Features and bugs

MeToo's one victory

When it is said that Kate Moss was “discovered” at age 14, this does not mean that she had, prior to that age, been kept hidden away, like in one of those horrible news stories you sometimes read. There is a horribleness angle, but it is less extreme, and less about Kate Moss personally.

I was thinking about this in light of the scandal now underway about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. A scandal that amounts to relearning things we already knew about Trump. Things that, at least in 2016 (I think 2024 was more about other things), were a big part of his appeal to the people to whomst he has one. Look at that playboy, that cad, with all that money, who surrounds himself with the world’s most beautiful women, which is exactly what I’d be doing if I could. This wasn’t the internal monologue of all Trump voters, but I guarantee it was that of some of them. The gross-about-women stuff, the accusations, the more-than-accusations, the Access Hollywood tape, it was all feature-not-bug to certain audiences.

What happened since Trump was elected in 2016 was, of course, the MeToo movement. October 2017 and the Harvey Weinstein story breaking. MeToo did not stop men from having the alluded-to internal monologue. But it challenged it. MeToo didn’t stop rapists from raping. It did invite a new prudery, some of which has been bad news for human connection, but other of which—especially things like what this post is about—were most welcome.

A 2016 Vogue article put the AVERAGE runway model’s age at 17. This means there were older ones and younger ones. An April 2017—so just-just pre-MeToo—Teen Vogue article (pre-woke Teen Vogue, mind you) swooned over a 14-year-old who had already been modeling for 10 years. Karlie Kloss’s “discovery” was at 13. As was Miranda Kerr’s. Very young models were not aberrations but the default. Forget older models as in 60-plus. A 25-year-old on the catwalk was an oddity.

Much is made of Gen Z or MeToo or whichever else being too uptight about, say, age-gap relationships, power differentials, or people hitting on one another irl. And yes, all of that, yes. We do not need webs of intricate rules about how two 30-somethings in the same industry but at different companies cannot date each other because one is a friend of a friend of the other, this helps no one. However. One thing that is different now than in before-times and unequivocally better is the de-normalization of using images of girls to illustrate Beautiful Woman.

Was it woke capitalism when Condé Nast decided, in 2018, not to use models under 18? Sure. But in that specific case, and a handful of specific others no doubt, hurrah for woke capitalism. It was also one of those things where the strange thing was that this had ever been (and yeah, still often is) allowed.

Because I lived through the before-times, because I remember like yesterday not just early 2017 but 1997 (when I was 14 myself), I can paint a portrait of the mindset. It was quite simply not pedophilia-coded in that context (SHOULD HAVE BEEN but wasn’t) to declare barely-pubescent girls the world’s most beautiful women. You could do this in the National Review and be celebrated for sharing difficult truths. Only a liberal hag of 21-plus would mind hearing that age 15-20 is, as John Derbyshire argued in 2005, the peak female form. Pedophilia, in the before-times, was molestation. It was men (almost always men) acting on desires. But there was a popular understanding that red-blooded men liked teenage girls (American Beauty, remember that movie?) and that this was something disconnected from the tiny subset of men with genuinely troubling urges.

People compartmentalized. The idea was that it was fine for young girls to be fashion models, that this was something many of them wanted to do, indeed the myth was that it was ‘every’ girl’s dream, and that this was something different from sex stuff. The idea was that modeling was like acting or gymnastics, one of those things where a child might work because the work required a child. There were the Roman Polanskis, the Jeffrey Epsteins, but this was aspiring-starlet-exploited. There was little understanding that even if ‘nothing happened,’ the mere fact of having a 15-year-old modeling sultry attire (or for that matter, women’s jeans; consider Brooke Shields, then 15, for Calvin Klein) was itself exploitative. Of course models were 14. Of course they were!

People chalked the extreme-youth thing up to male wiring, or to some kind of timeless evolutionary fact of female beauty occurring in middle school or 10th grade. This never quite added up, not least because (more on this later) the high-fashion look was not male-gaze-oriented. Grown men are more than capable of rising to the occasion for adult women, if all of human history is any guide. (I refer you to Cartoons Hate Her’s ongoing reminders that rich and accomplished men couple off with—and fool around with—assortative mates, with Mr. Coldplay Jumbotron the most recent example; yes I have other unrelated thoughts on that story.) The tell-it-like-it-is truth is that women will not all things equal get more male attention at 40 than at 20. It’s not that 13-year-olds look spectacular.

Some would say the models were as they were because fashion designers were gay men and wanted girls who looked androgynous. This also didn’t make sense because liking men, even liking young men, would not sexually orient you towards Kate Moss.

No, the models looked as they did for the convergence of two reasons.