Olivia Munn took to social media this week to post a short essay ripping apart the celebrity fashion blog “Go Fug Yourself” and the two women at its helm, citing the women’s “ugly behaviors.”
The specific blog post that Munn took issue with, titled “If Only I Had a Dollar For Every Time I’ve Said, ‘Oh My God Olivia Munn,’” discusses the outfit that Munn wore to an Apex for Youth Gala earlier this month. The post includes a picture of Munn and a joke that her Peter Pilotto pantsuit looks like “she got roped into making a sequel to American Hustle that ended up going straight to on-demand.”
Munn was over-the-top offensive in her essay, calling out website founders Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan by name, in an attack that declared their site a perpetuation of the patriarchal agenda. Munn wrote,
“Blogs like theirs have been around for a while, with their snarkiness and hypocrisy on full display.”
She continued,
“And we’ve accepted it because as women we’ve been conditioned to believe that being publicly chastised for our weight, our looks, or our choice in clothing is an acceptable part of our existence.”
The thing is, though, the “Fug Girls,” as they are affectionately known, have never once gone after a celebrity for his or her weight, or the way they look. They provide cheerful commentary on celebrity fashion choices.
According to their press kit, Morgan and Cocks strive to be “always unflinching, but never mean.” They have policies against body-shaming and work diligently to keep the comments section of their website clean. To boot, they are an independently-owned website run entirely by women, and they have merely one-eighth the number of followers that Munn has.
Munn herself says early in her essay that “it’s silly to put subjective work out into the public sphere and then get upset if it gets publicly and negatively critiqued.” She goes on to say that she does not believe fashion blogs fall into this category. But isn’t that exactly what fashion is: subjective?
It’s one thing to denounce hateful rhetoric when you see it online. But it’s quite another to go after someone else’s livelihood, in this case, two female entrepreneurs with far less star power, simply because you don’t like what they have to say.
A short essay on the ugly behaviors of the @fuggirls pic.twitter.com/KfZ5ambMQM
— Olivia Munn (@oliviamunn) April 25, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
And co-opting feminism as a way to divert criticism feels like the online version of throwing a tantrum to get what you want. Munn even goes so far as to hide behind the #MeToo movement in her post, arguing that the Fug Girls contribute to the “suppression of women.”
Munn wrote,
“If there’s anything we’ve been able to glean from the past two years, it’s that girls and women have been emotionally and physically targeted and abused for years yet have remained silent because collectively we all believed that our voices, our pain, our existence only mattered with conditions attached.”
However, by going on this smear campaign, it feels like Munn is the one doing the targeting. Moreover, using the #MeToo movement as a shield against legitimate criticism feels like a particularly ugly, or at least misguided, ploy.
For their part, Cocks and Morgan stuck to their signature comedic take on the issue, simply writing on Twitter,
“I know you’ve been waiting for our statement on this topic, but we had to take our time. Now, here it is: THE NFL DRAFT.”
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