It’s a case of he said, she said. Caitlin Stasey made her opinion known after a feature about her in Australia’s Good Weekend magazine was canceled because, according to the Reign actress, she refused to pose nude.
Stasey, 25, took to Twitter on Wednesday, July 15, to unleash her anger about the situation and to specifically call out editor Ben Naparstek. According to the actress, he spearheaded the decision to have the piece pulled.
"Good Weekend magazine suddenly doesn't have the space to run a piece on me because I shouldn't do a shoot in my underwear," she tweeted. "They wanted to team an interview about my upset over the constant objectification of women with a sexualized photo shoot."
"I declined …and miraculously, conveniently after I said I wouldn't do it, they claimed the magazine was downsized and there was no space to run the piece."
Stasey, who is the founder of Herself.com, a website dedicated to creating a safe space for women to discuss a wide range of feminist issues, had previously posted nude photos of herself on the site. But, the actress said, the intention there was entirely different.
"Staggering to me, the arrogance of those who thought a shoot like that would b appropriate and then having a tantrum when I refused," she tweeted of the situation. "U do understand the difference between a woman appearing naked on her own terms and one being coaxed to in order to sell your product?"
"A woman appearing nude once, for her own purposes, does not have to bend to you willing her nude for yours," she continued.
In an interview with Pedestrian magazine about her Twitter rant, Stasey called Naparstek an "entitled frat boy" and likened his decision to "assuming a woman is available to you and your agenda purely because you desire it."
Naparstek defended his and the magazine's decision to pull the plug on the feature in a statement to ABC.
"As the profile was tied to the launch of Caitlin's website of nude photography, I thought it would be fitting to do an artful shoot in that vein while offering a change of pace from our usual celebrity portraits," he said. "But of course I fully respected and understood Caitlin's reluctance to participate in that."
The editor further explained that he and the magazine had simply imagined the shoot to be similar to "the beautiful imagery she'd published of herself" on her website.
Naparstek told Pedestrian that they simply postponed the feature about the actress. “We chose to delay the profile until later in the year so it could be tied to the new seasons of her series Please Like Me and Reign,” he explained.
