Random Grossest Cover Stories of Young Female Stars (8 items)

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  (#1) Selena Gomez

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  Selena Gomez was profiled in the March 2017 issue of Vogue, and the tone of the article raised plenty of readers' eyebrows. She was interviewed by Rob Haskell, who wastes no time in describing Gomez as if she's fragile doll and ready to shatter at a moment's notice:

  "As I slip an apron over her mane of chocolate-brown hair, for which Pantene has paid her millions, and tie it around her tiny waist, I wonder whether her legions have felt for years the same sharp pang of protectiveness that I’m feeling at present."

  Haskell characterizes Gomez as "doll-like and startled," and to top it all off he squeezes in a reference to Woody Allen and his relationship with the considerably younger Soon-Yi Previn.
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  (#3) Cara Delevingne

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  Rob Haskell's profile of Cara Delevingne for a 2015 issue of Vogue makes some offensive, sweeping statements about his subject's sexuality:

  "Those who have been gathering the crumbs on Cara’s romantic trail may be confused about whether it’s men or women who excite her. She conveys a Millennial’s ennui at the expectation that she ought to settle upon a sexual orientation, and her interests - video games, yes; manicures, no - might register as gender-defiant in the realm of dresses and heels... Her parents seem to think girls are just a phase for Cara, and they may be correct."

  Apparently Haskell doesn't believe that bisexuality exists. He also manages to box her in as the "cool girl" archetype by praising her uniqueness: "on the runway, her half-upturned mouth, which seemed to suggest a mind dancing with naughty ideas, looked delicious within a sea of glazed, blank-looking beauties."
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  (#6) Angelina Jolie

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  Rich Cohen shared sometimes worshipful, sometimes insulting writing in a 2008 Vanity Fair profile of Angelina Jolie, and then again in a 2010 follow-up. Cohen seems awe-struck by Jolie's beauty at first, and almost repulsed by her later. He describes her as "a princess, an aristocrat" in the first piece; she's an "alien" with an alien head "too big for her body" and "alien in that big-headed Martian way" in the second. It's perplexing.

  To add to the ick factor, the first profile is entitled "A Woman in Full," and it repeatedly characterizes pregnant women as hungry, huge, and unrestrained (Jolie was pregnant at the time).
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  (#4) Jennifer Lawrence

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  Not even Oscar-winning Jennifer Lawrence can escape the flowery language and persistent mentions of nudity that come with these celebrity profiles. In Jonathan Van Meter's 2015 profile of the star for Vogue, he immediately dives into questionable territory:

  "Here I stumble into a subject that I wouldn’t have dreamed of bringing up so soon: the nude-photo leak. It was exactly a year ago that hackers stole photos from Lawrence’s iCloud account and posted them on the Web."

  To his credit, Van Meter dedicates more words to describing her home's décor than Lawrence's looks. Still, if he was planning on asking about a violating experience, maybe he shouldn't have started the interview with it.
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  (#8) Jessica Simpson

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  In 2009, Rich Cohen profiled Jessica Simpson for Vanity Fair. He describes her figure in leering detail: "Jessica Simpson, who looks down from a marquee, slender and blonde and shaped like a barbell, booming on top and in the middle, skinny as a pencil between."

  He also refers to her "weight gain" as a "danger sign," and seems obsessed with it:

  "She didn’t want to talk about her weight, so, of course, that’s all I could think of - it gilded each question in my mind: What are you working on now [that you’re fat]? Do you see yourself as part of a class, with Christina and Britney [or are you too fat]? Do you feel that your relationship with Tony Romo has affected his performance as a quarterback [because you are fat]?"

  "I didn’t want to ask about her weight directly, so I hinted at it, asking instead about body image in general, physical changes, perception - from my questions, you might have thought I was interviewing the Wolf Man."

  Even unrelated objects are written about through the lens of her weight; he says she holds a microphone "like a turkey leg."
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  (#7) Alicia Vikander

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  Rob Haskell loves describing women as "stricken" or "fragile," and Alicia Vikander is no exception. He profiles her in a 2015 Vogue article, in which he describes her as "childlike," "slight," and also "the most beautiful woman in the room whom you might not even notice at all."

  Haskell also seems bemused by her lack of physical size, despite the fact she's set to shoot a Bourne movie soon: "She is far from a bursting physical specimen; she flexes her bush-league biceps and laughs."

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