The last time Denmark’s prime minister was in the U.S. news cycle, she was going up against President Trump over Greenland. Now Mette Frederiksen is back in the news stateside, and this time her adversary is slightly less consequential: an anonymous man on social media. The PM is the latest woman in public life to deal with unsolicited commentary on her appearance.
Frederiksen posted on Instagram a message that she received from a male plastic surgeon. The unidentified doctor messaged her, unprompted, that he could “fix that little spot on [her] nose.” Frederiksen posted a screenshot of the Danish-language exchange. “I’m happy with my body—I really don’t need a male plastic surgeon to have an opinion about it!” she told him.
The message was hardly out of the ordinary. As any female public figure knows, unsolicited opinions on your face, body, clothing, hair, and almost anything else are common. “I’ve lost count of how many messages I’ve received over the years about my appearance,” the PM wrote in her caption. “Especially that I have ugly teeth and thin hair. That I have an ugly ‘wart’ on my nose and well-meaning advice to get some Botox.”
But this message seems to have struck a nerve for her, given that it arrived as she was returning from an actually important part of her job as one of Europe’s longest-serving heads of state: a visit to Ukraine, including air raid sirens and promises to defend the country against Russia. “If you’re going to write to me (and you’re more than welcome to), I hope you’ll use your time to talk about something more meaningful,” she wrote in her caption.
