Lizzo Doesn't Want To Be Told She's 'Brave' For Loving Herself

Lizzo talks about the double standard for women’s bodies and says she doesn’t like it when people are shocked that she’s so body confident

Lizzo is the reigning musical queen of Summer 2019. One of the reasons the world fell in love with Lizzo is that she is unabashedly confident, she makes pop anthems that idolize self-love, and she preaches body positivity. Lizzo’s self-confidence has inspired all sorts of memes, and she absolutely killed her recent VMA performance which was a toast to body love, but the singer rejects the idea that it’s novel or shocking to see a plus-size woman love herself.

In a new interview with Glamour, Lizzo talks about the double standard our society has set for women’s bodies and why her body confidence isn’t brave, it just is.

“When people look at my body and be like, ‘Oh my God, she’s so brave,’ it’s like, ‘No, I’m not,'” Lizzo told Glamour. “I’m just fine. I’m just me. I’m just sexy. 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.”

It’s true that for all the Lizzo-love circling the web these days, there’s a more insidious and unspoken agreement buzzing underneath that what Lizzo is doing is somehow rare and shocking — that we barely bat an eye when supermodels pose nude, but when Lizzo does it, it’s a spectacle. Glamour pointed out that artists like Britney Spears and Madonna have been triumphantly celebrating and parading their bodies around stages for decades but it only becomes “a thing” when an artist like Lizzo does it because we expect thin women to love their bodies and expect everyone else to be ashamed of theirs.

“I don’t like it when people think it’s hard for me to see myself as beautiful,” Lizzo added. “I don’t like it when people are shocked that I’m doing it.”

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Lizzo isn’t the first woman to speak on this idea that she’s brave for doing anything other than living her life. Blogger Kenzie Brenna expertly summed up everything that’s wrong with the “you’re so brave” conversation in an Instagram post in 2017.

Brenna lamented that whenever she posts a partially clothed photo or shares photos of her cellulite, commenters will tell her that she’s “brave” for doing so.

“You don’t tell a Victoria’s Secret model that ‘they’re so brave’ for showing off their body or someone who is sculpted from a type of athleticism,” Brenna wrote. “Bravery requires an acknowledgement of fear, possibility of loss, where chances of failure are high. When I [show] you a body that is underrepresented in our media I get hailed as doing an act of bravery because we acknowledge that there may be social failure in this, I may be attacked, I may get hurt JUST BY BEING MYSELF. Can we all just recognize how fucked up that is?!”

Let’s follow in Lizzo’s lead and try to reject the brainwashing we’ve endured about who gets to be body-confident and who doesn’t. We’re all just humans with bodies. Or as Lizzo put it: “I’m just me. I’m just sexy.”