Twitter queen Chrissy Teigen is known for standing up to trolls. In her finest clap-back form, the former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model schooled a commenter Tuesday who called her “chubby.”
“I hate to say this but…you are not a small person? Also I don’t care about my weight sooooo this does not hurt,” Teigen writes. “I can guarantee he is not a handsome man.”
The 33-year-old — who says she gained 20 pounds while pregnant with her second son — is a prime example of female empowerment. However, new research suggests that while Teigen’s bullies may not bother her — they are hurting women overall.
Celebrity fat-shaming produces a ripple effect that drowns out female self-esteem, according to the study appearing this week in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
“Weight bias is recognized as one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination; these instances of fat-shaming are fairly wide-spread not only in celebrity magazines but also on blogs and other forms of social media,” says lead author Amanda Ravary, a Ph.D. student at McGill University.
Using data regarding weight-related attitudes from Harvard’s Project Implicit, McGill psychologists focused on 20 instances of fat-shaming toward women in pop culture between 2004 and 2015, including Tyra Banks’ highly publicized “kiss my fat a–“ comment after being shamed for her bikini body in 2007, and in 2014 when Kourtney Kardashian’s husband told her she wasn’t losing her baby weight quickly enough.
The researchers found that each of these events caused more women to feel self-conscious about weight. The more “notorious” the body-shaming, the bigger the spike in implicit anti-fat attitudes among women. They also found that during that time period a general bias against overweight people increased overall.
“These cultural messages appeared to augment women’s gut-level feeling that ‘thin’ is good and ‘fat’ is bad,” says study co-author Jennifer Bartz. “These media messages can leave a private trace in people’s minds.”