Demi Moore Has Powerful Body Image Message for Men

On Sept. 22’s episode of CBS Sunday Mornings , Demi Moore spoke about the “crazy” and “humiliating” extremes to which people will go to maintain their idea of a perfect body. It’s a problem, Moore says, that affects men as much as women.

Moore knows the issue of self-image from the inside out, having weathered tabloid scandals concerning everything from her flesh-baring roles in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and Striptease to the infamous 1991 Vanity Fair shoot for which she posed nude while pregnant. The discourse about the magazine cover was so severe that Moore began biking 60 miles every day to and from the set of Indecent Proposal to shed the additional weight.

“I put so much pressure on myself,” she told CBS . “And I did have experiences of being told to lose weight, and all of those, while they may have been embarrassing and humiliating, it’s what I did to myself because of that,” Moore continued. “Even just the idea of what I did to my body it’s like so crazy, so ridiculous. But you look back and you kind of go, ‘Did it really matter that much?’ Probably not but at the time I made it mean everything.”

Moore contends that the issue affects both genders equally, though men may have trouble talking about the issue or naming it because it’s so often associated only with women “Self-judgment, chasing perfection, trying to rid ourselves of ‘flaws,’ also feeling rejected and despair, none of this is exclusive to women," she told The Guardian last week. “We are living at a time of great judgment," she added, where “people can anonymously judge one another in cruel ways.

“We’ve all had moments where you go back and you’re trying to fix something, and you’re just making it worse to the point where you’re incapacitated,” Moore said of perceived physical shortcomings. "I feel [negative judgment] is a reflection of someone’s own unhappiness and/or a way to boost their own sense of self," she said.

Moore has learned to take what people say about her body in stride. She’s currently getting awards buzz for her fearless turn in The Substance , a body-horror satire which tackles similar self-image issues. The actor previously spoke about the film’s “vulnerable” nude scenes , in which she is made to look purposefully aged beside Margaret Qualley’s pristine younger version of herself, but it wasn’t something Moore lost any sleep over. “Some days I catch myself dissecting, hyperfocusing on things that I don’t like,” she told CBS . “[But] I'm going to make the best of what is as opposed to chasing what isn’t.”