What Was the Horny Profile?
By Anna Merlan
Once upon a time, in the dark days of the early 2000s, we were beset on all sides by horny profiles. This was a replicable genre, wherein a writer—usually, but not always a man, met a subject—usually, but not always, a woman, often a model or an actress—and spent the entire time 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. These profiles were badly written, they needed a cold shower, and there were so many of them.
The horny profile is now, mercifully, a mostly-dead genre, something that withered along with the popularity and influence of men’s magazines. But to re-read the horniest of them is to consider what function they once served, and to guard ourselves, as if against an infectious disease—an STI, if you really want to belabor the point—against their recurrence.
How Horny Were They?
If you’re younger than, say, 30, you may not remember just how bizarrely, relentlessly lecherous things could get back then. Female celebrities of the early and mid-2000s were routinely objectified in ways that would be considered untouchably creepy now. Young pop stars wore rings pledging to remain virgins until marriage, sparking incessant speculation as to their resolve. Jokes were made about counting down until their 18th birthdays. Their bodies were dissected endlessly. Perez Hilton drew dicks and cum on their faces (and every woman’s face, basically). Jessica Simpson was heckled constantly in the tabloids for being “fat” when she looked like this.
All of which is to say: it was a gross time. The horny profiles were right at home in the prevailing fetid atmosphere, an invasive bit of would-be literary performance that described a woman’s physical appearance in ways that were also, you know, sexy. At its core, the idea of the horny profile seemed to be that male writers would show the average jamoke reader what it was like to be in the presence of these women, which required sharing ludicrously prurient descriptions of them in print.
Why in God’s Name Did This Happen?
The horny profile emerged at a time of declining fortunes for magazines and celebrities alike. Magazines—or so I hear anyway—used to have expense accounts, lavish travel budgets, and all the time in the world: “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,”an absolutely glorious account of mostly failing to get anywhere near the man, took three months of work and thousands of dollars. It became one of the defining accounts of how confining and airless a certain brand of mega-fame could become. (One of the few later profiles that comes close: Vanessa Grigoriadis’s unforgettable 2008 look at a mid-breakdown Britney Spears, that one also relied more on access to the paparazzi chasing her than to the pop queen herself.)
By the mid-2000s, the business of being famous was exceedingly tightly controlled, celebrities swept up behind powerful publicists and doled back out to the public in weak little morsels. In practice, the only access to a celebrity that a profile writer would get would be limited to the most boring scenes and places imaginable. The horny profile writers may or may not have actually been horny, but they were almost certainly bored and desperate, inflating an hour spent with a famous woman at some arid little hotel press junket or claustrophobic photoshoot into an orgiastic celebration of their own arousal.
Without real time or access, everything depended on a writer’s strength and skills, their ability to set a mood. And mostly, for reasons of courting controversy, playing to their audience, and maybe a pinch of laziness, the mood was, generally: horny.
Okay, Fine, Let’s See Some of the Metaphors
Gladly. “Megan is beautiful,” wrote British GQ’s Alex Bilmes of Megan Fox, back in 2009.
No kidding. She's beautiful in the same way that Bill Gates is wealthy and Barack Obama influential. She is 23 years old, 5'5", curvy as a canyon road and slender as your chances, with long, dark hair, penetrating blue eyes and a full mouth that, when the mood takes her, flashes a smile as wide as a movie screen. In short, as I e-mailed the Editor of this magazine from the set: “Hubba hubba.”
This is very bad writing– it makes Fox sound like a Cheshire cat with scoliosis—but, in fairness to Bilmes, it’s exactly what they were all doing. (When he settles down a dozen grafs in and writes more straightforwardly, the profile is perfectly readable.)
Jessica Simpson was profiled by Lisa Taddeo for Esquire in 2008. Though she did not perform horniness for her subject, the physical descriptions of Simpson are nonetheless insane:
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. Cheerleader legs. Jackknifing legs that split the air like seesaws. In the Dukes of Hazzard music video, those legs are in cowboy boots, moving like joysticks across your screen. She's got that dumb-fox high-maintenance pout. She's got her own money: She can buy your house just to use the toilet. She's one of those Easy-Bake celebrities, up from Abilene, Texas, with a fizzy pop beat on church-choir training wheels. She's hot as fresh milk and has an okay voice, and the rest just happens around her. Luck on Red Bull.
Finally, brace yourself and consider Esquire’s appalling 2011 description of model Brooklyn Decker, which is mainly a very literary and extremely long-winded lecture on the topic of she doesn’t mind if you stare at her tits:
She was then merely a swimsuit model and may in fact be only that now: known for her frame, for her confident carriage in body paint, for the slope of the back of her legs, for eyes that issue the command Get over here. And the breasts, ah, yes, always the breasts. It'd be foolish, and a little dishonest, to mention her history of swimsuit modeling, to allude to the Sports Illustrated cover and to the myriad catalogs of her image on the Internet without mentioning her breasts. They are not much evident tonight, here in the kitchen. She plays smaller in her own space, in a sweater and jeans like a lonely college girl, the kind who keeps her body a secret. But there they are. Have a look. She does not mind—she can't. Fill in your own simile. Just don't make her less than her whole in so doing.
