Actress Keira Knightley suggested this week that Duchess Kate Middleton did women a disservice by emerging from St. Mary’s Hospital after giving birth to daughter Charlotte in 2015 with a face full of makeup and a pair of high heels.
“Hide. Hide our pain, our bodies splitting, our breasts leaking, our hormones raging,” Knightley wrote in a letter published in Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (And Other Lies.) “Look beautiful, look stylish, don’t show your battleground, Kate. Seven hours after your fight with life and death, seven hours after your body breaks open, and bloody, screaming life comes out. Don't show. Don't tell. Stand there with your girl and be shot by a pack of male photographers."
Knightley was rather graphic in recalling her own pregnancy.
"I remember the sh*t, the vomit, the blood, the stitches," Knightley writes. "I remember my battleground. Your battleground and life pulsating. Surviving. And I am the weaker sex? You are?"
The palace, usually not one to respond to tabloid news, responded. US Weekly had the exclusive.
“Keira is obviously entitled to her own opinion, but it was very much based on her own experiences and not of Kate’s. Not every mother feels the same way,” the Palace source told Us. “Keira’s comments were simply for attention and they weren’t justified.”
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It's too bad the two women aren't getting along right now, considering their kids are nearly the same age and should obviously grow up to be best friends.
However, Knightley now claims the media has "misrepresented" her essay. She insisted she was not trying to shame Middleton.
“That essay is about childbirth, it’s about motherhood, and it’s about complete empathy with every other woman that has been through the extremity of labor," she said at the BFI London Film Festival Thursday night. "It’s also about my sudden realization that what our culture asks us to do is to hide our truths and to silence our experiences. So it is exactly the opposite of what certain media has reported it to be. And I think just shows [that] as far as the feminist movement goes, we have a long way to go.”
Still, Middleton does have plenty of critics who have shamed her simply for having children.
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