Why Does Us Weekly Post So Many Body Shaming Stories?

It's no secret that Strutter relies on Google Alerts to find the best news reporting on plus size culture. However, we couldn't help but notice that two in the last few days, Us Weekly reported on a couple of body-shaming stories about Tess Holliday and Iskra Lawrence.

While reading these new stories, I started thinking back to how many stories Us Magazine posted related to body-shaming and its ilk: (Name of Celebrity) Claps Back at Online Trolls or (Name of Celebrity) Has a Message for the Haters. Us Weekly isn't alone of the clap-backs and hater-message stories. Almost every news site posts a version of these stories.

With the dawn of social media, readers love to know when celebrities bypass their publicists and go nuts on Instagram.

Earlier today, I did a Google search for "Us Magazine Body Shaming" (no Lexis-Nexis access here.). There are more than 2.9 million search results with those four words in a story, but check out its "In the news" section:

With all the high-profile body shaming stories on Us Magazine, I checked to see how many stories the print/digital magazine did on body positivity. There were four milliion more hits with "body positivity" than "body shaming," but it's a rarity when the phrase is in a Us Weekly headline.

Hey, at least that Tess Holliday story can get more clicks by mentioning body shaming AND body positivity in the same post.

So, why does Us Weekly keep positing headlines about "body shamers"? Well, without a rep from Us Weekly to confirm, I could only speculate that they get more hits with shaming than positivity. There's a saying in therapy: When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back to you. Yep, we're part of the problem.

Strutter does its best to avoid the haters/clap back stories because, frankly, they're depressing. The internet can be a vicious place, and anyone of note is subjected to scrutiny by the faceless (and shapeless) masses. Do we find some satisfaction when a celebrity stands up to "the haters," whoever they are? Well, yeah. We see ourselves in that moment, standing up to people we know who once made fun of us for being fat. Unlike the celebrity with a reach of millions through social media and multiple news websites like Us Weekly, it's a message we were never able to get across to one person.