By Christine McFaul
Content Warning: Body shaming, eating disorder, homophobia, misogyny, racism, sexism, trauma
Everybody Else is Perfect is a sharp and intimate debut essay collection by Gabrielle Korn.
Korn is currently the editorial and publishing lead of Most, Netflix’s home for 2SLGBTQIA+ storytelling on social media. Under her guidance as the former editor-in-chief of Nylon Media, Nylon became an international lifestyle publication focusing on emerging culture. To date, she remains one of the youngest and one of the only openly queer people to have worked in the upper echelons of a media masthead.
“Like most millennials and Gen Zers, I was taught growing up that commercial beauty standards aren’t realistic…We know beauty is a myth but we still subscribe to it.”
Over a decade spent working in the beauty industry, Korn found herself constantly in conversation with women who, like her, alternated between two extremes: “Thinking other women are perfect just as they are, and quietly loathing themselves.” Korn penned these eleven essays to dig deeper into this widespread contradiction. The result is both an incisive insider’s look at women’s digital media and poignant rumination on coming-of-age in the early aughts, self-admittedly from a perspective that enjoys the privileges of being white and comfortably middle class.
The narrative follows Korn through her twenties as she navigates life, love, and career in New York City. Hot topics, jarring statistics, and personal experiences are woven together in clever and accessible ways. Some of my favourite chapters include:
• “Staying Out” - A rumination on identity and the isolation of being the only out lesbian on her editorial staff.
• “Low-Rise” - A comparison of the ebb and flow of denim fashion to the treatment of women by and within the beauty media machine. A highly relatable essay for millennial readers, as who among us doesn’t remember the infamous “whale tale” or wide-legged woes of the early 2000s?!
• “Happy Weight” - An open and pragmatic account of living with an eating disorder.
• “The Cult of Empowerment” - A scathing indictment of feminist language being co-opted for profit.
One of the most revealing aspects of this collection occurs when Korn peels back the curtain to show the reader who women’s media leaves out vs who it exalts and why.
“Women like me aren’t supposed to talk about things like this, about the ways that all-female spaces aren’t automatically the feminist utopia’s we want them to be.”
Korn exposes the nuance and complications that exist and suggests several tangible ways that the industry, along with consumers of that industry, might begin to enact change.
Reminiscent of her career’s work, Everybody Else is Perfect, straddles the line between cultural criticism and personal narrative. It is by turns humorous, exhausting, earnest, angry, beautiful—always honest and open. I recommend this book for anyone who grew up in the heydays of Nylon or who likes to keep up to speed on current and emerging issues and cultural trends.
Thank you, Simon and Schuster Canada, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!