Pinups on Parade
Free issue! The Peppermint Patty and Lucy van Pelt of newsletters is talking birds, bees, and Gen X-cellence.
News and analysis from two veteran editors who read it ALL to bring you juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, hot goss, and the odd shopping tip—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
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Spreadsnacks,
We spent a chunk of the past week distracting ourselves from the downfall of civilization by pondering an essay in something called Flaming Hydra (yes, we’re on the vanguard) about the “horny profiles” of yore. You know, those of the early 2000s, in which a writer (mostly men) covered a subject (mostly women), “with his tongue unrolling like a Tex Avery cartoon wolf, his eyes bugging out of his head, and his lust so unrestrained that he began to compulsively mix his metaphors, purple his prose and expand his word count beyond all bounds of taste or readability.” According to writer Anna Merlan, who spends most of her days reporting for Mother Jones, it is essential to revisit this mostly dead genre on occasion, “to guard ourselves, as if against an infectious disease—an STI, if you really want to belabor the point—against their recurrence.” Female writers are a problem, too. Merlan is appalled by Lisa Taddeo’s description of Jessica Simpson in Esquire in 2008: “Blond hair the way God meant, blond like Clorox sunshine. A caviar body, if you like your caviar lacquered in barbecue sauce. Breasts like plucked guinea hens, undercooked and overstuffed. And those legs, like those of every coed in every early-80s corduroy skirt, waving across the quad at the guy just behind you.”1
Spreaders, is this prose purple? Gloriously! And is it boring? It is not! Let us tell you, that’s a feat. We take Merlan’s point… mostly. Far be it from us to defend a bunch of lascivious male writers from a time gone by! But we’re scratching our heads: If you’re writing Jessica Simpson, whose entire brand was at one point her sex appeal (newsflash: it ain’t the singing) what exactly are you writing about in all that space you’re not using to describe her Clorox sunshine hair and guinea-hen boobs?
Then this week, along came Rolling Stone like it’s 2004 all over again, with a cover story on Addison Rae, a creature of the internet with 88.5 million followers whose existence we still find perplexing after reading it. What we were able to gather: Addison Rae isn’t not a Jessica Simpson of our times. And by the second sentence it’s clear that writer Brittany Spanos is going to have her work cut out for her: “When the SUV pulls up, Addison Rae is behind the wheel in a striped pinafore with nothing underneath it but black tape in two giant X’s covering her nipples.” How do you write an “evolved” profile of this woman?
Apparently, by avoiding describing her physicality altogether—thereby ignoring a giant percentage of her appeal and certainly the focus of the accompanying extensive Inez and Vinoodh lingerie shoot. Rae even takes Spanos to a lingerie shop, “piling the embellished, one-of-a-kind bustiers and panties into her arms.” Yet the closest the writer comes to actually talking about her looks is: “…whipping her hip-length hair, scrunching her button nose, and flashing those saucer-like brown eyes down the barrel of her iPhone….” The spectacular posterior shown to such great effect in the pics gets nary a syllable. Leer at her looks all you want—just don’t talk about them!
The moment writers stopped being able to tongue-wag a little about what makes a celebrity hot is the moment the celebrity profile as a form went on life-support. The magic of a cover story is access—reading what it’s like to be right up next to the mega-famous, experiencing all that beauty and charisma and, yes, sex appeal… in person. It’s the one thing we can’t get from the celebrity’s own social media and staged Erewhon paparazzi runs. If you’re going to neuter it completely, why run it at all?
Elsewhere in lady-body news, Cosmopolitan’s new cover story on Gracie Abrams just landed with a bang (OK, a ding) on our desks (fine, desktops). Abrams has already been anointed “the new Taylor Swift” by Swift herself. With an endorsement like that, safe to say she doesn’t exactly need Cosmo in the traditional PR-campaign sense. So we’re not sure what incentivized her to prance around in sheer underpants, exposing an extremely fat-free physique for an audience of readers who are probably roughly the age and vulnerability level of her fanbase? (Something, we might add, that to our sieve-like memories, Taylor has never done.) Again, we find ourselves confused. What’s with the double standard between words and images? Last week in Spreadlandia, sugar-“addicted” writer Caity Weaver was taken to task simply for stating the fact of her actual weight—the detail was derided as eating-disorder fodder. This week, Cosmo–under the aegis of the very young and hip-to-the-new-ways editor, Willa Bennett—is doing what for our money looks like old-school thinspo: Exactly the story we’d have ripped out and pinned to our walls back when we were self-hating 16-year-olds for whom “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” We figured a Willa-era cover for J.J.’s daughter would feature looks more along the lines of the, erm, inflatable onesie that Nylon recently opted for. Maybe giving Abrams the ole pop star lingerie treatment is some kind of post-body-positivity stance: All bodies are beautiful and deserve to be celebrated and looked at—including the very thin? But as elderstateswomen we feel compelled to point out that it would be naive to assume young Cosmo readers (and even some oldsters) won’t take images like this to heart.
