Aside from calling Rihanna fat, here are some other awful headlines from the guys at Barstool Sports

Hello, welcome to the internet. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a big old information superhighway that we can use for education and connecting with our friends across the world. We use it though, obviously, for calling each other mean names.

Just like this fine piece of journalism from Barstool Sports which debated whether Rihanna will make being fat “the hot new trend”, and was up for a depressing amount of time before being reluctantly deleted by the site. Deadspin reports founder Dave Portnoy eventually decided to take the post down not because its kayfabe satire was misread by feminists, but because it simply wasn’t funny.

In a blog post Portnoy wrote: “There is a double standard at this company. If Big Cat or PFT or KFC or I write this blog I’ll defend it to the death. They have earned that trust and loyalty from me. I hired them because I think they are all legitimacy hilarious people. However as I’ve said many times Spags wasn’t originally hired to be a personality at Barstool. He should not be writing blogs that we as a company end up having to defend.

“And I’ve been doing this long enough to know that somewhere down the line this blog will be dug up again and used as an example of our extreme sexism. Frankly that’s not a hill I’m willing to die on. I’ll choose a different guy and a different blog to go to war for. Just like how the risk wasn’t worth the reward in writing this, the risk isn’t worth the reward defending it either. That’s called being a leader. I make the decisions nobody else has the stomach to make.”

I feel for Portnoy though, really I do. I mean, it simply wouldn’t be fair for critics to dig up this post time and time again as a stand alone example of their extreme sexism and lack of all discernible humour. At least, not when they have these posts live on their site as well:

@rosielanners