Maren Morris gave the camera her middle finger, and the words on the screen read “me being a wh0re at the gym.”
She set the video to her own song, “Be a Bitch,” and wrote a caption under it.
“Leave my gym short wedgie out of it,” she wrote in the Instagram post.
Morris posted it on Monday, Oct. 12, two days after Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live for the third time. During his Oct. 10 monologue, the 38-year-old comedian told the audience he had been away from the gym for a while.
“I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now,” Gillis said.
Morris answered him by putting his own word on her screen.
Shane Gillis’ Gym Joke on SNL Drew Few Laughs and a Wave of Backlash
The line drew few laughs from the studio audience, and the backlash spread across TikTok, Instagram, X and Threads. Gillis has a long history with the show. SNL fired him as a cast member in 2019, before his first episode, after podcast clips resurfaced with racist and homophobic remarks, and the show still invited him back to host in 2024 and 2025.
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Schitt’s Creek creator and star Dan Levy answered the monologue in an Instagram video on Sunday.
“Women wearing short shorts to the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists,” he said.
Levy added that men need to be defending women more, and he called it an everybody issue. Maggie Baird, the mother of Billie Eilish and FINNEAS, shared his response, and so did Flavor Flav. On Monday, former SNL star Ego Nwodim posted a gym selfie to her Instagram Stories with the caption “whore reporting for duty.”
Gillis had his defenders too. Former SNL star Jay Pharoah cheered him on in the comments of SNL’s monologue post, and Travis Kelce appeared to like the post, according to The San Luis Obispo Tribune. Representatives for SNL and Gillis did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Maren Morris Has Answered Critics of Her Body in Her Own Words Since 2017
Maren Morris has stood up for herself this way for years. In December 2017, after she posted a bikini photo, a Twitter user asked her about breast augmentation. She told him it would not be any of his business, and that she had not.
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Another time she came under fire for her clothing choices, she answered on Instagram.
“I refuse to ever, EVER be ashamed of the body God gave me,” she wrote.
Ryan Hurd, her husband at the time, stepped into the comments and wrote that he did not usually respond because she could handle herself, Taste of Country reported.
The song Morris chose carries the rest of her answer. “Be a Bitch” came out in 2025, and in it she sings that she tried to fake nice, but it didn’t quite stick. That sums up how Maren Morris has handled people talking about her body, from a bikini photo in 2017 to Shane Gillis’ gym joke on SNL.
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