Aren’t you people tired?
Recently, Nicola Coughlan went on Instagram to share a simple message to her followers: “If you have an opinion about my body please, please don’t share it with me.”
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“I am just one real life human being and it’s really hard to take the weight of thousands of opinions on how you look being sent directly to you every day,” she added.
It’s heartbreaking that Coughlan has to plead to people to stop sending unsolicited comments about her body. She’s beautiful and talented and successful—stop undermining her.
She’s had to fight back against people body-shaming her before, from a male critic that chose to focus on her weight in two separate reviews and a podcaster who summed her up just as “the fat girl from Bridgerton.” She wrote a whole article about the former for The Guardian, saying, “[The] prism through which my body is viewed is inescapable.” She concluded it with a call for revolution: “I hope in the future that more people will talk about our work, our inspirations, our drive, rather than our looks. A revolution is happening, and I want to play my part in it.”
I can only imagine how exhausting it must be for her to constantly have to be a relentless force just so she can get the respect she deserves. It still blows my mind that we’re living in the year 2022 and yet we’re still bogged down with the same problems. It’s not fair that women are still totaled up by how their bodies look, as if their only value to the world is how much their bodies conform to beauty standards.
Similarly, Melanie Lynskey opened up about people giving her unsolicited comments about her weight. “Most egregious are the ‘I care about her health!!’ people,” she wrote. “B*tch you don’t see me on my Peleton (sic)! You don’t see me running through the park with my child. Skinny does not always equal healthy.”
The story of my life since Yellowjackets premiered. Most egregious are the “I care about her health!!” people…bitch you don’t see me on my Peleton! You don’t see me running through the park with my child. Skinny does not always equal healthy https://t.co/W2poMmsv1p
— Melanie Lynskey (@melanielynskey) January 29, 2022
Prior to this, Lynskey had also just recently opened up about being body-shamed on the set of “Yellowjackets.” A crew member asked her “what [she] planned to do with [her] body,” she shared in a January interview with Rolling Stone.
“I did find it important that this character is just comfortable and sexual and not thinking or talking about [her body],” she also said about her “Yellowjackets” character, “because I want women to be able to to watch it and be like, ‘Wow, she looks like me and nobody’s saying she’s the fat one.’ That representation is important.”
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