Keira Knightley Would Like the Royals to Acknowledge Birth in All of Its Excruciating Shit-Covered Gore 

Keira Knightley would like to direct your attention to the massive media cover-up surrounding childbirth: a vomit-inducing, blood-shit-and-piss-soaked process with side effects and complications including ripping the wall between your vagina and anus, rectal bleeding, incontinence, getting cut open and sewn back together, and death, to name a few. In a letter to her three-year-old Edie, published in Scarlett Curtis’ new book Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (And Other Lies), she writes:

My vagina split. You came out with your eyes open. Arms up in the air. Screaming….I remember the shit, the vomit, the blood, the stitches.

Now, she asks you to please hold that image in mind when you look at this photo:

The fresh-as-a-daisy post-delivery-room look is the stuff of myth-making in line with the boy rumor that girls don’t fart, and Knightley’s not sorry to burst your bubble. She had her baby around the time Middleton had Charlotte and observes how the obligatory post-birth paparazzi shoots the woman is forced or chooses to endure, walking out of the hospital looking rested “with her face made up and high heels on” doesn’t gel with her own experience. “My shoes are crusted and sticky with the amniotic fluid of yesterday,” she recalls. “They smell.”

She addresses the Duchess:

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. This stuff is easy. It happens every day. What’s the big deal? So does death, you s—t-heads, but you don’t have to pretend that’s easy.

Here, here. Fuck that.