And so it goes,
Rachel & Maggie
Like Bunnies
Thank you, Jake Silverstein, for creating a dedicated-to-the-Spread issue as a token of appreciation for inviting you on the pod. You really didn’t have to, it’s above and beyond, but we’ll treasure it always. The New York Times Magazine editor in chief told us he and the Gray Lady’s fiercest girl-gang had another “women’s magazine”-esque biggie in the pipeline, and we’re guessing he meant this coming weekend’s new “relationships” issue—in particular, Mireille Silcoff’s2 persuasive case (posted online today) that, contrary to the “misery perspective” on aging, Gen X women like herself are having the best, and the most, sex of any generation. With humor and a boatload of insight, Silcoff—who got divorced in her mid-40s and, much to her own surprise, has spent the handful of years since getting it on (pause for golf clap)—argues that the free-range latchkey kids of her generation, forged in the fire of the ’90s, are emerging into “the flip side” of this kinder, gentler, more open-minded sexual era to find “a womblike bouncy castle where women are invited not just to have orgasms but also to have important conversations about their orgasms.”
But that’s not all, folks: Also in this issue is author/Substacker Daniel Oppenheimer’s astoundingly frank and vulnerable account of couples therapy, in which he finally came to grips with the fact that yes, he’s the problem (specifically, his anger issues). It’s required reading for anybody, male or female, who has spent time on the couples therapy couch, both of your Spreaditors included. And finally, there’s Spread Fantasy Mentor Lisa Miller’s examination of the post-Ozempic marriage: how profound a shift it can be when one partner’s body (and mind) changes dramatically—and the other partner is left mourning a person who vanished. There are lots of on-the-money Lisa Miller-y descriptions of partnered life in this piece, but here’s the big takeaway: This is one of those stories that really drives home how much nicer the world is to thin people.
The point here is that you’re gonna want to go out and seek the full-freight print edition of the Times this weekend. But if you can’t wait to sink in your teeth…
Read “Why Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex” here.
Read “How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me” here.
Read “How Weight-Loss Drugs Can Upend a Marriage” here.
“The brief is simple, classic Geddes: The company wants babies dressed up like petunias sitting in flower pots.”
For the Cut, the delightful Allie Jones scratched a deep-seated itch we didn’t even realize we had by way of an encounter with ’90s photo icon Anne Geddes, whose calendars and coffee-table books Maggie was too Gen X to give in to and Rachel was just Millennial enough to find darling. (Honestly, at Rachel’s junior-high school, you were no one if you weren’t fluent in Down in the Garden.)3 Jones observes Geddes, 68—a Boomer who was recently referenced in a Loewe social campaign???—as she works with a gaggle of six-month-olds on a commercial job for a plant company, and as she contemplates how to adapt her business to the age of Instagram. It’s a quandary we hope Geddes can solve, for her sake and ours too: Geddesian dupes, now a dime a dozen on social media, make us really nervous—like, how did they get that newborn into that chrysalis suit and is she breathing?? Leave it to the professional, people!
Read it here.
Not exactly a deep-tissue profile, but we’ll take it!
Because we can’t go a week without getting breathy about the new season of White Lotus, kicking off on February 16 on HBO (it’s not TV, remember?), allow us to point you to Lauren Bans’s hop-skip-and-a-jump of a profile of Natasha Rothwell for Marie Claire. Rothwell, a Gen X cusper whose life was transformed by the success of White Lotus’s first season—though she’ll forever be Kelli from Insecure to us—is returning to the series as Belinda the massage therapist for season 3 (the character is doing an exchange program in Thailand). Rothwell spends much of the profile expressing gratitude; it’s not our native tongue but, sure, we’ll give it a shot: Natasha, even though we did not care for your Hulu show (despite its promising title: How to Die Alone), we are grateful for you! (You too, Lauren.) Read it here.
