hannah einbinder can get it
On intellectual lust, the male gaze she refuses to participate in, and that scene in Hacks.
Get It is a short essay series about the people or objects I’m crushing on, why, and what that interest says about me. Intellectual lust, parasocial crushes, the ones who make me think and feel things. Get It is about desire as a form of self-knowledge.
I have never been one for parasocial relationships with celebrities. I don't know. I think growing up in New York City ruined the illusion for me.
Celebrity in New York could mean anything or anyone with a loud enough voice or close enough proximity to Carson Daly on TRL, and I was close enough to the 1515 studio that it felt like nothing. If I can take a subway to you, the magic is gone. A few years ago I was outside the Chateau Marmont in LA when the people I was with started freaking out about Jonah Hill, James Franco, and Zoey Deutch at the bar. I remember feeling embarrassed by the fandom. I said "let them have their privacy" to the scoffs of the people I was with. I felt superior about it. I'm not proud of that but it's true.
So what I feel for Hannah Einbinder is something I don’t have great language for. Parasocial crushing, maybe. Intellectual lust. It’s wondering how someone so beautiful has been completely impervious to the pressure to change her voice, her demeanor, her style, her boyish humor, her creativity, for a more mass appeal, and then just snagged celebrity anyway by being exactly who she is.
In interviews I see myself in some of her inspirational choices: Wayne’s World, But I’m a Cheerleader, the perfectly executed honk honk at tits on a painting. The way she finds a joke somewhere both revealing too much and also nothing.
She was revealed to me through Hacks, a show I waited until fully out before I pressed play, because I knew I’d need to be sat for it. Emotionally prepared for the mixed-generational relationship between Deborah and Ava. I was right.
I’ll also say: when I have crushes on women, it’s soley plus-size women. Maybe it’s because we share the same soul-crushing trip to a store to discover that, shocker, they don’t have our size. So when Hannah Einbinder and her slight frame (but thick behind) came onscreen during a FMF sex scene where it’s revealed she’s the third in a couple, something clicked in my brain that has been running on a loop since. A deeply poetic and real onscreen orgasm while receiving oral. If that was acting, give her every award ever.
There are intersecting things that make me find someone attractive. It starts with them doubling down, tripling down on who they are and refusing to be any different. I love a crooked tooth. I love when people say “like” and refuse to polish their natural speech. I love feminine touches on a masculine aura. I love weirdos. People who obsess too much. I love revealing too much. I love when someone throws themselves hard into their own art. I love real displays of sex and intimacy.
Her general way in interviews, on red carpets, with cast members, feels like a perfectly crafted personality that had no crafting to speak of. It’s just her.
There’s a version of attraction that’s really just longing. Not for the person exactly, but for something they seem to have figured out that you haven’t yet. I think that’s part of what’s happening here. My list, the crooked teeth, the people who say “like,” the weirdos who reveal too much and throw themselves hard into their own art, that’s not really a type. That’s a portrait of the person I want to be when I stop editing myself. Hannah Einbinder just happens to already be that person. So maybe the crush is less about wanting her and more about what she gives me permission to want for myself. Both can be true.
And maybe part of this is the classic queer woman question: do I want to sleep with her or do I want to be her? (inset SATC end-sentence typing).
There’s something very freeing about watching a woman not participate in the male gaze in any way while being deeply sexy doing it. She’s just contagious
So she can get it. Parasocially, of course.
Crushing On:
Boomba, because I want a set for my other crush:
Tubetops.
Lena Dunham.
chat soon,
laura