TW/CW: This blog post addresses issues of relationship and sexual violence. It also uses profanity in a quote.

ALSO IMPORTANT: The book that I discuss below has some very mature content. I only recommend it for readers ages 16 and up.

Last week, I was once again hit with the realization that I was being sexist.

That surprised me, even though I know that growing up in this society, I’ve absorbed patriarchal values more deeply than I can imagine. After all, I pride myself on being a feminist, on being more “enlightened” / “evolved,” and in helping other men to detect and act against misogyny. And I have spent a great deal of energy and time pushing back against sexist stereotypes over the years. I’ve done it as a parent, trying to help my daughters to feel empowered in our still-male-privileged society. I did it as an activist, particularly when mobilizing men and boys to advocate for the rights of women and girls. And I do it now as an educator whenever I can, weaving in facts about gender bias and the blessings of gender equality into my teaching.

In other words, “I should be better than this.”

What triggered all of this was seeing actress Megan Fox’s new book of poetry at Barnes & Noble. When I first saw the cover, I thought, “Poems by Megan Fox? The one from Transformers? Is she deep enough to write a whole book of poems?”

I cringe as I replay my internal dialogue. Based on the little I knew about Ms. Fox, her career, and her sometimes over-the-top public image, I had jumped to the conclusion that she wasn’t especially thoughtful and, well, poetic.

Really, I was being sexist. 

A similar realization hit me several months ago, when I was listening to Meghan Markle’s outstanding podcast Archetypes. In one episode, her guest was Paris Hilton, another woman whom I had long ago judged harshly and unfairly. That was especially based on her 2003 reality TV show The Simple Life, where the Hilton heiress went to live and work on a farm in rural Arkansas with fellow socialite Nicole Richie. All beauty and not much brains, I had thought. 

But listening to Ms. Hilton’s conversation with Ms. Markle, I was struck by not only how knowledgeable and thoughtful she was about a variety of topics, but also by her frank admission that she purposely played the “dumb blonde” to establish a niche and get a foothold in the entertainment industry. She explained that it was a stereotype that the show’s producers actually encouraged her to lean into. She made a lot of money in her early career from acting the part of the pretty airhead, but over time, she came to realize that pretending to embody that common trope harmed her, especially since it added to a load of childhood trauma that she was already carrying.

Though she played it up even outside of the TV series, making occasional silly remarks on talk shows and doing a famous Carl’s Jr. Super Bowl commercial that focused much more on her body than on burgers, I had to recognize that I was categorizing her stereotypically, never mind that that was her goal. I was judging her book by her cover, as it were, labeling her with the sexist stereotype of the dumb blonde. 

And I essentially did that with Megan Fox as well. My automatic response upon seeing her book gave me away: Megan Fox wrote a book of poems? Really? 

It doesn’t matter that in the public mind, she has been associated with sex appeal above all else, from her breakout role in the 2007 Transformers movie to her appearances in public and in magazines. It doesn’t even matter if she has intentionally cultivated that image. Like Ms. Hilton, Ms. Fox has done nothing to justify my categorizing her as an outwardly attractive, yet inwardly shallow person. My doing so shows that I still have some unconscious reluctance to think that women can be both beautiful on the outside and brilliant on the inside, despite zillions of examples to the contrary. It’s a negative, implicit bias for a man to see a woman who matches current beauty standards and unconsciously assume that she’s probably not super-smart, unless she can prove to him otherwise.

Again, I cringe as I peel back the layers of my thought patterns. It doesn’t matter that the “dumb beauty” trope is common among men. It’s sexist, and it’s wrong.

I was being sexist. I was wrong.

I did pick up Ms. Fox’s book, and in fact, the 70 or so poems are quite deep. Titled Pretty Boys Are Poisonous, it’s raw, explicit, profane, and heartbreaking to read, especially knowing that the poems are based on her experiences. It is a relatively brief volume, one that I read in one sitting at the bookstore, and that works in the book’s favor, because many of the poems address topics of relationship and sexual violence. It’s a subject that I’m quite familiar with from my years of work in the field of relationship and sexual violence prevention, but the collection of poems was quite intense even for me; its shorter length made it more manageable to experience.

