Lizzo isn’t afraid to be herself — just don’t call her “brave” for doing so.
The “Juice” singer, 31, recently opened up to Glamour magazine about the double standard she sees in Hollywood and the beauty industry.
“When people look at my body and be like, ‘Oh my God, she’s so brave,’ it’s like, ‘No, I’m not.’ I’m just fine. I’m just me. I’m just sexy,” she said.
Lizzo explained that the double standard happens whenever she gets called “brave” for doing the same things a thinner woman would do without being labeled as such: “If you saw Anne Hathaway in a bikini on a billboard, you wouldn’t call her brave. I just think there’s a double standard when it comes to women.”
“I don’t like it when people think it’s hard for me to see myself as beautiful,” she added. “I don’t like it when people are shocked that I’m doing it.”
The “Truth Hurts” singer said that she credits social media for helping to change perceptions of beauty — and that finding herself reflected online helped her to “find the beauty in [her]self.”
“Back in the day, all you really had were the modeling agencies. I think that’s why it made everything so limited for what was considered beautiful. It was controlled from this one space,” she said. “But now we have the internet. So if you want to see somebody who’s beautiful who looks like you, go on the internet and just type something in. Type in ‘blue hair.’ Type in ‘thick thighs.‘ Type in ‘back fat.‘ You’ll find yourself reflected. That’s what I did to help find the beauty in myself.”
Her recent Absolut campaign is a great example of what she’s talking about — and the vodka company was inspired by her Instagram feed.
“The creative had the big girls in it. It was juicy, like me, and fun, like me,” Lizzo said of the campaign.
“For someone like me to get a campaign with Absolut and to be wearing a bikini and to be jumping around and dancing and having fun — Absolut saw me on Instagram, saw how I like to dress, saw how I liked to party with my girls, and they came up with that creative,” she said.
All in all, the singer and flutist is hoping that more space can be made for women.
“Make space for me. Make space for this generation of artists who are really fearless in self-love,” she said. “They’re out here. They want to be free. I think allowing that space to be made is really what’s going to shift the narrative in the future. Let’s stop talking about it and make more space for people who are about it.”
Lizzo’s comments come fresh off an electric performance at the MTV Video Music Awards on Monday, where she was nominated for three awards.
This isn’t the first time that Lizzo has spoken about the body positivity double standard she experiences.
In her July interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, the musician clapped back when the host said that she finds her posing nude on her Cuz I love You album cover “a really bold statement, and it’s a statement for women.”
“Yeah, but are you only saying that because I’m fat?” Lizzo replied. “Because I feel like if I were a thin woman, maybe that wouldn’t be the case.”
“I feel like women who are smaller aren’t really given the opportunities to be body-positive or role models either because we’ve been conditioned to believe that women are using their bodies for the male gaze,” she continued. “And I think if I were slimmer, I don’t think people would look to me with the same type of like, ‘Oh, wow; she’s so brave; she’s doing this and representing everyone’ — that they would — you know I’m saying? Because I’m big.”
This article was originally published by: People
