Keira Knightley slams Kate Middleton's "perfect" post-birth appearance

Academy Award nominated actress Keira Knightly has lashed out at Kate Middleton for promoting 'unrealistic' expectations for women post-birth.

In an essay titled 'The Weaker Sec' which appears in a printed collection, the 33-year-old slammed the Duchess of Cambridge for posing for photos appearing ultra-polished outside the Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital in London just hours after giving birth to each of her three children.

"We stand and watch the TV screen. She [Kate] was out of hospital seven hours later with her face made up and high heels on. The face the world wants to see," Knightley writes, according to Refinery29.

The star gave birth to three-year-old daughter Edie just one day before Kate gave birth to Princess Charlotte in 2015.

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Her essay appeared in the collection Feminists Don't Wear Pink (And Other Lies), curated by writer Scarlett Curtis.

"Hide. Hide our pain, our bodies splitting, our breasts leaking, our hormones raging. Look beautiful," she wrote.

"Look stylish, don't show your battleground, Kate. 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."

Knightley's essay, dedicated "to my girl", begins by intimately describing her daughter’s birth.

"My vagina split," she wrote. "You came out with your eyes open. Arms up in the air. Screaming. They put you on to me, covered in blood, vernix, your head misshapen from the birth canal. Pulsating, gasping, screaming.

"You latched on to my breast immediately, hungrily, I remember the pain. The mouth clenched tight around my nipple, light sucking on and sucking out.

"I remember the s--t, the vomit, the blood, the stitches. I remember my battleground. Your battleground and life pulsating. Surviving. And I am the weaker sex? You are?"

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