Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

by Chuck Klosterman

Times change, and you have to change with them, even when the changes are dumb. Something you may notice in the following 2015 feature on Taylor Swift is that I never describe what she looks like or how she was dressed, even though I almost always do that with any celebrity I cover. Around the same time my piece was published in GQ, two other high-profile articles on female pop stars ran in The New York Times: a Nicki Minaj feature by Vanessa Grigoriadis and a reported magazine essay on Rihanna by Miranda July. Grigoriadis noted that Minaj has “a shockingly beautiful and complex face, with a wide, high forehead [and] dark, almond-shaped eyes.” July literally describes sniffing her own blouse hours after the interview in order to relish the remnant scent of Rihanna’s perfume. These are visceral, vivid details. They’re excellent details. But I would no longer write anything close to those passages, assuming the person I was profiling was female. If I did, it would be reframed as creepy misogyny and proof that I didn’t take the woman seriously as an artist. It would derail everything else about the story. It would become the story. This is part of the reason it’s so much easier to write about old white guys: nobody gives a shit how you describe them.