The fact that celebrities make shame makes women more "critical" of body shapes

Shaming celebrities can make women more judgmental about overweight people.

Comments like the statement of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld that singer Adele was a "bit too big" change points of view, suggests a study.

In a study involving more than 90,000 people, they discovered that women's anti-fat attitude increased after a large-scale event shaming fat.

Among recent examples, a blogger said that the award-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence no longer looked "hungry enough" to play in the movie The Hunger Games.

Christina Hendricks, star of Mad Men, said: "Do not put a big girl in a big dress".

And the "shock-jock" DJ Howard Stern called Lena Dunham, star and writer of Girls, a "little fat girl".

In the fifteen days that followed these comments, and others like them, women had a more negative attitude toward fat people, scientists discovered.

This was judged in an online experiment that asked them to classify silhouettes of body sizes and negative or positive words.

Amanda Ravary, lead author of the McGill University study in Canada, said: "It's hard to escape from this kind of messages that are ashamed of fat, and our research suggests that these messages that "fat is bad" do not only affect the target of celebrities, but can also influence other women who hear about comments.

"But we always hear these things and often we do not flinch.

"Prejudices against people because of their weight are one of the last forms of socially acceptable discrimination".

Canadian researchers searched for articles on hair loss in magazines, newspapers and Internet blogs between 2004 and 2015.

These included the singer Kelly Clarkson, invited by a television presenter to "stay out of the flat-bottomed pizza".

And her husband, Kourtney Kardashian, told the reality TV star that she needed to lose weight faster.

They then compared women's scores in a prejudiced fat test, both in the two weeks preceding these episodes and in the fifteen days that followed.

This test of automatic prejudice was based on the fact that women categorized body silhouettes as fat or thin, and words as "dreadful" or "glorious" as positive or negative.

Sometimes, they had to use a single letter on their keyboard to identify a big person or a good word, which made it more difficult for women who thought unconsciously that the big ones were linked to big words.

If they reacted more slowly, it would suggest greater harm.

In the two weeks that followed each of the 20 tired cases of the study, women showed more bias toward fat people in this test.

When asked explicitly how much they preferred thin people to fat people or how warm they felt at once, women did not show any difference after the events shaming their lives. the fat.

Only their unconscious prejudices against fat people have increased dramatically.

Professor Jennifer Bartz, senior author of the study at McGill University, said: "These cultural messages seemed to reinforce the women's feeling, at the intestinal level, that" losing weight "is good and "fat", badly.

"These media messages can leave a private trace in the minds of people."

The study, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, revealed that women were particularly prejudicial in the wake of a serious fat shame incident.

These were judged by the number of times they were published in the 20 articles analyzed by the researchers.

Although the effects faded five or six weeks after a shameful fat event, the results show that women have been more judgmental over the past 15 years.