Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation
Billie Eilish has a message for her shamers.
The 18-year-old artist addressed her critics during the kickoff of her Where Do We Go? World Tour in Miami on Monday.
At one point, the Grammy winner played a video in which she spoke about the judgment she faces over her body and style. As the video played, Eilish started to slowly remove her clothing until she was standing in her bra and sinking into a dark pool.
“Do you know me? Do you really know me?” Eilish said at the beginning of the clip, per a transcription by The Guardian. “You have opinions about my opinions, about my music, about my clothes, about my body. Some people hate what I wear; some people praise it. Some people use it to shame others; some people use it to shame me.”
The “bad guy” star then said she can “feel you watching” and that “nothing I do goes unseen.”
“So while I feel your stares, your disapproval or your sighs of relief, if I lived by them, I’d never be able to move,” she continued, per the publication. “Would you like me to be smaller? Weaker? Softer? Taller? Would you like me to be quiet? Do my shoulders provoke you? Does my chest? Am I my stomach? My hips? The body I was born with, is it not what you wanted? If I wear what is comfortable, I am not a woman. If I shed the layers, I am a slut. Though you’ve never seen my body, you still judge it and judge me for it. Why?”
She then called out her haters for making assumptions about people based on size.
“We decide who they are. We decide what they’re worth,” she added, per the newspaper. “If I wear more, if I wear less, who decides what that makes me? What that means? Is my value based only on your perception? Or is your opinion of me not my responsibility?”
Eilish has spoken out about the judgment she’s received before, including during a 2019 Calvin Klein ad.
“I never want the world to know everything about me,” she said in the campaign. “I mean, that’s why I wear big, baggy clothes—nobody can have an opinion because they haven’t seen what’s underneath, you know?”
She also talked about the topic during an interview with Pharrell Williams for V Magazine last year.
“I wear baggy s–t and I wear what I want; I don’t say, ‘Oh, I am going to wear baggy clothes because it’s baggy clothes.’ It’s never like that,” she explained. “It’s more, just, I wear what I want to wear. But of course, everyone sees it as, ‘She’s saying no to being sexualized,’ and, ‘She’s saying no to being the stereotypical female.’ It’s a weird thing because I know a lot of what I hear is a positive or people trying to be positive about how I dress; how I am never really out there wearing nothing, or wearing dresses. I’ve heard that. [Even] from my parents, [the] positive [comments] about how I dress have this slut-shaming element. Like, ‘I am so glad that you are dressing like a boy, so that other girls can dress like boys, so that they aren’t sluts.’ That’s basically what it sounds like to me. And I can’t [overstate how] strongly I do not appreciate that, at all.”
Furthermore, Eilish has opened up about the hurtful remarks she’s received on Instagram. During an interview with BBC Breakfast, for instance, she said she’s “stopped reading comments fully” because it was “ruining my life.”
Eilish’s international tour runs until early September.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