The toughest parts to read contain unsparing descriptions of the abuse she has experienced in relationships, something she has dealt with since childhood. Even in these passages, there is a lyrical quality to her words, but they are still graphic. There are also quite a few references to Christian imagery. Her spirituality currently seems to be drawn from a variety of sources, including shamanistic traditions, but she grew up in a strict Pentecostal home. In “leading a lamb to slaughter,” she describes a toxic, gaslighting lover, using a number of Christian allusions:

i’m not a zealot
i didn’t come here to die for your sins
you crucify me
then beg me to be your redeemer
hanging the weight of your salvation
around my neck
like a noose

In this and other poems, she really captures the cyclical pattern of abusive intimate partner relationships – the initial romance, the abuser’s jealous attempts to control her, the eruptions of fury as the abuser lashes out at her, the abuser’s pleas for forgiveness and promises to never do it again, and back to the beginning of the cycle. This is also reflected in “seventy times seven”:

If i had a nickel
for every time you showed up for me
i would have exactly zero nickels
but i know i’ve earned
a mansion in heaven
for all the times
i forgave you
for calling me a stupid cunt

More biblical references appear in “the book of mary magdalene”:

it hurts
to see how i’ve
betrayed myself
trying to save
the souls of men
who do not want
to be saved
it hurts to see
how my legacy
will only rest
in the space
between my legs

In addition to her poems with Christian allusions (of which there are still more), she also refers to classical mythology in several others. One is called “pomegranates for sale,” an allusion to a small, yet important detail in the story of the Greek god Hades, king of the underworld, and the goddess of springtime Persephone, whom he has kidnapped. (This myth is often referred to as the Rape of Persephone, from the Latin rapere, which means “to seize.”) The pomegranates are magical ones that trap Persephone forever in her forced marriage to Hades, whom the poem mentions by name. (I would honestly not have remembered this except I’m a fan of the neo-mythological webtoon Lore Olympus.)

Another theme of Ms. Fox’s poems involves people turning into monsters. Mostly these are references to her abusers, but she also uses the monster imagery to refer to herself. I find this particularly interesting given how many stories in popular media use this very motif.

In the U.S., there have been a number of blockbuster films and TV shows over the years based on people turning into everything from werewolves to zombies; one of the hottest shows on television right now is HBO’s The Last of Us, where a doomsday fungus (yes, fungus) turns people into zombiefied creatures of various kinds. Recent Korean dramas like Sweet Home, Sweet Home 2, and Gyeongseong Creature have also been popular in the U.S. through their distribution on Netflix; all of these involve regular human beings turning into grotesque, violent monsters. I don’t know that Ms. Fox is appealing to any of these shows specifically, but her poem “lessons in hot boy demonology” evokes such images:

When beautiful boys
turn into evil things
you will find that bibles and silver bullets will fail you
eventually
you will stop running
you will stop fighting
you will collapse into a pathetic little heap on the floor
and as the ashes from the hand-rolled cigarette
that dangles from his perfect cupid’s bow lips
fall into your eyes
you will let him feast on your tears and your self-esteem
and when he walks away with your soul in his mouth
you will pray for death
but instead you will live forever as the monster he turned you into

Ms. Fox does write about things other than interpersonal violence. One set of poems that has especially surprised readers describes a miscarriage that Ms. Fox suffered. As far as I know, the mother of three sons had never spoken of it publicly before. Her baby would have been a girl, but it died after the pregnancy had just passed the ten week mark. 

The book isn’t all words; there are a number of silently powerful black-and-white paintings by Japanese American artist Audrey Kawasaki. Some of these works feature a woman surrounded by animal motifs, while others feature nudity and sexual situations. None of them, as I recall, show smiling faces. In my opinion, they are not at all erotic or titillating; they are haunting without being scary, and they effectively add to the book’s pathos.

And though there is no crescendo of positivity and hope to conclude the volume, that doesn’t mean Ms. Fox has no hope. We see it in poems like “you wanted marilyn monroe but you got joan of arc instead”:

i’ve humbled kings
alone
i’ve fought wars
against titans
still they foam at the mouth
attempting to silence me
because i am a mirror
that reminds them
of what they cannot have
you mistook me for a possession
when i was a nuclear weapon all along

This verse, with its bold, “eff you” attitude, has extra significance because Ms. Fox once had a tattoo of Marilyn Monroe. She had it removed because of all the negativity in Ms. Monroe’s tragic life, negativity Ms. Fox didn’t want represented in her own life. Their backgrounds have common threads; in addition to both being considered sexy Hollywood stars, the two women share a struggle with bipolar disorder. If that weren’t hard enough, they also share childhoods marked by abuse and adulthoods marked by abusive relationships.

But it’s clear from Pretty Boys Are Poisonous and the interviews Ms. Fox has done in support of the book’s launch that she is on her way to writing a much different life story than Ms. Monroe’s. Megan Fox is a brave warrior and a powerful wordsmith, penning a breathtaking volume. There’s even brilliance in the placement of her poem titles; each comes after the body of its respective poem, turning into part of the poem itself. More than once in my reading of her book, I smiled when I finished a poem and then read its title, because the phrase was so fitting and sometimes came with a clever twist.

Megan, if you ever happen to come across this blog post, I am truly sorry for stereotyping and underestimating you. Thank you so much for courageously sharing these poems! I am better for having experienced your book, which I know will inspire so many people!