Culture

Vanity Fair’s Sexist Profile Of Margot Robbie Is Offensive In Pretty Much Every Way Possible

The profile also says that "Australia is like America 50 years ago." Haha — wait, what?

by Sinead Stubbins  7 July 2016

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Another day, another profile written by a crusty old man describing the physical attributes of a young actress as if she was an intricately decorated end table that they found at Sotheby’s, or a piece of steak they were looking forward to devouring after a five o’clock scotch. The writer was Rich Cohen, the prestige publication was Vanity Fair and the star was Margot Robbie.

If you feel like getting fired up this morning, feel free to read the whole thing! If not, here a few choice passages:

“She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance. 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.”

Margot Robbie is like “a slow dance?” Hm, not sure what that means. Quick question: was she wearing clothes while you’re interviewing her, Rich?

“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.”

Rich, you know she was obligated to talk to you, right? You weren’t on a date. She is promoting a movie. Her agent set this up, Rich. Rich decides to ask her about sex scenes, because she is a beautiful woman who has been in sexy films. You wouldn’t ask Tom Cruise about sex scenes, because what’s interesting about that! A man having sex, yeuccch! Good call, Rich.

“I asked Robbie about the sex scenes. In Wolf, she partakes in some of the most graphic on-screen shenanigans I’ve ever seen, famously short-skirted in one scene, pushing a crawling DiCaprio away with the toe of her designer shoe, saying, ‘Mommy is just so sick and tired of wearing panties’.” 

After Rich transcribes a lengthy and dull conversation they have about sex scenes, Robbie leaves the table (to vomit, presumably) and Rich stares at her butt.

“We sat for a moment in silence. She was thinking of something; I was thinking of something else. Then she stood, said good-bye, and went to see a friend across the room. Jerry was right. She looked just like Audrey Hepburn going away.“

But wait, there’s more! Rich also decides that Australia is a country of “throwback people” who are obsessed with Neighbours and can’t possibly understand the complexities of Hollywood, or anything that has happened since 1966!

“Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback, which is why you go there for throwback people. They still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas in Melbourne and Perth, still dwell in a single mass market in Adelaide and Sydney. In the morning, they watch Australia’s Today show. In other words, it’s just like America, only different.”

One more way that Australia is America, but different (what a fantastic line, shattered I didn’t come up with that bulletproof prose) is that we use the movement of the sun to study American’s customs, customs that we can’t really comprehend because we are “throwback people” who are fifty years behind in thought and general consciousness. (Meanwhile, what happened with that Berlin Wall thing, can someone check on that?)

“When everyone here is awake, everyone there is asleep, which makes it a perfect perch from which to study our customs, habits, accents.”

As you can imagine, the internet at large has not taken kindly to this profile.

 

You may recall that not that long ago, Vogue wrote a similarly misguided profile on Robbie, also by a man who could be her dad but seemed to want to be her boyfriend. The same thing also happened to Amy Schumer last month. This trend of getting older men to creepily profile women in Vogue — writers who frequently seem uninterested in the star’s work, but very interested in their physical appearance and if they are eating a salad (health!) or a burger (relatable!) during the interview — has been previously pointed out by Jezebel‘s Julianne Escobedo Shepherd.

“Getting the Vogue treatment, salad/burger and all, is a specific and colossal benchmark in a woman’s celebrity,” Shepherd writes. “And to achieve this Vogue legitimacy means, almost always, being profiled by a man.”

Of course there’s nothing wrong with a man profiling a woman. It’s just disappointing to see that the tradition of giving big cover stories to older male writers (who may not have the adequate knowledge or care factor to understand their subject) is still the norm, because this speaks to fact that men still occupy more senior media positions than women, despite large numbers of women in the workforce.

A profile that takes more care in documenting how “sexy and composed” a woman can be while naked, is not a good profile. Listing the ways in which you’re attracted to a 26-year-old actress is not insight.