Billie Eilish has become a household name, rightfully so. At the young age of 18, she has won 5 Grammy awards and has topped the charts numerous times, like she’s literally amazing. She is also pretty well known for the oversized and baggy clothing she chooses to wear, and she has been very vocal about why she makes this choice. She has body-related insecurities, as many young women do, and expressed back in 2019 that she wears baggy clothes because she doesn’t want the world to know everything about her. That the world can’t have an opinion because they don’t know what’s underneath the clothes. It is common for women to be criticized for their bodies no matter what they look like, so her statement is not something out of the ordinary. She has every right to wear whatever she wants, and she always looks good doing it.
More recently though, she has been seen and photographed wearing tighter fitting clothes, exposing more of what her body looks like, looking amazing per usual. However, the media and the public have this weird obsession with talking about her body. When she wants to show it off, it immediately makes headlines. The response to these photos has been aggravating, to say the least. She is completely picked apart, and a popular response is to call her brave. Here is my issue with that: it is a very backhanded sort of compliment, she must be brave in order to show off her body, which means there’s something to hate about it. She is not brave, she is existing. For a woman to exist in a body that isn’t a size 0 she must be so confident! So brave! Confidence and bravery are necessary for her to perform in front of large audiences, but they shouldn’t be necessary for her to walk down the street in regular clothing.
I really do find that to be just blatantly disrespectful, she deserves better than this. She is not the only woman that goes through this — that just makes it worse. The objectification of women is so normalized and ingrained in our society that it’s not as questioned or called out as much as it should be. No one should be made to feel like they have to cover something up in fear of being judged or stared at, but that is what women have to deal with all the time. In the public eye something is always wrong with how we choose to present ourselves, too much or too little clothing, too much makeup, we are either too big or too small, we can’t win. This generation of strong women, including Billie Eilish, will be the ones to denormalize this and make sure women get the respect they deserve.
