Forget every politician you’ve ever loved or hated — memes are the real great communicators.
And that’s exactly how Rihanna’s seen fit to respond to body-shaming. With a meme.
Bless her, honestly.
Rihanna’s kind of amazing.
Her music is wonderful and she’s a stellar performer.
… Though Tom Holland did recently one-up her performance of Umbrella. But that’s no insult to her.
Unfortunately, like all female celebrities and most female humans, she’s subject to body-shaming.
Part of it’s standard misogyny familiar to many women, part of it’s her celebrity status meaning that all eyes are on her.
Some people just can’t resist wondering if she’s pregnant if the wind so much as makes her top billow out in front.
So, as you can imagine, these same people had a field day when she showed up wearing an outfit that could have covered two Rihannas.
That’s a baggy outfit, sure.
Baggy enough that, in addition to an infamous “Is Rihanna going to make being fat the hot new trend?” article, pregnancy rumors resurfaced with gusto.
But if every time that people wore baggy clothes, it meant a pregnancy, we’d live in a world of perpetual, universal pregnancy.
And no small number of “medical miracles,” since there’s no shortage of cisgender men who favor loose-fitting clothes.
Well, Rihanna finally clapped back.
She’s known for being pretty savvy about social media and memes in particular — so she’s in way less of a celebrity bubble than most.
Now, this meme isn’t exactly body-positive.
Or nice to Gucci Mane.
Or nice to overweight people in general, if we’re being honest.
But she didn’t invent it — she’s just using it to communicate.
Her point? It’s a little ambiguous, since memes have a lot to do with context.
But we think that part of it is poking fun at the people who are obsessed with her body size.
Another part is just the meme’s straightforward meaning — that even if she were fat, she’d still be Rihanna.
Any of her real fans will still adore her.
She’s not gonna care about the haters either way.
Perhaps, even more to the point, it was an indirect way of saying that yes, she’s seen that nasty Barstool Sports article floating around.
This is exactly how we’d expect her to respond: coyly and with a meme.
Remember, this is the woman who’s currently planning to do a film with Lupita Nyong’o based on a popular Tumblr post.
Rihanna’s an artist of the people, and she knows how to speak their language.
