“I Feel Your Stares”: Billie Eilish Slams Body-Shaming And Sexism With Powerful Video
"Do my shoulders provoke you? Does my chest? Am I my stomach? My hips?"
Billie Eilish has kicked off the first night of her world tour with a video message in which she confronts those who have endlessly sexualised her and publicly criticised her body.
In the video, the ‘bad guy’ singer strips off her distinctive baggy clothing while submerging herself in murky water, a visual reference to both Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin and the imagery of her early video clips.
“Some people hate what I wear, some people praise it,” Eilish says in the video. “While I feel your stares, your disapproval or your sighs of relief, if I lived by them, I’d never be able to move.”
From there, Eilish goes on to address her own body in minutiae, questioning each part.
“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?”
empowering pic.twitter.com/IBOl9LF0rU
— a 78 (@ILOMIL0S) March 10, 2020
Eilish has previously explained that her baggy clothing is a way of deflecting the opinions and attention of the mainstream public.
“I never want the world to know everything about me,” she said in a video released last year. “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?
“Nobody can be like, ‘Oh, she’s slim-thick, she’s not slim-thick, she’s got a flat, she’s got a fat. No one can say any of that, because they don’t know.”
In recent weeks, Eilish has spoken of the particular pressure exerted on popstars. While accepting an award at the BRITs, for instance, she claimed to have been feeling “very hated” recently.
Clearly, we do not deserve an artist as switched-on and plugged-in as Billie Eilish.
Photo Credit: Mikki Gomez/Music Junkee