Millie Bobby Brown says “she will not be ashamed for how she looks” as she faces online bullying

Actress Millie Bobby Brown has faced much scrutiny and online bullying from journalists and the public due to her appearance.

The 21-year-old has been on a press tour for her newest movie ‘The Electric State’ and therefore has been in much of the public eye recently. This has brought much attention to her appearance and outside thoughts on her looks, which has now turned to bullying.

The Electric State actress has responded to these offensive articles with a three-minute video on her Instagram page.

She said, “The fact that adult writers are spending their time dissecting my face, my body, my choices, is disturbing."

Picture of Brown: credit to Vogue

Founding member of Feminists Work for Change, Katy Sadler said, “all women are judged on their appearance throughout their lifetimes, from childhood onwards. The judgments and insults may change as women age. Still, we live in a patriarchal society where misogyny, sexism, and the abuse of women is pervasive, and how women look is weaponised and used to demean and degrade them. Women receive constant messaging from the media all their lives about what beauty is and what they should be striving to look like.”

She continued, “If we look back at The Sun’s Page 3 now, it is a great example of the woman standing up to the media system and winning. It seems unimaginable that a full page was dedicated to depicting a naked young woman in a mainstream newspaper, daily, but this shows how acceptable sexist attitudes, and the objectification of women were and still are. We are living in a toxic and damaging culture when it comes to women’s agency over their image and their bodies.

“Be kind to yourself and to other women too, don’t waste your energy tearing other women down for how they look, we are all stuck in this system.”

In Brown’s video response, she also added, "That some of these articles are written by women makes it even worse.”

Freelance journalist, Ellen Manning, says, “Newspapers and the media have always cashed in on how people look. That’s not a new thing, but what's changed over the past decade or so is something that Millie Bobby Brown raised, which is the idea of writing articles for clicks. To read your stuff online, you have to make them click on it. This then leads to things like ‘The Daily Mail sidebar of shame.’ It’s often about appearance and is designed to make people want to read the article.

Picture credit to University of California

“Social media is visual, and it's about aesthetics. But also, the ability to manipulate images, whether it's adding a filter or completely changing something, means a lot of women have a very unrealistic idea when it comes to appearance."

She continued, “I’m a freelance journalist, which means I must sell stories to make money. If a headline happens to go on a story I don’t like or if my editor wants me to include something that I don’t feel comfortable with, what do I do? There needs to be a wholesale change in how we do celebrity journalism. Or a movement, maybe of female journalists who turn around and say, “No, I’m not going to write that.”

“I think it’s important that Millie Bobby Brown raised this issue and as she said, “it's for the future children and young women.””