Did They Pretend Like They Had Some Kind of Sexual Tension With the Subject?
As the deranged description of Decker and her variously accommodating body parts makes clear, this was the other crucial piece of the horny profile: pretending that the interview might, at any moment, slip loose from its bonds and hurtle both interviewer and interviewee headlong into bed. Whether any readers actually fell for this or found it to be an appealing construction is unclear, and yet it continued.
Did They Also Do Weird Stuff When the Subject Said Something Intelligent?
To answer that, dear exhausted reader, I simply refer you to the infamous French-language profile of model Emily Ratajkowski, written by married journalists Thomas Chatteron Williams and Valentine Faure. The piece spends a great deal of time devoted to the fact that Ratajkowski is both professionally hot and describes herself as a feminist.
“I must add here that as she’s articulating her absolutely intelligent response,” one characteristic line reads, “she’s wearing an extraordinarily deep neckline without a bra, all the while surely knowing, deep down, just how absurd and confusing, even downright contradictory, such an outfit looks with everything she’s saying.”
The subject herself eventually weighed in to declare the piece “gross/embarrassing,” yet another “absolutely intelligent response,” as the profile might have put it.
A Fucking Steak?
One of the last unreconstructed entries in the horny profile arena was a 2017 Esquire piece about Penelope Cruz, which is considerably less bizarre even as it fixates intensely on her eating a steak (sexy) and what might happen if she got a little drunk. (“I don't say that, obviously. But I do think it.”) This piece was, and I imagine this will come as no real surprise, also by Alex Bilmes, whose 2009 descriptions of Megan Fox defied both the basic principles of good writing and also physics.
Amazingly, this was the latter of two Esquire profiles that focused their panting attention on Penelope Cruz eating a steak. The first, in 2014, was written by one of the magazine’s most notorious over-writers, Chris Jones, and it consists mostly of a delirious meditation on the concept of Spain—bullfighting, Hemingway, Madrid, the fact that it’s nice to be a magazine writer on assignment in a European city in August—broken only by a brief, strangely damp-feeling glimpse of Cruz eating a meal.
She is always hungry, she says. She orders the chuletón de buey, a huge slab of bone-in rib-eye steak, seared on the outside and covered with coarse salt. When it arrives, the beef is so rare that it is crimson and gleaming in the middle. If it ever had a relationship with fire, their time together was insignificant and short. She stabs her fork into her first thick slice and cuts into it with her knife.
The fact that two different journalists tried to conjure animalistic arousal from the same threadbare material of Penelope Cruz performing an identical routine, wearily eating a steak in front of them like a sad lioness in a zoo, is a really incredible testimony to how this whole thing worked. As Gawker’s Leah Finnegan pointed out at the time, the whole thing slipped by without learning much of anything about Cruz: “The unwitting reader who is trying to learn what might be up with the Sexiest Woman Alive (nothing?), is greeted by nine loquacious paragraphs about bullfighting.”
Jesus Christ, How Long Did This Go On?
The lusty interview fever could really have broken way back in 2011, when Edith Zimmerman was tasked with profiling actor Chris Evans for GQ. Her response was to lay bare the expectations and subtexts of the genre, by frankly acknowledging that she had no idea whether or not she and her subject were flirting.
“I couldn't quite figure out if he was a goofy, warm, regular dude,” she writes, “or just playing the character of goofy, warm, regular dude in order to charm a female reporter.”
This admission alone should have broken the spell and freed us all from the dictates of magazine profile horniness. It went on for years, though, until, straining under the weight of various global catastrophes and quite possibly the Me Too movement, the horniness diminished at last.
And yet, vestiges of it remain. The most recent and quite possibly the strangest entry in this long and ignominious record might be a Vanity Fair piece about Augusta Britt, the woman who says she began a romantic and ultimately sexual relationship with Cormac McCarthy when she was a 16-year-old runaway from foster care.
The piece fell short on a remarkable number of fronts, from its patchy reporting to prose so purple it should be kept in a wine cellar in Hell. And it isn’t horny about Britt in a classic sense despite its many exhausting descriptions of her beauty (“When she blinks, her large blue eyes seem to tinkle in crystal delicacy. And her blond Finnish hair frames a youthful face that has slipped into a barely discernible older age. One sees her effortlessly—when she laughs, when she contemplates—in all her unvanished youth and beauty.”)
What makes author Vincenzo Barney the spiritual descendant of a horny profiler is that he and his frantic, plate-spinning prose are the centerpiece and real objects of his interview, his rhapsodies eclipsing the woman who was supposed to be his subject. Britt barely comes into focus; she’s beside the point, in the manner of the countless actresses and models who were turned into insane-adjective generators in an earlier time. The heyday of the horny profile is mercifully behind us—and yet, in so many of the self-absorbed, onanistic, nonsensical celebrity interviews of today, like a zombie making a come-hither motion from an open grave, it lives on.