Margot Robbie – And All Of Australia – Has Been Creepily Profiled By Vanity Fair

If you’re were hoping to not be skeezed-out today, you are out of luck.

Margot Robbie is having quite a 2016, starring in both The Legend of Tarzan and the upcoming Suicide Squad.

Nonetheless, she must still contend with being a young actress facing the judgmental gaze of a dude-run industry, fending off accusations that she’s lying about her age, or, in the case of a new Vanity Fair profile, being told she’s “sexy and composed even while naked but only in character”.

That’s as writer Rich Cohen puts it, suggesting he has intimate knowledge of how “sexy and composed” she is while naked and not in character. At one point, he even refers to her as an "it".

These are just some of the questionable lines from the cover story that has raised the ire of an always-irritable internet; many of them even pull the entire continent of Australia into the fracas.

“Australia is America 50 years ago,” Cohen writes.

“Sunny and slow, a throwback, which is why you go there for throwback people. They still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas in Melbourne and Perth, still dwell in a single mass market in Adelaide and Sydney. In the morning, they watch Australia’s Today show. In other words, it’s just like America, only different. When everyone here is awake, everyone there is asleep, which makes it a perfect perch from which to study our customs, habits, accents.”

Of course, we as a nation can take it, and by all accounts, Robbie is not the kind to be deflated by a misguidedly sexist puff piece. Still, the Vanity Fair article is an eyebrow-raiser.

“She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance,” is a bunch of words that open the piece.

What follows is not much better, and Twitter agrees.

The @VanityFair piece on Margot robbie by rich Cohen is so gross in so many ways. Clearly written by a man who knows - (cont.)

— Josh Lawson (@ThatJoshLawson) July 6, 2016

- NOTHING about Australia. It's full of things about the country that simply aren't true. Not to mention the slimy, lecherous, - (cont.)

— Josh Lawson (@ThatJoshLawson) July 6, 2016

- stomach churning way he writes about Margot robbie. Yuck. Hollywood sexism is very clear here as demonstrated by this creepy, - (cont.)

— Josh Lawson (@ThatJoshLawson) July 6, 2016

- ill informed journalist. And I use that word very, very loosely.

— Josh Lawson (@ThatJoshLawson) July 6, 2016

It wasn't just Josh Lawson who was mad, either.

Hey @VanityFair. I rewrote that Margot Robbie lede with Alexander Skarsgard. Yep. Still creepy. pic.twitter.com/py9HAUVP4a

— Donna Dickens (@MildlyAmused) July 6, 2016

the Margot Robbie profile is actually very good if you just pretend it is about my parents' dog, Robbie pic.twitter.com/UBWELBrhnI

— Lindsay Zoladz (@lindsayzoladz) July 6, 2016

Oh my god, the dude who wrote that Margot Robbie piece co-created HBO's Vinyl. You can't make this stuff up.

— Caroline Siede (@CarolineSiede) July 6, 2016

Just read the Fatal Attraction novella or as some are calling it, the Vanity Fair #MargotRobbie piece.

— Josh Gad (@joshgad) July 7, 2016

In the wake of L.A. Weekly’s discomfiting profile of Sky Ferreira, you’d think magazines would be a little more self-aware when assigning bros to write about women in almost purely objectifying terms.

But if not, the internet will make a point of reminding them today.

Photo: Vanity Fair.