Mon On the Mic!
Gen X icon Monica Lewinsky is launching an interview podcast with Wondery. Do we need this show in our lives? Not really. Are we definitely going to listen? Of course we are. Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky is premised on conversations “about what it means to reclaim what’s been lost or taken in the broadest sense.” If this description sounds familiar to you, you’re probably recalling Meghan Markle’s bust of a pod, Archetypes, which sought to “investigate, dissect, and subvert the labels that hold women back.” Except Lewinsky’s actually makes sense. (To quote again from Anna Peele’s Vanity Fair cover story on the Royal Grifters: “Archetypes was complicated as a podcast concept. You had to explain what the archetype was, then why the woman embodied it, but also how it wasn’t true about her. Every episode was like, ‘This is my friend who has been called that archetype but is not that archetype.’”) Also unlike Markle, Lewinsky has for years now provided a drip-drip-drip of better-than-they-need-to-be Vanity Fair columns in her own personal reclamation of her narrative. If reclaiming is a sport, she’s the GOAT. Queue it up here or here.
An Education
Because we are jealous of the delightful and sharp (and younger-than-us) Bess Kalb’s success, we don’t always give our full attention to her Substack, The Grudge Report. But this week—a week spent literally praying that Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy would do the right thing, and then despairing because of course he did not do the right thing—Kalb’s republication of her account of interning for RFK Jr. between high school and college broke through our pettiness and dang. Though it will in no way make you feel better, exactly: like Bess, the post is funny and wise and may even make you feel a little seen. Read it here.
Buy low, sell high, etc. etc.
Remember Ultragrrrl? She is now a day trader. Read her story in Bustle here.
Orgasms for sale! Getcha orgasms!
It’s our life’s work to keep up with The Culture, but the Wall Street Journal recently caught us sleeping on the job: Criminally, we had not been closely following the rise and likely-about-to fall of Gen-Xer Nicole Daedone, the founder of OneTaste—a culty orgasmic meditation “community” that may or may not have conspired to coerce its staff to work extreme-to-the-point-of-illegal hours. Daedone and her former head of sales have been indicted by the FBI. Daedone stands by her business—she’ll preach her methods in prison if she must! You heard it here: Daedone should be played by Laura Dern in the FX/Hulu limited series created by Liz Meriwether. Email us for where to mail our cut for this casting genius-ery.
Read “She Made Orgasmic Meditation Her Life. Not Even Prison Will Stop Her” here.
Rampant. Sex is rampant.
After we finalized this week’s lineup, one Spreaditor looked at the other and spoke her truth: “Honestly, I’m kind of tired of all this sex stuff. Everything is about sex. I mean, I guess some of it is ‘sexy’ and some of it is ‘interesting,’ even ‘inspiring.’ But can we please talk about something else for a minute?” The answer, we came to realize, is nope: unless we’re talking babies in cabbage drag, we shall talk of nothing else. In that state of sex fatigue, we found the Atlantic’s Gen X writer Xochitl Gonzalez’s side-eyed investigation of sex clubs, orgies, and sex parties (note the distinction 🙄) extremely welcome. After speaking with all manner of sex-gathering enthusiasts—prompted by a rash of group-sex alarm bells in august publications such as the New York Post—Gonzalez comes to the conclusion that all the fuss is just “a way to break through all the boredom and numbness. Rich people might go to a sex club because they’re deadened by excess and privilege. Working class people might go because they’re tired of being ground into dust. Either way, they all want to feel something again.” Boner killer, eh? We’re here for it. (Yes we said “boner.” It’s been a day.)
Read “What’s Up With All the Sex Parties? here.
Of course, in response to the horny-profile-about-a-woman subgenre, the horny-profile-about-a-man was born. Anna Merlin would have you believe these are as bad as the rest, of course. But we remain nostalgic for verve-y, devourable accounts like Jessica Pressler’s pioneering 2011 portrait/date with Channing Tatum, or Edith Zimmerman’s subsequent and oft-referenced flirtation with Chris Evans. Would we publish them exactly the same way today? Perhaps not. But they remain bona fide classics.
You may recall Silcoff as the genius who paid her daughter $100 to read a book.
Spreaditor baby pic by Anne Geddes.
The babies! The lettuce leaves! And One Taste.
Perfection.