Underneath the five medals she took home from Rio Olympics, gymnast Simone Biles is just another 19-year-old on Instagram. Like other teens, she doesn’t shy away from posting photos of herself and her friends doing mundane things, like, say just going to the beach.
Of course, Biles isn’t just any old 19-year-old. She’s one of the most famous women in the world now thanks to her dominating performances at the Rio Olympics. More than 570,000 fans responded positively to her photo on Instgram, which shows Biles flanked by teammates Madison Kocian, 19, and Aly Raisman, 22. But because this is the Internet, at least one idiot decided to rip into the women, criticizing their bodies.
In a tweet that has since been deleted, Twitter user @uwantmyd_aniel asked, “Ya’ll find this attractive? lmaaoo.”
A 19-year-old University of Florida college student did not “lmaaoo,” however, and neither did the more than 50,000 people who retweeted her response to the offending tweeter.
“I wasn’t surprised that so many people seemed to resonate with my thought,” Crystal McDuffy told The Washington Post on Thursday. “I was surprised that the tweet itself got so much attention.”
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McDuffy, a marketing and economics double major, said she uses Twitter often to speak out on social issues. She said while her social-minded tweets usually concern the #BlackLiveMatter movement, she’s touched on body image before, always with the same sentiment — that women don’t have bodies just to please men.
“I just kind of get people to really understand the core of why they think the way they think,” she said of her 140-character missives.
Of the tens of thousands of people who appreciated McDuffy’s thoughts, several replied to her with congratulatory GIFs, including a famous shot of President Obama dropping the mic at the White House Correspondents Dinner earlier this year.
“My mentions are in shambles,” McDuffy said of all the attention she’s getting.
Good thing she’s already thought of a way to fix it.
“I think I’m gonna delete [my account] when it comes time for internships,” McDuffy said.
The aspiring public relations consultant isn’t sure how her account, which she describes as “very candid,” will play with potential employers once she graduates.
In the meantime, she hopes to find more immediate employment in the social media field.
“The attention is cool,” she said. “I’m not gonna lie.”
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