The way she sees it, the reason some people hate her is the
same reason a lot of other people love her, so what’s she
supposed to do? In fact, she describes her fans as “free
thinkers.” As she puts it, “They have to be because if you
thought what everybody else thought, you probably
wouldn’t be a fan of mine.”
Iggy used to feel really defensive about this stuff. “Iwould hit back and say, ‘What about this that I had to go
through?’ because I wanted to talk so much about my
experiences of things I didn’t have, and I think it felt like I
wasn’t acknowledging that there is white privilege and
there is institutionalized racism,” she says. “It seemed to
a lot of people like I was living in this bubble or unaware of
all these things that people have to experience.”
The charitable interpretation is that Iggy understandsthat the criticism stems from America’s relationship with
race and that that h i s t or y i s f ucke d up. A nd he y, i f t h a t ’s
how you feel or what you believe, she’s not taking away
the fact that it’s real for you. The less charitable one is that
she doesn’t care. Either way, she’s going to stop rage-
tweeting about it.
T h a t g r ow t h i s c o u r t e s y of w h a t s he de s c r i b e s a s amental-health retreat in Arizona that her management
team insisted she attend two years ago. She resisted at
first but eventually acquiesced. (“They just didn’t want
me to fuck up my own life, basically,” she says.) For about
two weeks, Iggy sat with a therapist to unpack everything:
her childhood and what had made her feel out of control
as a kid; her control issues as an adult; resisting criticism,
specifically “not being able to separate well-intended
criticism from trolling.” She identified the forms of sabo-
tage she was inflicting on herself. Mentally, she needed a
break. “I just couldn’t get out of functioning at this insan-
ity level,” she says. “Where you’re like, Whoa, hold on,
don’t operate the vehicle.”
Looking back now, her chaotic ascent lasted foreverand not at all. “The whole thing was very overwhelming,”
Iggy says. It’s not hard to imagine what it must have felt
like—how thrilling and disorienting and wonderful and
awful to be so young you could still be on your parents’
health-insurance plan and then, like that, “you’re sud-
denly mega fucking famous within a few months.” And
a l mo s t i mme d i a t e ly, p e o ple ma ke he a d l i ne s b y c r it ic i z -
ing you (or in Snoop Dogg’s case, calling you a bitch), law-
suits suddenly appear (one for a casual $1.5 million by a
disgruntled producer), and your own body becomes a
weapon used against you (the hacker group Anonymous
threatened to release stills from an alleged Iggy sex tape).
This stuff hasn’t really let up either: More recently,
nude outtakes from Iggy’s GQ Australia shoot were
allegedly stolen and posted on the internet without her
consent. When the photos leaked, Iggy wrote a statement
on Instagram that she felt “blindsided, embarrassed,
violated, angry, sad, and a million other things.” She
knows there are people who don’t understand why she’d
b e s o up s e t. It ’s no t l i ke s he h a s n’t done s e x y s ho o t s
before. “That’s the problem with you understanding
consent,” she says. “When somebody else chooses for me,
that’s not consensual.” Old Iggy would’ve lost her shit.“THE OLDER I GET,
THE LESS
I KNOW
ABOUTANYTHING.”116
Cosmopolitan September 2019