Actress Margot Robbie is pregnant. And what I’m going to say next may surprise you, but here it is: pregnant women gain weight because there is a human being developing inside their body. Such a revelation seems to have gone unnoticed by a group of people, mostly men, who have been commenting on social media for weeks about Margot Robbie’s physical change, following some photographs of her in a pregnant bikini. The criticisms include assessments such as “How disgusting!”, “Damn, she’s really fat,” “She’s not what she used to be.” Having a group of myopic and unscrupulous Barbie collectors comment on the physical appearance of an objectively spectacular Hollywood actress is not something that deserves a column, you might think. But it is a precise indication of the aesthetic and hallucinogenic pressure to which society subjects women: if even Margot Robbie cannot escape these surrealist canons, who among us can? And this case underlines the extent to which the individual female body continues to be treated as public property that can be scrutinized and ridiculed, whether for being too big, too imperfect, too unmaternal or too pregnant; in other words, for any reason.
A few years ago, actress Emma Thompson said in an interview that “actresses over 30 simply don’t eat” because of the pressure the film industry imposes on them. In the interview, in fact, Thompson said that Hollywood’s obsession with weight prevented him from even living there. “I never moved to the United States because of it,” he said. But Emma, let me get to know you, in reality this pressure is everywhere, although in Hollywood it is more brutal. I write this while a friend tells us today in our WhatsApp group, with real pride, that she only gained one kilo during the summer, despite all the “excesses” she had. Measuring your success in kilograms is something that we women are accustomed to since childhood, because we have been thoroughly taught that thinness is the shortest path to beauty, this culturally constructed illusion that, however, greatly affects the way we are perceived and in which we perceive others.
