When Esquire trolls the Internet with misogyny, they really commit. In a profile of Megan Fox that begins with a parable about ancient Aztecs’ ritual sacrifice of the most physically perfect among them (“It’s so similar. It totally is,” Fox says), the men’s magazine argues,
Megan Fox is a bombshell. To be a bombshell in 2013 is to be an antiquity, an old-world relic, like movie palaces or fountain pens or the muscle cars of the 1970s or the pinball machines in the basement. Bombshells once used to roam the cultural landscape like buffalo, and like buffalo they were edging toward extinction.
Liberation and degradation both played their part. If you want to see naked women, of virtually any kind, do virtually anything to their bodies, it’s a click away. And women no longer need to be beautiful in order to express their talent. Lena Dunham and Adele and Lady Gaga and Amy Adams are all perfectly plain, and they are all at the top of their field.
Will nobody speak up for America’s impoverished bombshells, who stand daily in plastic surgery waiting rooms, desperate for procedures to defuse their bombshell-ness? Writer Stephen Marche continues,
For every Jessica Alba who is dismissed out of hand, or Lindsay Lohan, whose incremental fall into the abyss of drugs and obsolescence we follow like the weather — boring and expected, with a spectacular storm here and there — there’s a Scarlett Johansson telling everyone who will listen just how thoughtful an actor she is.
It’s not Johansson’s fault. Today, unfettered sexual beauty is an impediment. To be serious and respected, it is better to be homely or cute. Or else you must disfigure yourself, like Charlize Theron in Monster. Or you must allow yourself to be brutalized, like Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball. Or you must pretend that you’re really just average, like Tina Fey.
To prove this point, Esquire photographed Megan Fox in a burka for their cover, and the issue broke all newsstand records. Twelve months later, Megan earned three Oscars and a Wolf Prize in Mathematics.
As for the profile, if you skip the “bombshell” theory and go straight to Megan Fox describing speaking in tongues in a Pentecostal church at age 8, it’s not bad! As with all Megan Fox profiles, the most interesting moments are when Megan Fox responds to heavy-breathing male attention by acting completely insane. Nobody takes the bait harder than Megan Fox, not even a men’s magazine editor selecting “perfectly plain” women to name-drop to maximize outrage. Or me blogging about it, I guess.