Last night, actress Daisy Ridley responded to an Instagram criticizing her lithe frame in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in which she plays the heroic lead Rey. The text overlaid on the still from the film implied that Ridley’s athletic-yet-slender silhouette isn’t curvaceous enough to set a positive example for young women. “Don’t they know real women have curves?” the caption read.
Ridley was quick to thoughtfully react—joining a growing league of women, including Gigi Hadid, Petra Collins, Lena Dunham, Serena Williams, Jennifer Lawrence, and Zendaya, who have used the social media platform to take a stand against body shaming—by choosing to simply state the obvious: “ ‘Real women’ are all shapes and sizes.”
Ridley has since deleted her initial comment on the chastising image, and instead took to her own account to pen an empowering rebuttal. “I will not apologize for how I look, what I say, and how I live my life,” she writes. Nor should she. These days, for every negative comment about a celebrity’s figure, there's a thoughtful public response that pushes back, signifying a larger movement toward body acceptance that's rapidly gaining speed—from diverse castings on Fall 2016 runways from Hood By Air to Chromat, to the recent announcement that Barbie will now represent a more expansive definition of beauty with three new body types.
Rather than standing in the way of the actress, who has been making waves for women in Hollywood with her landmark turn as the series’ first lead heroine, we’d all do well to meditate on the mantra "not my body, not my business." Or, as Ridley puts it: "If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
24 hours of love, lightsabers, and Star Wars in New York City: