Rich Cohen, I see what you did there.

Let’s talk about this June Vanity Fair issue with Jessica Simpson.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/06/jessica-simpson200906

I generally don’t pay attention to Vanity Fair, but there’s this excellent blog post on Entertainment Weekly, which gets things right surprisingly often, about it.

http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2009/05/jessica-simpson.html

I decided to go read the article myself, and everything that’s mentioned in the post regarding weight is pretty much spot-on. It’s worse than he says, too. Whether subconsciously on purpose, Cohen sure likes to use his junk-food metaphors when describing Simpson – she’s like Lucille Ball in the candy factory; she’s McDonald’s to Britney Spears’ Burger King and Christina Aguilera’s Hardee’s. Hey Rich, I see what you did there. 

As the EW post mentions, the article really isn’t about her weight – although Rich Cohen admits himself that he mentally appended that question to everything in his interview. Why? Because she’s skinny again! Yay! All is well with the world and now we can talk about her fall from good Christian girl grace to the world of pop and of sex. Or so the narrative goes.

The maddening thing about this article is that it gets so close to getting things right. But instead of this being a metaphor where you’re climbing a cliff and you’re just so close to reaching the vista at the top, it’s one where you’re leaping over a pit and you’re just so close to landing on the other side – i.e. you still fail.

There’s the usual heteronormative stuff – a “normal couple” is “you and your girl,” and I really don’t think he’s writing for lesbians. For instance, there’s the whole saga of churchy Joe Simpson and his creeperific antics. Cohen mentions this about Joe:

“Joe Simpson used to bring unwed mothers home to live, to counsel and feed, but also as a kind of visual warning to his daughters: Here is what comes from yielding to temptation! When Jessica was 12, Joe gave her a purity ring, on which she pledged to keep her virginity until its taking could be ordained by God (and aired on MTV).”

There is absolutely nothing about this anecdote that is not flat-out fucking creepy. And that’s why you’d bring it up in an article, right? Like an essay. Present evidence for your case. Cohen later mentions how the “subtext” of Simpson’s show Newlyweds is Joe sticking a camera into her Loss of Chastity. But for some reason, Cohen isn’t on the this-is-fucking-creepy case. He’s got another case:

“He’s the spiky-haired Texan who seems responsible, in one way or another, for everything Jessica has done…. He is a fascinating man, a minister who quit the church for showbiz, or, to be precise, quit one kind of showbiz for another.” About Joe’s profession as a constantly traveling minister:

“It’s a righteous calling, but a hard life.” And later on, Cohen calls him a “a uniquely American figure, who has made a place for himself beside the great Colonel Tom Parker, another manager of exclusive clientele.”

Yeah. Good ol’ Average Joe. Undoubtedly some of this praise is meant to be ironic – Cohen does mention that Joe’s business is selling images – but he doesn’t go far enough. He gets that Joe’s investment in his daughter’s career is “chilling,” but the closest he gets to really criticizing the massive fucking creepiness is an offhand comment about how he’s “a bit too aware of his daughter’s sexuality” – and even that isn’t the point. Of course daughters have sexuality – they’re people. Being aware of it isn’t the problem. The problem is being a patriarchal douchebag about it. 

And then there’s a bit later on about how Simpson used to be a Christian musician until Teh Breasts caused Teh Menz to get Teh Lustz and she went over to the dark side of pop music. Cohen on this: “Too sexy for church, thus forced from the world of Hallelujah to the world of Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.” He mentions that this is part of the story of Jessica Simpson, but it’s not just her. Katy Perry’s story, for instance, looks pretty much the same. 

It’s not just musicians, either. This is the story of Christianity and of society. If you repress sexuality, you can make a fortune later on when you package it up, dumb it down, and sell it to people. And since we live in a sexist society, it’s women who are primarily hurt.

But, of course, we should cut him some slack in his analysis; he couldn’t focus the entire time because he kept thinking about her weight. How frustrating that must be, always being told to think about weight. 

If there’s one silver lining to all of this, I guess, it’s that the article has more views than the slide show of “sizzling photographs.” How long is that going to last?