Olivia Munn Fires Back At Fashion Blog Go Fug Yourself

Olivia Munn took aim Wednesday night at celebrity style blog Go Fug Yourself, known for its comedic takes on celebrity fashion, for what she called “ugly behaviors.”

The actress shared a short essay on Twitter criticizing Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the writers behind the blog. The self-described Fug Girls had run an April 18 item titled “If Only I Had a Dollar For Every Time I’ve Said, ’Oh My God Olivia Munn,’” which critiqued the outfit Munn wore to the Apex for Youth Gala earlier this month. 

“This is just kinda like she got roped into making a sequel to American Hustle that ended up going straight to on-demand,” the item said.

In her essay, Munn acknowledged that a “career that comes with an audience” necessarily brings critics whose job is to assess her work, “sometimes positively, sometimes not.” But fashion blogs like Go Fug Yourself don’t fall into that category, she argued.

“For years, fashion-policing celebrity has been an accepted form of mainstream media critique, even though it mainly focuses on females and not men, which ultimately contributes to the perpetual minimization of women and propagates the idea that our worth is predominantly (or singularly) tied to our looks,” Munn wrote.

Munn said she was speaking out because she felt Morgan and Cocks shouldn’t “get away with spewing whatever vitriol they want just by betting on the antiquated notion that the people they target won’t say anything.”

Morgan and Cocks responded in a statement on Thursday: “We absolutely respect Olivia Munn’s right to her opinion ― even if we disagree, as we do here! Red carpet fashion is a big business and an art form like any other, and as such there is room to critique it. Having said that, we wish her nothing but the best and look forward to her next project.”

“Blogs like theirs have been around for awhile, with their snarkiness and hypocrisy on full display,” Munn wrote on Twitter. “We’ve been conditioned as women to feel that we must look and dress a certain way to be accepted. If there’s anything we’ve been able to glean from the past two years, it’s that girls and women have been emotionally and physically targeted and abused for years yet have remained silent because collectively we all believed that our voices, our pain, our existence only mattered with conditions attached.”

However, the actress said, she’s been inspired by the voices of “strong, supportive women,” including a group of 18 seniors at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland who organized a meeting in March to address the harmful behaviors behind a list created by male students that ranked their female classmates by appearance. 

“They’ve inspired me to also reject the ‘blogs will be blogs’ mentality that also pervades our social consciousness,” Munn wrote. 

She received some pushback from other Twitter users:

On Fashionista, Tyler McCall responded with “What Olivia Munn Got Wrong In Her Rant About The Fug Girls,” noting that the “Fug Girls go to great lengths to spread their red carpet coverage across both genders and avoid any discussion of body or appearances beyond the clothes — and they’re not alone in this.” 

Munn had spoken to HuffPost at the Apex for Youth Gala, which supports underserved immigrant and Asian youth in New York City and where she accepted an Inspiration Award. She revealed why she was choosing to speak out about her own experiences regarding sexual assault and misconduct. 

“My mom always taught me that I mattered. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought, I mattered. I’ve always had this strength because of my mother,” Munn said. “But this is something that all Asians do have ― we have a very strong sense of self and that’s not something anyone else can take away.”