projects at the time (the story’s dek acknowledges that she co-wrote, produced and directed one of them), Cohen introduces Madonna in the opening graphs:
To reach her, you must wait for a sign. When it comes, if you are pure of heart, you begin to move toward Madonna, and move fast. One moment you are in Connecticut, wondering if it will snow, the next moment you are swept up by a force greater than yourself. You’re in a car on the highway, flashing past sleepy towns, moving closer and closer to the center, which you approach deftly and humbly, in the manner of a pilgrim. Like a pilgrim, you set off before first light. Like a pilgrim, you remove your shoes—to pass through security at the airport. Like a pilgrim, you read and reread sacred texts: profiles and reviews, the first published in the early 1980s, the most recent published just a second ago, which constitute a kind of record, the good news, the Gospel of Madonna.
(What’s equally tough to get through in the piece is Madonna’s own constant self-praise of her work in Africa, even derailing a question about her kiss with Britney Spears to say, “When you think about the way people treat each other in Africa…”)
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