Florence Pugh is an extremely accomplished actress. From Midsommer to Marvel, there’s nothing she can’t do. And yet, for some reason, people think her weight is more important than her talents.
It’s a tale told time and again in Hollywood: a popular actress reaches new heights in her career and is then immediately body-shamed.
Luckily, Pugh is a very self-assured person—but there’s no doubt that the words hurt. While speaking to Vogue this month, she made that perfectly clear. “It’s so hard,” she said. “[The internet’s] a very mean place. It’s really painful to read people being nasty about my confidence or nasty about my weight. It never feels good. The one thing I always wanted to achieve was to never sell someone else, something that isn’t the real me.”
Florence Pugh is not here for your body-shaming
But Pugh has always shown the real her, and this isn’t the first time she has spoken up about this particular kind of bullying. In 2022 she wore a sheer pink Valentino dress to a Valentino haute couture show, and she was slammed for it. She wrote a post on Instagram at the time, standing up for herself, her right to wear whatever she wanted, and her body.
“What’s been interesting to watch and witness is just how easy it is for men to totally destroy a woman’s body, publicly, proudly, for everyone to see,” she wrote. “So many of you wanted to aggressively let me know how disappointed you were by my ‘tiny tits’, or how I should be embarrassed by being so ‘flat chested’. I’ve lived in my body for a long time. I’m fully aware of my breast size and am not scared of it.”
Really we should be long past body shaming as a society by now, but the problem persists. Take the abuse suffered by Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan as another example, or, going back further, Kate Winslet was relentlessly criticized during her post-Titanic stardom. People feel like they’re entitled to actresses’ bodies and get to dictate how they look. It’s completely unacceptable, and eradicating that mentality means a huge overhaul in how we think and behave when it comes to the human body.
Pugh is determined to remain unapologetically herself in the face of bullying, however. She told Vogue, “I don’t think it’s confidence in hoping people like me. I think it’s just, like, I don’t want to be anyone else … Now I know what I want to show. I know who I want to show. I know who I want to be and I know what I look like. There’s no insecurities about what I am anymore.” Good for her.
Published: Sep 19, 2024 05:19 pm