AHP: The thing that I think about Jennifer Lawrence is that the release of those photos don’t compromise our understanding of her. They are not scandalous because they don’t provide a counter narrative for how we’ve already been thinking of her. If similar photos came out of Taylor Swift, we’d have a different conversation, because our conversation of Taylor Swift is much more virginal and feminine and precise and those photos are not. She [Lawrence] is a Cool Girl. Those are the sorts of photos that a Cool Girl would take for her boyfriend, and so it works. Yes, these things keep happening over and over and over again and that’s because celebrities scandals are a way that we can take a temperature of what’s okay at a given time. Things that were scandalous in the 1920s are not scandalous today. A hundred years from now, there are still going to be things that are scandalous because anything that trespasses on the status quo is going to be scandalous.

WP: One of the things that [Stranger editor] Dan Savage espouses is that eventually, it’s going to be really difficult to find someone to run for public office who doesn’t have nude photos or who doesn’t have compromising information about themselves on the Internet and if that’s what you’re using to judge people, then no one’s going to get elected.

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AHP: Right. Either no one’s going to get elected, or we’re very gradually going to change our understanding of what it means to be a good and decent person and a nude photo is not going to be the opposite of a good and decent person anymore.

WP: Okay, so The Fappening is something that affects female stars. This is not really something where male stars are running around Hollywood wondering if they’ve been hacked.

AHP: Although there should be (laughing)! Part of that is hacker culture. 4Chan is dominated by millennial boys and so of course the target is girls. But also, it’s that female sexuality is more scandalous than male sexuality. So a d— pic is not scandalous because that’s just proof that someone is masculine. Whereas a picture of Jennifer Lawrence like that is supposed to prove that she’s slutty, but the reaction to those photos proves that’s not how people treated those photos.

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WP: Right. Colin Farrell had a sex tape that kind of made a small fuss, and then people quickly forgot about it.

AHP: It really depends on who the sex tape is with. Remember in the 1990s when Hugh Grant picked up a prostitute, it wasn’t just that it was a prostitute, it was that it was a black prostitute on Rodeo. That was what made it scandalous. It’s all about the particulars. So if that sexuality is not the sort of sexuality that virile straight male stars should have, that’s when it becomes problematic.

WP: There are always horrible people on the Internet, but do you think some of the reaction to FKA Twigs dating Robert Pattinson is because after Kristen Stewart people expected him to date a string of young, white Hollywood ingenues? [Twigs is a singer who was deluged with racist messages on Twitter after Pattinson fans discovered she was dating him. She’s black.]

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AHP: I don’t know how much of that reaction is coming from a group of people that are colloquially referred to as “Twihards,” who really just ship him and Kristen Stewart so hard that anyone who isn’t her will become the recipient of their wrath. That’s mostly because that couple gets held up as proof that true love exists. You can see it’s because they’re [“Twilight" characters] Edward and Bella. It’s not because they’re Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart. If you are a fan, and you see this couple as proof, you would be angry at anyone who compromises that truth, that gospel.

But part of that is, yeah, it would be one thing if he was dating Blake Lively. But he’s a weird dude. He’s gonna date weird girls — people who aren’t mainstream starlets. It absolutely makes sense with his image.

WP: You’ve written a lot about Angelina Jolie and how adept she is at constructing and managing her media narrative. Do you think there’s anyone else right now who comes close to her?

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AHP: I think Jennifer Lawrence is really savvy. She is the millennial, the only one in that crop of starlets who is a Hollywood star in the old-school way. Angelina Jolie is that way. Julia Roberts is that way. They have the charisma. They don’t need to be on social media because they don’t need to interact with their fans and be just like us. Even though Jennifer Lawrence seems so relatable and down-to-Earth, she doesn’t need to have a social media presence in order to do that. People think because I say she’s a Cool Girl, I think she’s performing. I don’t think she’s performing. I think that’s who she is and it’s just so consistent and she’s just funny. It’s easy for her to be so consistent because that’s just who she is.

At the same time, I would be wary — is she going to be able to mature into how we want women to be, like five years from now? But at the moment, she’s dominating that game.

WP: Is there anyone you just want to pull aside and say you’re doing this all wrong and you don’t have to?

AHP: I honestly think with Jennifer Aniston, I just want to be like, you don’t have to say that you’re going to get married. I know that you’re trying to cater to the Minivan Majority [Lainey Gossip has a name for people who want everyone to get married: the MiniVan Majority — middle America, basically] … you can be like Cameron Diaz, just like, marriage isn’t for me! But she keeps hedging that line between accepting a different narrative for herself and trying to be this Reese Witherspoon girl-next-door type thing.

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WP: You were saying we have these expectations of female celebrities and they way they communicate femininity. I’m curious about how you think those expectations are shaped if you’re working within the confines of both gender and race, and if there’s a difference?

AHP: It totally complicates it. Rihanna is a good example of that. I was talking at a college last week, and one of the students asked, can Rihanna be a Cool Girl? And she is, but at the same time, there’s something that makes her seem so much more reckless and part of that is the narrative of her domestic abuse and how that works into it. I think in some ways the femininity that is expected of you is dominated by what the understanding of your race’s femininity is. A good example would be Sofia Vergara. She turns herself into a self-fetishizing sex object on a stage at the Emmys and really plays up the accent, both in character and the interviews that she does to adhere to the dominant understanding of a hot Latin lady.

WP: It sounds like people just have to find a box that makes them easily digestible? Like that’s what happened to Ellen DeGeneres after being exiled from Hollywood for awhile.

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AHP: It’s the way she performs being a lesbian. She’s butch, but she’s butch in a way that’s palatable. She has a certain body type and the clothes that she wears are a certain type. For her, lesbianism is a lifestyle choice, not a sexuality, and that’s the way her image makes it seem.

WP: Yeah, I wonder how that would have turned out had she been more like Shane from “The L Word.”