The people at Vice.com were unimpressed with the recent cover story at Esquire magazine, devoted to Hollywood star Megan Fox. Actually, “unimpressed” is putting it too charitably:

The cover story of this month’s Esquire is an interview with Megan Fox by Stephen Marche. And, though I haven’t read every single thing that has ever been written, I can say, with confidence, that it is the worst thing that anybody has ever written. Ever.

With our expectations calibrated to a suitably low bar, the Vice takedown zeroes in on some of the worst things about the Esquire puff piece:

MEGAN FOX BELIEVES THAT BEING FAMOUS IS WORSE THAN BEING BULLIED

“‘I don’t think people understand,” she says. ‘They all think we should shut the fuck up and stop complaining because you live in a big house or you drive a Bentley. So your life must be so great. What people don’t realise is that fame, whatever your worst experience in high school, when you were being bullied by those ten kids in high school, fame is that, but on a global scale, where you’re being bullied by millions of people constantly.'”

When I was at school, there was a kid who everyone picked on because they thought he was gay. One day, a bunch of older kids dragged him into the PE showers and forcibly inserted a broom handle into his ass. Pretty sure he’d trade lives with you, Meg.

And then this, on Fox’s approach to escaping fame:

MEGAN’S UNUSUAL APPROACH TO ESCAPING FAME

According to the article, “Megan Fox doesn’t particularly want to be famous anymore.” Obviously, appearing on the cover of Esquire in your underwear to promote a new movie that you’re starring in isn’t the best way to go about this. But what about some other methods she’s tried?

“She’s tried to escape from her fate as a sex symbol. She starred in Jennifer’s Body, a magnificent, delicious, criminally underrated parable about a bombshell who literally devours men.”

“In December, in Judd Apatow’s This Is 40, she plays a woman so gorgeous that the other characters cannot quite believe it.”

And neither of those things made it so she wasn’t famous anymore? Weird!

But the best part relates to particular pet peeve of mine, the overambitious / anatomically incorrect Photoshop attempt made for the cover picture. You may be familiar with the recent image in Vogue China, in which the model appeared to be missing a leg…y’know, just to tidy up the shot a bit:

While Esquire magazine managed to (more or less) avoid losing any critical parts of Megan Fox’s anatomy in their Photoshop attempt, it nonetheless had many of the unearthly, not-quite-human characteristics that we are accustomed to seeing in glossy magazines:

As the Vice article drily notes:

How many people must have seen that cover before it went to print? And not one of them said, “Uh, guys, her left thigh is shaped like a teardrop, she has a wrist a third of the way up her arm and her vagina is, like, a foot wide.”

Quite. Good job, guys. Of course, the sheer level of half-assery on display here by Esquire will not have cost them anything in terms of reputation or profit. Nobody reads the drively words anyway, and I’m sure that the Editor’s mailbox has not been inundated with complaints about the photograph either.