Social Media platforms were on fire on Wednesday, April 24, when Olivia Munn slammed the blog Go Fug Yourself in a self-posted essay following comments the site’s creators made about her Peter Pilotto pantsuit. And celebrities have been weighing in on the issue, some to offer support and others to defend the site’s co-founders, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan.
The backstory: Fed up with their criticism (the post claimed the 38-year-old’s outfit looked like “she got roped into making a sequel to American Hustle that ended up going straight to on-demand”), the Ride Along 2 actress called out the blog’s founders for what she referred to as their “ugly behavior.”
“For years, fashion-policing celebrity has been an accepted mainstream media critique, even though it mainly focuses on females and not men, which ultimately contributes to the perpetual minimization of women and propagates the idea is predominantly (or singularly) tied to our looks,” she wrote. “At the forefront of this right now are blogs like Go Fug Yourself, created and run by people who have anointed themselves as judge and jury of what’s fashionable … Their blatant hypocrisy is nauseating — they claim to employ some sort of subjective barometer for goodness and beauty even though what they do and write is neither good nor beautiful.”
This almost immediately set off a debate amongst the Hollywood elite. There were some who defended her fighting words.
Father of the Bride actress Kimberly Williams-Paisley commented on Munn’s Instagram, writing, “Thank you for writing this. Love you and so inspired by you.”
New Girl’s Hannah Simone also showed support. “I love you and I love this truth,” she wrote along with clapping emojis.
Parent Trap actress Lisa Ann Walter also agreed, arguing that this type of criticism should be a thing of the past. “We’ve moved on. We have such bigger things deserving our hate,” she wrote on Twitter.
Anthony Rapp got in on the debate as well, giving it some credence. “My read was that she was doing something necessary: underlining the fact that for too long women have just gone along when criticized for their physical appearance,” he tweeted. “Critics write their criticisms without any consequence for their words.”
However, many other commenters (famous and not) disagree, defending the writers for doing their job and doing it well.
“The @fuggirls run a delightful, fun, positive blog,” tweeted the Bold Type creator Sarah Watson. “And for Olivia Munn to use her celebrity to try to destroy them personally and professionally because they thought her outfit was meh is absolutely awful.”
Sia’s manager David Russell tweeted, “I swear I’m not being funny but all I know about Olivia Munn is that she’s always mad about something.”
As many point out, Cocks and Morgan have always been careful not to engage in body shaming or in racist and sexist practices surrounding fashion.
With her essay, Munn joins a growing list of stars who have spoken out about critics lately. For example, just earlier this week, Lizzo proclaimed that music critics should be musicians themselves after receiving a bad review on Pitchfork. “People who ‘review’ albums and don’t make music themselves should be unemployed,” she wrote on Twitter.
