In this column, we deliver hot (and cold) takes on pop culture, judging whether a subject is overrated or underrated.
By Tabitha Carvan
You know what was really great? When Harry Styles pashed supermodel Emily Ratajkowski right there on a rainy street somewhere in Tokyo while awkwardly holding one of her hands, but also pressed against a silver van, with John Legend’s Dope playing in the background.
“Happy to help,” Legend later commented proudly on Instagram.
“Slut era,” tweeted the steadfastly sex-positive Ratajkowski a few days afterwards. I love her.
The Kiss Heard Round The World was the highlight of my month, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
If there is one woman on this Earth who deserves a “passionate liplock”, as the tabloids called it, with Harry Styles, it’s EmRata. “I attract the worst men,” she said recently. She is in the middle of a divorce from a man with the word “Bear” in his name. Also, she dated Pete Davidson.
“Good for her,” I said watching the video from Tokyo on loop, my eyes glued to my phone much like Harry Styles’ lips were glued to EmRata’s face.
Then I inspected photos which fans had dug up of Ratajkowski at a Harry Styles show in Paris last year, dancing away - right next to Styles’ girlfriend at the time, Olivia Wilde. Awkward! And then I watched another video, this one from a Mexican TV station, featuring 2014-era Styles citing Ratajkowski as a celebrity crush - but pronouncing her name entirely wrong. Even more awjkward!
Then I read a Slate magazine piece called “The Kissing Style of Harry Styles: An Investigation” which was very important and much needed because The Kiss Heard Round The World felt like it actually could have been heard around the world. There was so much mouth involved! I don’t know what sound a really good-looking python makes when it dislocates its jaws and swallows whole a really good-looking deer, but that would be the sound.
Finally, EmRata “spoke out” about the pash, meaning she was asked about it by the LA Times.
“Sometimes things just happen,” she said. So true!
And sometimes those things just happen to be the highlight of my week. Okay, fine - my month.
I could do a really excellent job of justifying why I enjoyed all this so much, and why someone like Ratajkowski is a worthy object of my attention. I’d whip out my university library login and, in a flash, link to studies in psychology journals which show that celebrity gossip relieves stress and facilitates social connection. I could say things like “evolutionarily speaking” and “parasocial relationships” and “Emily Ratajkowski reads Flaubert, you know”.
I always have this kind of rhetorical weaponry close to hand, you see, because when you enjoy something as glorious as the dating life of Emily Ratajkowksi, you need to be forearmed. At any moment, someone could leap out at you, demanding that you defend yourself.
Not even the corners of the internet solely dedicated to celebrity gossip are safe. No, your adversaries will make a special trip to these sacred places, just so they can write comments like, “What about some real news?” and “Focus on something that MATTERS for a change” and “Wow, who cares?” and “Nobody cares” and “Why would anyone care?” And every possible variant thereof.
Obviously, I care, and John Legend cares, and the enormous, profitable audience serviced by the celebrity industrial complex cares. And then there’s EmRata’s 30 million Instagram followers. But it’s hard, when all one wants to do is sit back and read about whomst pasheth whom, to pretend you’re not answerable to these questions, even if they’re only being asked by the internet commenters of one’s mind.
And actually, my internal, self-generated commentary hits harder than anything offered up by the nobody-cares brigade. “Does this make me a bad feminist?” I cringe as I scroll. “What about celebrity privacy? What about the effect of all these half-naked photos of EmRata on impressionable young girls?” And worst of all, “What does this say about me?”
I got to thinking about all this recently not because of The Kiss, but because it’s football season. At this time every year, many people I know and love, plus all kind of randos I follow on social media, proudly post about their various teams and codes and drafts and goals and… other sport things.
There’s one guy I enjoy following, who for most of the year posts about native wildlife and politics but who also seasonally, and very enthusiastically, tweets about the Canberra Raiders.
And I do not care at all! Not one bit. But also, I just don’t mind! I don’t expect him to justify it. I don’t demand that he explain why he enjoys something as pointless as sport, and he clearly doesn’t feel the need to, either. I don’t hold him responsible for everything every footballer, or every football fan, has ever done. It’s almost as if his interest in football doesn’t affect his entire personhood.
Imagine being that guy! Imagine if, like the woman herself has written in one of her many essays (she’s an author, you know) I pledged: “I refuse to live in this world of shame and silent apologies.” Our lives, she continues, “cannot be dictated by the perceptions of others.”
What if I wrote this entire thing like I was a football fan, with no need to defend myself, or EmRata, at all?
In her recent LA Times interview, Ratajkowski said she strives “to speak to the multifaceted parts of womanhood”. She wears bikinis, she pashes popstars on the street, she’s a mother, she writes essays, she reads Flaubert.
“All these parts of me exist,” she said. So true!
Tabitha Carvan is the author of This Is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch (Fourth Estate).
To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.
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