Vanity Fair's cover story on Tarzan star Margot Robbie has sparked outrage by readers.
Vanity Fair's cover story on Tarzan star Margot Robbie has sparked outrage by readers.
Australia has been described as a country full of "throwback people" in a gobsmackingly patronising interview with Margot Robbie.
The Aussie actress is on the cover of the latest Vanity Fair - but it is the accompanying interview that has sparked outrage and mockery across the internet.
Vanity Fair's latest cover features Margot Robbie.
According to Vanity Fair contributing editor Rich Cohen, "Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback". And it "still lives and dies with the plot turns of soap operas".
Cohen's profile of Robbie is the latest in a long list of articles by male journalists examining an attractive female celebrity in a way that suggests the woman in question should probably inquire about a restraining order on their way home from the interview.
"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.
He goes on: "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. 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."
Fair dinkum, cobber. Australia: wide brown land of "throwback people".
Alexander Skarsgard, Margot Robbie as Tarzan and Jane in the new Tarzan movie.
Cohen continues, describing his first meeting with the former Neighbours star in a New York cafe: "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."
Margot Robbie as Jane in Tarzan.
Elsewhere in the piece, Cohen describes Robbie variously as "too fresh to be pegged," "Less being than becoming," and "From another place, another time ... A kind of lost purity, what we've given up for the excitement of a crass, freewheeling, sex-saturated culture."
It's ... a lot. Those reacting to the piece online are combating Cohen's clear Robbieboner in the best way possible: mercilessly taking the piss.
The 2 best parts of the Margot Robbie profile are when 1) Rich Cohen explains time zones and 2) Margot just leaves pic.twitter.com/n9pAg1PZQ8
This isn't a new phenomenon, of course: There's a long-held tradition of male journalists writing about female celebrities with only one hand on the keyboard.
Back in 2013, Esquire was widely ridiculed for publishing a Megan Fox interview in which writer Stephen Marche described her skin as "the colour the moon possesses in the thin air of northern winters."
"The symmetry of her face, up close, is genuinely shocking. The lip on the left curves exactly the same way as the lip on the right. The eyes match exactly. The brow is in perfect balance, like a problem of logic, like a visual labyrinth. It's not really even that beautiful. It's closer to the sublime, a force of nature, the patterns of waves crisscrossing a lake, snow avalanching down the side of a mountain, an elaborately camouflaged butterfly. What she is is flawless. There is absolutely nothing wrong with her," Marche wrote, as readers reached for the sick bucket.
In it, he encouraged readers to pore over the singer's Instagram account as forensically as he had done: "There isn't a single photo of her that isn't flawlessly, almost offensively cool. Even in the candid photo of her nude in the shower, soaking wet, she looks natural, like she's shooting a home video, rather than being photographed by a creeper. She looks like a more cherubic Sharon Stone, icy but also sweet, like a freshly licked lollipop."
