Amy Schumer Shouldn’t Have To Defend Her Own Face, and Yet

I’m tired, aren’t you? I’m sure that, like most women, Amy Schumer is tired. She should be celebrating the season 2 premiere of her Hulu series Life & Beth (which is quite good!), but instead she’s responding to random strangers online about why her face looks different this week.

There are reasons to criticize Amy Schumer, an imperfect person who is nevertheless famous and therefore more heavily scrutinized than, say, your Aunt Carla. (Even if your Aunt Carla deserves to be scrutinized heavily for posting Blue Lives Matter rhetoric on Facebook.) Criticizing Amy Schumer for posting Islamaphobic memes is justifiable. Criticizing Amy Schumer for looking different than she did the last time you saw her? Get a life.

Schumer appeared on The View and The Tonight Show this week to promote the second season of her Hulu series Life & Beth, which she stars in, wrote, and directed. Unfortunately—but sadly not surprisingly—the majority of comments on social media are about her face, which, Schumer explains, is “puffier than normal” due to an ongoing medical issue.

“… thank you so much for everyone’s input about my face!” Schumer writes. “I’ve enjoyed feedback and deliberation about my appearance as all women do for almost 20 years. And you’re right it is puffier than normal right now. I have endometriosis an auto immune disease that every woman should read about. There are some medical and hormonal things going on in my world right now but I’m okay.”

Schumer has been outspoken about living with endometriosis, a common medical disorder that affects more than 11% of women in the U.S. The real figure is likely higher given that endometriosis is often misdiagnosed and its symptoms overlooked or flat-out ignored by some healthcare professionals. As Schumer points out, “Historically women’s bodies have barely been studied medically compared to men,” and she’s not wrong. Women’s bodies—and specifically our sexual organs and reproductive systems—are under-researched and remain poorly understood by the medical community.

But anyway! Let’s talk about this woman’s face! Why does it look different than it did before? Does she know how different it looks? We should definitely go online and say something about it. If we don’t speak up about this famous lady’s face, WHO WILL?!

Isn’t it exhausting that women constantly have to explain our appearance? We can’t just look a little different in front of other people without being forced into a spoken-word performance of our personal struggles to justify why we look different so everyone can move the hell on—like reciting a rhyme for the bridge troll before he’ll let us get to the other side. We’re not even trying to pull a coup on the bridge; we just want to get on with our fucking DAY.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: Just don’t comment on another person’s appearance. Unless they specifically solicit your opinion, keep it to yourself. Your thoughts about how someone else looks—their size, shape, color, hairstyle, whether or not they’ve been thrown in a vat of toxic waste and emerged with clown makeup permanently embedded in their face—is not interesting, valuable, or necessary.

(featured image: Hulu)