Erin Moriarty, star of The Boys, is sick of Megyn Kelly's postulating her judgement of people's bodies as concern for women and, honestly? We're proud she said something.
The former Fox News host accused Moriarty of getting plastic surgery, using the actress—best-known for her portrayal of Starlight in the superhero comedy from Amazon's Prime Video—as an example of a "social sickness" that convinces "beautiful" women to get "extreme" plastic surgery during a recent segment.
"More and more young women are doing this," Kelly explained on her SirusXM show. "It’s not about an objection to plastic surgery, it’s about an obsession with turning yourself into this fake version of yourself," the host claimed.
(Sure, Jan.)
But Kelly went even further after picking apart the differences between two undated photos of Moriarty, declaring the actor's perceived face changes as, "a sign of mental illness."
Kelly continued the tried-and-true line so often touted by people who assert that their ill-informed judgments are actually care. "I really want to get in the heads of these young girls and say, 'Please don’t do this.'"
Understandably, Moriarty did not take kindly to Kelly using her image to police women's appearance and what they should or should not do with it, particularly because, as she said in an Instagram post on Friday, she's never had the surgeries and procedures Kelly posits.
Explaining that she was already dealing with "one of the most challenging weeks" of her life, where she has been "BARELY been able to eat and sleep," and therefore already dreading the unasked for feedback and comments around her body online, Moriarty went condemned Kelly for what she called "exhibitionist feminism" and "ironically misogynistic."
"This is something I truly never anticipated writing," Moriarty wrote on the Instagram post. We're all subject to levels of bullying throughout our lives but I am horrified, and I felt that I deserved to take a second to address these things."
"Megyn used a photo taken 'a year ago' according to her, that had in actuality been taken about a decade ago before I was of LEGAL DRINKING AGE (I'm about to turn 30) as an example (maybe do some research that would take 30 seconds)," Moriarty stated.
She explained the "after" photo Kelly used was from a day where a make-up artists used their "magic wands," and did work that "involves major contouring" to create the look Kelly claimed was purely plastic. At the time, the make-up left Moriarty "feeling pretty" after a stressful day. However, the "scathing comments" since have left her "horrified" and convinced her to leave social media altogether.
"I am horrified by the reaction, the reductive assumptions," she wrote. "It's broken my heart, You've broken my heart ... there's no excuse for these horrific allegations, the verbal abuse that I have had to delete, and genuinely false information that is being used to perpetuate a message that is exhibitionist feminism."
"Shame on you, Megyn Kelly," Moriarty finished her statement, "implying that my photo is reflective of women being in a worse place is as false as my conviction in saying that if you resigned, you would be leaving women in a better place."
To which all we can say is: hell yes, Erin. Hell. Yes. Thankfully, many people—including several The Boys co-stars, like Chace Crawford and Jack Quaid—came out to support Moriarty for speaking out about our culture's ouroboros-like obsession with women's bodies.
And, hey: maybe one day the world will just let women live!
(Sure, Jan.)
