Rihanna apparently didn’t even know people were “fat-shaming” her
For the past couple of weeks, media outlets have written extensively about Rihanna’s recent apparent weight gain.
Some coverage has been idiotic, like when douche-bro site Barstool wrote a post entitled, “Is Rihanna going to make being fat the hot new trend?,” some coverage has been supportive, and some has celebrated Rihanna for launching a savage crusade against body-shamers on Instagram.
But the only problem is, Rihanna’s not doing that. This story — that Rihanna saw fat-shamers and responded — is totally made-up. She’s just living her life and the public is reading what they want to read into it.
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Take this headline published on StyleCaster yesterday: “Rihanna Dismissed Fat-Shamers With an Epic Instagram Comment.”
Imagine in your head what an epic Instagram comment dismissing fat-shamers would look like.
Do you have that image?
Good.
Now here’s Rihanna’s “epic Instagram comment”:
“Somebody called me too fat?”
Funny? Sure. Self-aware? Absolutely. Epic? No.
Rihanna’s comment makes it clear that although blogs and Twitter users are convinced she’s been launching a war against fat-shamers for weeks, she didn’t even know people were fat-shaming her to begin with.
Because fam, if Rihanna wants to be savage, she is savage.
Remember in 2014 when a reporter asked her what she was looking for in a boyfriend and Rihanna firmly put her foot down and said, “I don’t need a man, let’s start there.”
Now that was a putdown.
This was just Rihanna literally taking in new information and processing it by writing words and adding emojis.
And this isn’t the first time something like this has happened.
After that Barstool post went viral, Rihanna posted a Gucci Mane meme on her Instagram that numerous media outlets like Elle took as a hilarious response to the story.
And yes, while it is funny, it doesn’t make much sense as a hard-hitting response to her body-shamers.
For one, it’s not of her, and for another, the before/after comparison doesn’t directly apply to her life. The meme kind of tells the opposite story.
And did you see her caption? It’s a sad emoji. Not even a this is so funny I’m laughing emoji. A straight up single tear streaming down the face emoji.
Which begs the question, did Rihanna even see this meme as hilarious at all? Or did she see it as something sad?
When you really look at it, it’s clear that this wasn’t a response to her haters. And if it was, it wasn’t something to scream from the rooftops about.
So why did media outlets write up the story like that?
Maybe because it was an excuse to talk about Rihanna’s weight gain without seeming like they were pointing a finger and saying, “oh, look at what happened to Rihanna, can you believe it?,” which is a time-honored strategy for “woke” female-focused media outlets.
But when we were deciding whether or not we should write about the Barstool post, we decided that in the long-run, the best way to send a message that we thought the story was hurtful and awful was to ignore it.
On the internet, all attention is good attention because every time another outlet wrote a story about it, Barstool got the outrage clicks, which boosted their traffic and possibly made them more money in the process.
Sure, the attention was negative and they eventually deleted the post, but it raised their brand awareness and in the long run probably did more to help their image than to hurt it.
And publications like Elle thrive off your outrage clicks, so instead of ignoring the story and condemning it to death instead of viral infamy, they wrote about it in a way that made them look super woke for being on the right side of the body positivity debate.
But here’s a hot tip everybody: if you want to prove that you really don’t think Rihanna gaining a few extra pounds is no big deal or that people who say it is are garbage, don’t talk about it.
It’s really that simple.
Let the trolls talk amongst themselves instead of rewarding them by giving them the attention they don’t deserve.
Because there’s nothing like adding fuel to the flame to make hateful speech proliferate.
