A little dash of high school bitchy

The problem with writing a profile of Tina Fey that’s all about how she lost 30 lbs, got designer frames, and marched out of the writer’s room to sit behind the Weekend Update desk is: that all happened eight years ago.  There have been plenty of profiles of Tina Fey since then, and they’ve all thoroughly described her metamorphosis from dowdy writer to movie star, her “boobs and butt,” and her ambivalence about being a ‘thinking man’s sex symbol.’   So really the problem I have with Maureen Dowd’s Vanity Fair profile, which hinges almost entirely on whether Fey will eat a proffered cupcake — God, forced eating is such a tired trope of celeb-lady profile, almost as tired as “Her skin glowed without makeup!” — is not that it’s bizarrely, anachronistically sexist.  Of course it is bizarrely, anachronistically sexist, it is appearing in a magazine which — desultory long thinky political profiles aside — basically exists to showcase female celebrities’ artistically-photographed wet-tshirt-clad areaolae.

Also it’s by Maureen Dowd.

So nope, not shocked that it’s sexist!  I’m shocked that it’s BORING.  Post Palin-impersonation, two seasons into 30 Rock, I don’t need to read about whether Tina Fey plans to have another baby, and I’m not fascinated to learn that her husband “cooks and sews,” and I don’t care whether she eats a cupcake.  I want to read a story of her success that admits that her success isn’t a fluke based on changes in her appearance. I want to read a story that acknowledges the possibility that the changes in her appearance are a fluke necessitated by her success.   I want someone to ask Tina Fey interesting questions, because she’s a genius, and I’m sure she finds making self-deprecating jokes about the size of her ass as boring we find reading them.

Man, if this is the best magazines can do then they deserve to die.

(Also thanks Lindsay)

13 comments to A little dash of high school bitchy

  • JMc

    Tina Fey is a genius? It’s a great show. I saw Russell Brand on Letterman last night and he was super funny, but genius?

    I love blogs, and though sometimes brilliant, they are often verbal diarrhea. Everything I write is golden. I’m too lazy to write a second draft. Or third or fourth.

    Why should I, my every thought is Golden?

  • Santa Claus

    I didn’t know Tina Fey’s career, “went into hyperdrive this fall, when her Sarah Palin impression convulsed the nation.” I wasn’t convulsing. I didn’t think the writers made all the jabs they could have at Sarah what’s-her-name. It seemed like they were kowtowing when they invited John McCain to make serveral appearances and when Palin hosted the show. Hopefully the republicans learned that presidential elections are not lost or won on a variety show.

    Watching SNL is so painful nowadays that it’s a miracle the show is still on the air. The only thing funny about Saturday Night Live is how unfunny and embarrassing it is. Kenan Thompson, Horatio Sanz, Andy Samberg! NBC must stand for Needs Better Casting. Bring back Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer and Rob Schneider as Orgasm Guy and I’ll be happy.

  • Maureen Dowd is kind of what I worry my blogging will come across like if I’m too blowsy. Her writing style drives me insaaaane.

  • This is awesome, Emily, and makes me remember why I loved you so at Gawker. I miss this kind of thing.

  • emily

    It’s weird that I wrote such a gawkery. jezebelly post on basically my quittiversary.

  • Au contraire!

    Gawkerish, Jezebellian diatribes are shrill, ad hominem calumnies perpetrated by immature, frustrated harridans.

    Your piece is spot on: Maureen Dowd sux!

  • Biggest WTF?: comparing Fey to Daisy Buchanan

  • emily

    @joanne: ACK! RIght? “[ because you have to lean in to hear her... ]but instead of a voice full of money, she has a voice full of FUNNY.” You just picture Maureen Dowd typing that and then like standing back and admiring it on the page and maybe winking at herself in the mirror like, ‘Still got it!’

  • Totally agree!!! Whenever there is a smart woman we concentrate on whether she eats or not. Doesn’t make Mrs. Dowd very smart.

  • Seriously. Maureen is such a weird choice to write this piece because she consistently makes Chris HItchens’ assertion that women aren’t funny seem true. And clearly Tina Fey is waaaay more of a Jordan Baker than a Daisy Buchanan. Of course she is really nothing like a Great Gatsby reference at all, which is what makes Dowd so fucking OFF.

  • What I find so odd about the choice of Dowd as the writer of this given that she was the object of some (albeit gentle) parody in the first season. Perhaps all of the references to Fey’s looks stems in a bit of minor resentment of that, in addition to her normal hangups? It resembles the whole “I’m going to tell my friends that I’m voting for Barack Obama, but there’s an 80% chance I’m going to secretly vote for McCain” line that was eerily prescient to the final two candidates kind of weirdness that the whole “ascent of Tina Fey” took leading up to the election.

  • rand

    Seriously, Fey is an unfunny, talentless wench.

    And everything written for SNL must pass a phalanx of conservative republican censors before it airs. Karl Rove rewrites every joke that is deemed too liberal and replaces it with something that obliquely mirrors the generic dying republican rhetoric of the day.

  • stephen

    yeah, tina fey’s not a genius. and 30 rock is much more entertaining than it is funny.

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