Kate Middleton Doesn’t Need Your Body Commentary Either, Actually

I just have a quick question for the group. Can we not?!

And let’s not forget Sarah Ferguson, another woman who married into the royal family, who was dubbed Duchess of Pork by the tabloids. Having actually gotten the opportunity to confront the journalist who coined the atrocious nickname (a blessing I would wish on all body-shamed women), Fergie told Glamour’s Samantha Barry, “I looked at this little chap—round, jovial—and I thought, My heavens, you were the cause of my eating disorders, my mental stress, my demise. If only I’d known it wasn’t real. It was entirely made up.”

So, Kate Middleton stepped outside of her house to unofficially attend a music festival and was spotted momentarily off wardrobe script. Cue the onslaught of unsolicited body commentary!

Now, for the record, we cannot possibly know whether or not Kate Middleton has an eating disorder, and it is both dangerous and cruel to speculate on it. What we do know is that if Kate’s weight fluctuated even slightly in the other direction, she’d be getting a horrific fat-shaming nickname of her own. 

Seriously, though. All women who are in the public eye are subjected to an obscene level of body-shaming and speculation that we, as a society, are still working hard to undo. And it seems to come down particularly hard on women in the royal family. Princess Diana, who would have been Princess Kate’s mother-in-law, very famously struggled with an eating disorder throughout her marriage. “The bulimia started the week after we got engaged and would take nearly a decade to overcome,” Diana said in a confessional tape, per Vogue. “My husband put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me—and the Camilla thing.”

Here is an incomplete list of things strangers on the internet have claimed Kate looks in the amateur snapshot: Painfully thin, painfully slim, wasting away, not well, sickly, and emaciated. One commenter compared her to a person with a drug addiction. Several people speculated that she has an eating disorder.