Megan Fox was an ironic, self-aware sex symbol who playfully deconstructed what sex symbolness even was—but at the time, nobody got it.
From her rise, it was striking that Megan Fox was highly aware of constructing her ‘sex-symbolness’. She attracted endless headlines for daring to speak in an unfiltered way about the objectifying hollywood machine, and for calling out misogyny before mainstream society was ready to listen.
“I’ve worked with people who have been difficult but have been male, and there’s never been a complaint made about them… And then I have friends who are female and if they show up to work without a smile on their face they’re tagged a bitch.”
Hortense Smith wrote in Jezebel that Fox was “attempting, in a way, to take down the very thing she represents from the inside.”
Pretty much all Fox’s roles have fallen into ultra-hot badass “cool girl” territory—with her sexiness always written into her role and plots having to revolve around her hotness. But her characters typically also bring a level of irony or commentary to her sex symbol-ness.
Jennifer’s Body: “They’re just boys. Morsels. We have all the power, don’t you know that?”
Roles like Reagan in New Girl make Fox into a post-modern version of the sex symbol—dissecting our collective idea of what hotness is.
Still, using Fox to convey this conversation hasn’t always added up to that much depth for her characters. And Fox was also clearly uncomfortable as her sex symbol-ness took on a life of its own and became an excuse to treat her without humanity.
“Women are objectified, especially women in the entertainment industry.”
In the wake of the MeToo movement, our culture at large has given Fox a second look and is at last regarding her as what she always asked to be viewed as: an actor and a person, worthy of respect.