If you’re bothering to read this, you likely know Cat Marnell, the former beauty and health editor of xoJane.com who was fired/quit when her drug use interfered with the interests of her bosses (those interests being, hey, we don’t want a drug addict working for us). That seems like the fairest way to put it, considering the typical description seems always to be some variation of “Cat Marnell decides drugs are cooler than work.” Whatever. In a high school paper, the last sentence of the first paragraph would be a thesis, so I’ll hit “Enter” after typing: Fuck Cat Marnell.
But why is Cat Marnell, a darling of the blogosphere, deemed so perfectly problematic that she gains adoring followers by virtue of italicized writing and excessive similes? The gist of Marnell’s appeal (so funny to call her by surname only) seems to be the fact that she broke the mold of beauty and lifestyle writing because she deigned to reference sex and drugs in her often irreverent posts. I know, go dust off your Bible and fondle the wooden rosary your grandmother gave you for Confirmation. Maybe start self-flagellation rituals. Whatever gets you into heaven these days.
So, um, Cat Marnell does drugs, has unprotected sex, has been to rehab but doesn’t care for it, and adores stimulants? It’s almost as though… she’s… talking to us… on drugs! Anyone who’s taken speed consistently knows the drug’s most debilitating effect is convincing the user that her work and her ideas are unique, revolutionary, epiphanic, that pursuing those ideas to the fullest extent of their possibilities is a necessity. That’s one reason stimulants appeal to creative types. Of course, a person’s belief in his or her ability to create something unique and worthwhile does not make it so.
Let’s take a look at Cat Marnell’s work and her ideas; let’s peel back the hard, brittle shell of her bouncy pop writing like it’s a reinvigorating mask to see what exactly she has to say, because otherwise we would simply be irresponsible assholes criticizing someone who genuinely suffers from a serious affliction. Which might be where we end up after this is all finished, but we’ll live with the consequences.
Marnell appeals to and shocks the beauty world so much because rather than capitulating to corporate desires by promoting the standard sort of beauty and lifestyle writing that helps sell products, she injects her own life into a stale form. As far as I can tell, that means she talks about all the drugs she does and all the sex she has. Not much rock and roll though. Two out of three ain’t bad, but claiming that writing about lipstick (and its relationship to blowjobs) shakes up an industry when you simultaneously provide personal weight updates that hover around the 100-lb mark minimizes your credibility as an iconoclast.
So a lipstick post might turn into a blowjob post, a post on the latest runway collection turns into a story about blowing coke off a C-list celebrity’s Italian sausage-shaped dick, etc. What’s the big deal? Why do so many people find her so endearing? Cat Marnell is not the first person to write about sex or drugs, nor is she the first person to write while on drugs. Let’s turn to Mish Way (seriously!), the VICE writer who interviewed Marnell before xoJane.com pulled the plug on Cat’s employment:
“I know Cat is one of those people who most can't get behind. But whether you love her or hate her, what she is doing is interesting. No one has approached beauty like this before. As a feminist, a magazine writer, and someone who feels slightly connected to Cat’s twisted world, she spoke to me. I wanted to know what was really going on behind her troubled drug-addicted-beauty-queen internet persona.”
Wow, a girl from an uber-privileged upper-class background finds it easy to a) get jobs, and b) quit those jobs when it suits her! That is interesting! It’s downright revelatory! It’s revealed that rich, spoiled brats can do whatever they want whenever they want. There's nothing beneath Cat Marnell's exterior; she's all surface. When you wade through the drugs and sex and all that good stuff, you find... more drugs, more sex, and a person who's able to write well about drugs and sex.
Cat Marnell is uninteresting because she doesn't change. She is predictable. She is a rich, privileged white girl writing about her rich, privileged white girl problems. The super-formalized, ultra-conservative fashion world – conservative as in, “we don’t like change when it doesn’t suit our interests,” not, “we refuse to show tits” – eats this shit up, because they’re constantly searching for ways to appear as though their project of asserting beauty as value relates to that of the average person. Sometimes this disconnect results in racism (see: Galliano, John, and Vogue Italia); in Cat Marnell’s case, it results in faux pity for someone who’s found a way to turn drugs into a legitimate income source. She’s so pretty! And talented! Yet she destroyed herself in spite of the fact that she was working for an industry she loved. There are no victims here, which makes it an unchallenging story that tricks the reader into thinking it's challenging because it deals with drugs, traditionally a taboo subject.
Just how banal are Marnell's ideas? Here's what she had to say about her success in beauty writing, from the same VICE interview referenced above:
“First of all, with beauty I knew I would get a response just by being myself because beauty is so square. Obviously, I could just write it straight and I could write that in my sleep. ‘The Lip Gloss Round Up!’ It’s stupid. I just hated it. It’s so boring. ‘Master the Disheveled Pony Tail!’ You don’t even really write them, you just get the quotes from the hair stylist and then you plug in a product. But when you write ‘Lipstick That Won’t Come Off on a Dick,’ you get a response.”
The disheveled ponytail should not be conflated with the blowjob ponytail, which is hot and honest and a product of real life, and not formulaic writing. Not formulaic at all.
We all know how this story ends: on a precipice. Instead of falling off, Marnell will climb slowly and clumsily down the side of a sheer rock face, bumbling her way into obscurity. I have no doubt that she does not give a fuck, as VICE would point out, but I also think that’s less because of a general recklessness than complete security. She knows her place in this world. There is no incentive to change. Cat Marnell’s builds problems from her dull life’s unused parts, but she dramatizes them because that's her job.
Former NBA player Charles Barkley once said, in response to his excessive gambling, “I do have a gambling problem, but it’s not really a problem because I can afford to gamble.” Cat Marnell can afford to live her own lifestyle, and whatever she writes about it has carries as much value as a Charles Barkley book on gambling. Marnell has such a talent for brainwashing her admirers, however, that she’s made it a cliché to pity her and sympathize with her, to the extent that her own employers felt the need to wash their hands of standard practices like drug testing.
She’s done nothing but emphasize conformity to the magazine world’s notions of beauty at all costs, and any perceived “brutal honesty” with which she professes to write doesn’t mean that her words are truth. Brutal honesty offers an easy shield to hide behind; you make insensitive, thoughtless comments and claim it they were made in the name of honesty. Cat Marnell is not honest; she’s a phony. A rich, privileged phony who cares about superficialities above anything else, and she will be just fine without anyone reading her blogs, her columns and any books she manages to finish in the future. So get off Cat Marnell’s dick already and go back to being a real person in the real world, one who couldn’t routinely be described as coquettish after fucking an unnamed celebrity.
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