Margot Robbie is not hot enough

And neither are you.

I asked a friend if she’d seen this Summer’s blockbuster, she said she had, she thought it was pretty good, but that Margot Robbie wasn't hot enough to play the lead.

“Margot Robbie?” I coughed. “Margot Robbie, the double Oscar nominee who embodies every physical quality we have been collectively conditioned to desire? That Margot Robbie?”

My friend said that yeah, she was alright but they should’ve hired someone hotter.

At first I was bemused; how could anyone (who isn't critiquing her function as legible shorthand for oppressive euro-centric, sexist, ableist, standards of cis beauty) question Robbie’s good looks? Of all the hot takes from the usual nuts, the anti-woke Barbie doll-burners, the preachers cursing the movie “in the name of the Lord” (which are almost too camp to be considered with any seriousness) I thought this was the strangest, because it came from the liberal, secular mind of white millennial woman who looks not unlike M.R. herself.

Robbie is slender but not too skinny, she’s glamorous but approachable, athletic but not masculine, feminine without being mawkishly girlish, the woman looks like she was designed by Donatella Versace in collaboration with the US National Dairy Council for goodness sake. She’s a flawless specimen.

Moreover her star persona is finely calibrated to be one of intelligence without belligerence, she’s pro-writers’s strike but she’s no Hanoi Jane. She’s sexy but seemingly in control of that sex appeal, she doesn’t put across the pin-up naivety of a Marilyn Monroe but there’s nothing pneumatic or pornographic about her as with say a Pamela Anderson or an Angelina Jolie. She’s fun but not as hokey browski as Jennifer Lawrence, she’s objectively gorgeous without the complications of a Cate Blanchett, she’s capable of moving between smash hit and indie, but she’s no kooky Tilda Swinton or hippie everywoman Frances McDormand. She might not be your dream gal, pal, I thought, but to say she’s not hot enough seems, well, illogical.

My friend’s read of the situation came at a particularly choice moment for me which is probably why it rang so loudly in my head. I’d seen the film and it hadn’t exactly eased the crushing weight of dysphoria I’ve been squirming like a Tudor martyr under lately. As much as I enjoyed Barbie (and reader, enjoy it I did) watching Ms Robbie bouncing across the big screen for two hours in all her board certified beauty, was a little like being tied to a bar stool and being forced to listen to the greatest drunken chat-up lines of every random straight dude ever, with each one inevitably unwinding towards, “But I’m really only into girls”.

Staring up at that gigantic quasi-fascistic exposition of feminine perfection I felt like I was being read to filth by everyone else in the cinema. “This way": Beauty!” said the neon arrow which descended from the ceiling. Then came another illumination, one with half of it’s lightbulbs missing, “This way: you ={”

It seems that my friend is not alone in her dissatisfaction though; there’s the chef’s kiss apotheosis of cultural idiocy that is the men’s rights activist who tweeted that our Margie is “mid”, and the now infamous fan page which facetunes Robbie’s images (see above) before posting them, as if in fear that their icon is failing to be gorgeous enough. I know it’s par for the course that famous women get slammed for their looks, however they look, but honestly if, after hours of hair and make-up, years of red carpet training, and all the kale, calisthenics and cosmetology Hollywood can throw at her, the most talked-about movie star on the planet still needs to be yassified before she’s suitable for public consumption, then frankly the rest of us are fucked.

Myself, I spent last year running the strangest lap of book readings and press interviews, popping up in national newspapers blowdried and retouched to within an inch of my life, groomed by pros and dressed in clothes that had to go back two days later. Obviously that was a lot of fun, it’s wonderful to both step into your mega-watt glam authenticity and simultaneously acknowledge that it’s all gigantically silly, only it did leave me in the awkward position of having to compete with this advanced and corrected version of myself.

I now have an identical twin sister who only lives online, she’s just that bit glossier than me, she doesn't have a frown line and is never troubled by a blue shadow on her upper lip, and honestly she doesn’t make me feel good. While I have returned, for the time being, to a slightly more demotic existence, she is out there making me look bad. I’m back in this milky oblong body of mine, wondering each time I look in the mirror, why nobody has taken a mo to use the Gaussian blur filter on my acne scars. I’m residing at my desk hashing out a new book, sloshing through the British summer in my tie-dye and my Garfield sweaters, while my evil twin and Margot Robbie are out drinking Negroni sbagliati with Prosecco in it, and talking about me behind my back.

Of course unbeknown to her, it isn’t Margot Robbie at all, but Robbie’s stand-in. The real Margot is in Malibu on the elliptical wondering, “Will I ever be enough?” while Greta Gerwig cranks up the resistance level to 12. “You want that Oscar, huh?” she shrieks as Robbie sobs, “Yeah? Well, you better work, bitch.”

Essentially my friend is right of course; Margot Robbie doesn’t cut it, she isn't meeting the standard required of her. And I have felt the greatest rush of relief in realising this, because when you follow the thread to its logical end, it means that well, nobody is.

The scramble to be the most desirable versions of ourselves at all times isn’t only an inane struggle it’s an impossible task, designedly so. It’s also a vast waste of time because it means we either pine for what we looked like “then” or wish our lives away dreaming about how good we’ll look “when.” Robbie could get cat eye thread lifts and have her nose filed down to a pixie point, remove all the buccal fat from her face and have it pumped back into her lips and she still wouldn’t be beautiful enough, she’d only be “desperate” and “unrecognisable”. So what hope does anyone else have in this marketplace of vain desires? What chance do I have with my living room door of a body and my laser removal resistant leg hair? Less than zero tbqh, but I’m coming to recognise that as a wonderful thing. I feel like I’ve been let off the hook, as though someone just whispered into my ear to tell me that I’m not obliged to calorie control my life or book in for subcision after all, because the will to beauty is futile.

Ultimately it’s hats off to my friend, because since she gave me her assessment I’ve come to the long-overdue realisation that in this competition there is no way to win. Unless of course you tap out and accept the facts as they are, that Margot Robbie is not hot enough and frankly that is a huge relief.