If we don’t laugh, we’ll cry. The relentless, repugnant and quite frankly random obsession with dissecting women’s appearances has reached new heights in the form of – wait for it – Nicole Kidman’s earlobes.

It’s not enough that the Oscar-winning actress, producer and pop culture icon is regularly trolled because of her ‘Botox face’, now her ‘ears are so noteworthy that they simply can’t be ignored’ – or so one tabloid article reads.

The report suggests that Kidman’s earlobes appear to be ‘stretched’ and ‘might be a result of plastic surgery’. According to Mark Solomos, who appeared in Olivia Attwood’s ITV documentary Price of Perfection, the Babygirl star’s hearing organs are known as ‘pixie ears’ or ‘bat ears’. I think I’ll stick with ‘ears’, personally.

‘The effect occurs when the earlobe is pulled downward, often revealing that a facelift has been performed,’ Solomos told The Daily Mail’s FEMAIL, before suggesting it is ‘typically a result of poor surgical technique’.

Most women will recognise a slightly drooped earlobe as the result of wearing heavy earrings or a natural sign of ageing, but fine, whatever, now it’s a tell-tale sign of a ‘botched’ cosmetic procedure as well. ‘It amazes me that these people think they look good and that’s why they keep having tweaks,’ reads one comment under the aforementioned article. ‘It’s ridiculous if they think we can’t see that they have had procedures done.’

‘She was beautiful and would have aged well, now on a slippery slope,’ reads another.

The grass is always greener. Women who stand accused of having work done or who have openly admitted that they have are told they should have ‘aged naturally’. While those who choose to ‘age naturally’ are equally vilified and given streams of unwarranted advice about how to improve their appearance.

Before we get onto the crux of the issue, which is, of course, who actually cares?, we must go over all the usual, tired points. The main one being that even the wealthiest, most idolised and widely sought after women in the world are trolled about how they look. It’s not just their weight, their figure, their style or their facial features anymore, it’s niche, nonsensical things like the shape of their earlobes. If you tried hard enough you could probably find a negative article, comment or social media post about every single square centimetre of a woman’s body – thousands of times over.

In theory, knowing that it’s a battle that can never be won should be enough of a reason to stop fighting, but we all know that’s not how it works. Far from discouraging us from honing in on our own insecurities – if Kidman’s ears are enough to offend people, why bother? – the discourse sends a clear message to women everywhere: your appearance is a constant, failing work in progress.

Those who opt for cosmetic procedures or ‘tweakments’ to stave off the impending doom, criticism and self-loathing are not safe either. They might hand over time and money to preserve their looks, but strangers on the internet will always find another reason to criticise them.

Then there’s the reality that swathes of people, and industry upon industry, stand to benefit from this cycle of misogyny and abuse. The outlets reporting on Kidman’s ‘worrying’ earlobes, the cosmetic surgeons who will receive a flurry of calls from women worrying that they look like bats, the beauty industry at large that has every generation in a chokehold worrying about how to attain the latest beauty standards, and now an entire social media ecosystem that feeds off our schadenfreude and encourages us to use our ‘free speech’ to repeatedly tear other people down.

If that all sounds dystopian and slightly over the top, unfortunately it doesn’t scratch the surface. Remember, the jumping off point for this conversation is Kidman’s earlobes.

Back to the crux: who finds this type of sexist body part analysis valuable? Obviously not Kidman, though you’d like to hope her publicist is able to shield her from at least some of the drivel that gets shared online. Does anyone actually care what Kidman’s ears look like? Or whether they are the result of surgery? If they do, I kindly implore them to seek help or take up a hobby.

Perhaps we should all defer to another Hollywood stalwart, Emma Thompson, who has had her image debated countless times over the years. She said: ‘I think one of the greatest tragedies in our lives – in women’s lives – is the time, the effort, the energy, the passion that we’ve wasted on not being able to accept our own bodies.’

It’s not even just our own bodies we struggle to accept, it’s other women’s bodies too. That’s no coincidence. The endless quest for perfection knows no bounds. Today’s earlobe discourse should serve as a reminder to listen to voices like Thompson’s, not give us yet another reason to feel bad about ourselves.