‘Billie Eilish has developed a mid-30’s wine mom body’ is just one of the Tweets I came across while searching her name- tweeted by a middle-aged man. She’s eighteen years old and already the victim of body shamers, which is unfortunately a sad truth celebrities face when having fame in the Instagram age.
A couple of weeks ago the Daily Mail published a series of photos of Billie Eilish wearing a nude vest top and matching shorts, and since then, the internet has had a lot to say about it. Eilish famously prefers a baggier style of clothing and has been open about the fact that she has struggled with her body image frequently in her early teenage years. Previously she used baggy clothing as a way of maintaining control over her body by not allowing people an opinion on it.
According to the Mental Health of Children and Young People survey, more than one in twenty girls in the age between seventeen and nineteen may have body dysmorphic disorder. Body dysmorphic disorder is classified as a mental health condition and it is a very real issue affecting girls all over the UK as they pick at the small flaws in their appearance.
Women have campaigned so hard over the last few years, working towards a society where women’s bodies aren’t sexualised. Billie Eilish’s unedited, real body is refreshing to see amongst a myriad of edited images and size four models on social media. A fan on Twitter made an important point, saying: ‘y’all forgot what a woman’s body actually looks like’. The user hints at the toxic Instagram culture and how it has warped our perception of what we should look like. Twitter has been flooded with support for the ‘ocean eyes’ singer, asking people to focus on her talent, rather than her body.
In celebrities, their talent is often disregarded as the media choose to focus on their aesthetics; brand of their clothes, hair colour, and who they’re currently dating. At eighteen years old, Billie Eilish is the first woman and second artist to ever win all four major categories at the Grammys. Instead of focusing on what her body does or doesn’t look like, let’s just celebrate her extraordinary and unprecedented success.
‘Too fat’, ‘too skinny’, ‘not enough clothes’, ‘too many clothes’ are damaging phrases used too frequently by the media and online trolls. It’s 2020: let’s just empower women and whatever they choose to wear.
Header image credit: Jim Dyson/Getty Images.