Megan Fox Opened Up About Body Dysmorphia & The Complicated Relationship She Has With Her Body

megan fox

Megan Fox might have been *the* face of beauty and sex appeal for girls like me who grew up in the early to mid 2000s, but the star has revealed she’s never felt that way about herself.

In an interview with Sports Illustrated, the Transformers star revealed she has suffered from intense body dysmorphia for most of her life — pretty much since she was a little girl.

“I have body dysmorphia—I don’t ever see myself the way other people see me,” she told the magazine for its 2023 issue.

“There’s never a point in my life where I loved my body, never, ever.

“When I was little, that was an obsession I had of ‘but I should look this way’.”

Fox said she wasn’t sure “why I had an awareness of my body that young”, but added that her “obsession” with having the perfect body wasn’t “environmental” because she grew up in a deeply religious household where bodies were rarely talked about or acknowledged.

“I remember being little and I would go in [to] the bathroom and pull my shirt up and check to see if I had boobs yet,” she said, laughing.

Honestly, it’s funny, sure, but it’s also kind of sad how much the pressure of being sexy and hot weighs on girls even before puberty kicks in. Just recently, discourse kicked off about an episode of hit children’s show Bluey, which showed Bluey’s dad pinching his belly fat and discussing needing to lose weight. So maybe it’s no surprise that women are experiencing body dysmorphia at such young ages.

I can recall being eight, maybe 10 years old and wanting to be “hot” because really, that was the only kind of positive attention you saw women either getting, or being rewarded for.

Fox also opened up about the way she was abused and slut-shamed by the broader public and media around the time she starred in feminist cult-classic film Jennifer’s Body.

“I think Jennifer’s Body was my favourite project and probably always will be because there’s just something about the timing of that, how it aligned with my public crucifixion that I was going through, and my internal psychological breakdown,” she said.

“What the character went through was very much a metaphor for what I was going through in Hollywood and with the media and with the world at large.”

ICYMI, Megan Fox was calling out misogyny and the objectification of women way back in the early 2000s, when the word “feminist” was still more of a cringe insult, and she’s been vocal about how much that’s been forgotten by modern feminists.

Fox recalled how she was “ahead of the #MeToo movement just in terms of timing” because she was discussing the issues it centred on “maybe a decade before” the movement.

Despite knowing what a powerful queen she is, Fox revealed she still has a long way to go before she’s at a place where she’s completely happy with herself.

“The journey of loving myself is going to be never-ending,” she said.

I hope she knows that until then, she’ll still have plenty of our love to get her through it.

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