Last week, Billie Eilish was photographed on the street wearing shorts and a tank top. As mundane as this sounds, men on Twitter decided that this image was offensive and hilarious in equal measure. A tweet which has since gone viral due to the furious backlash that it received from women, reposted this shot of Eilish with the caption, “in 10 months, Billie Eilish has developed a mid-30s wine mom body.”
Women on Twitter immediately jumped to Eilish’s defence, calling out the original post for its blatant misogyny. Seemingly, men have become so desensitised to the unrealistic standards of beauty portrayed in the media, that seeing a famous woman who does not resemble the enhanced appearance of a Kardashian is considered to be laughable. This response to Eilish doing nothing except wearing casual clothes is of course an act of misogyny on numerous accounts. Many women subsequently pointed out that Eilish looks healthy and beautiful, and that anyone who believes otherwise has had their idea of realistic women warped by Instagram and the media at large.
Billie Eilish herself did not directly address the ensuing drama but she did share a video that stated, “guts are normal… Instagram isn’t real.”
Simply put, we have allowed ourselves to normalise the edited pictures that we see online, and not only does this spark derogatory comments from entitled men but it also warps how young girls might see themselves. In one careless and rude Tweet, a range of social issues has been highlighted most importantly, society’s expectations of women.
On several occasions in the past, Eilish has drawn attention to the fact that she refuses to wear form-fitting clothes for two main reasons: if the public does not know what her body looks like, she cannot be subjected to the abuse that arose from this Tweet, and secondly, she refuses to present herself in a stereotypically feminine style, which subverts the expectation of sexualisation that is placed upon her as a famous woman.
Billie Eilish has been ridiculed in the past for attending events in comically baggy clothes but is it any wonder that she chose to conceal herself under loose suits given the uproar that simply wearing a tank top caused?
In a short film that Eilish released earlier this year, she addressed the dismay that people have expressed at her apparent lack of femininity: “If I wear what is comfortable, I am not a woman. If I shed the layers, I’m a slut.”
At the end of it all, an eighteen-year-old was proved right by very cruel means; she would be body-shamed if she wore anything other than baggy clothes in public. Our society has developed a deeply misogynistic mindset that claims the right to have an opinion on women’s bodies.
As women who exist in this cultural landscape, we are forced to co-exist with the knowledge that our body will always be “too much” in one way or another: too small, too big, too real.