At certain kinds of parties I have stopped going to, I used to find myself at the mercy of ugly conversations about beautiful women. There was never enough bad wine to hand to make those negotiations tolerable. They arose chiefly through the sustained influx of models, actresses and pop starlets who have re-marketed themselves as avid readers of highbrow literary works.
Perhaps you have seen the media fodder that accompanies the phenomenon. Kendall Jenner photographed on a yacht reading Chelsea Hodson; Kendall Jenner recommending short stories by Lydia Davis and Leonora Carrington. Emily Ratajkowski, in Interview, discussing Adrienne Rich and bell hooks with Oxford’s Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory. Kaia Gerber telling Vogue that Raymond Carver and Marguerite Duras changed her life. Dua Lipa interviewing Douglas Stuart at Hay Festival. Pamela Anderson on Twitter, announcing a book. Britney Spears on Instagram, announcing a book. Julia Fox on TikTok, announcing a book. In the week it has taken me to write this essay, Megan Fox has announced a collection of poetry. Among the party guests, disbelief would abound at the ability of these women to appreciate or potentially produce the kind of literature that those guests made their living on as writers, academics, members of the book trade or journalists.
It was regularly accompanied by the suggestion that it could not be the beautiful person herself who read those texts. Rather, these women’s engagements with highbrow literary culture were PR stunts, wherein a lowlier figure – an assistant, a production manager – was likely the person selecting novels; the books themselves were probably props.
I would carry these conversations home with me like hangovers. I would think about them while I removed whatever dress or eyeshadow I had used to make myself feel good for the party.
That these women were beautiful and made their money, at least partly, through the sexualisation of their image never came up as a discussion point in regard to determining their supposed lack of intellectual prowess. It was too crass a piece of logic to make explicit in a post-MeToo era. But last year I watched that judgement invert itself palpably, painfully. I saw the following, now infamous, tweet by Marie Terese Mailhot rip through the socials of people I work with, or am in proximity to:
Joyce Carol Oates shouldn’t have written Blonde. What could a literary non-hottie know about the exploitation of femme, highly sexualized women: women who look and act like Oates have no compassion or love for women like Marilyn. They’re just as bad as men at writing them.
Sex and beauty have nothing to do with literary output, was the rebuttal. And more than once in the fray of bookish discourse, unpicking everything wrong with Mailhot’s take was an anecdote regarding the lasting sting of having once been judged a ‘non-hottie’.
If you care to dig deep enough, there is a correlation, I think, between the wariness members of the literary world show towards the standardised forms of beauty that have been commodified for mass appeal, and the wariness they show towards a book trade which increasingly pursues a consolidated market. In the latter case, profitability lies in fashionably jacketed, easily digestible, trendy books. A successful novel, in other words, presents much like a successful model: it has a viral social media presence and its palatability depends on its ubiquity in appearance and content. And yet, this project of a sexy, beautiful woman aspiring to be publicly intelligent – I want to believe in it.
My interest in the idea holds only a limited investment in the notion of feminist camaraderie. Of course, a lifetime of objectification makes the reclamation of one’s thoughts and the ability to declaim them an important prospect. More beautiful women than I have written on that subject with experience I cannot lay claim to. My dilemma is ordinary, and somewhat veiled by shame. The female writers and academics I know have limited recourse to ideas of beauty should they wish to be taken seriously. I have wondered about the impoverishment of imagination that an intellectual life devoid of sex appeal and fun has wrought on the institutions I work within.
