Holy cow, was Ben Hauck always this ripped?: Ben Hauck shows off six-pack abs during trip to the beach

*Read on for an explanation of this tweet
@onthemedia

PS In case you're confused by my series of tweets like these, I keep seeing "news stories" about celebrities and their bodies. Usually the headlines are about the person's abs, and usually the celebrities are middle age. Often they are stories about a single Instagram photo.

So as satire, I take these headlines and substitute in my name. (Just in case it's not clear, I'm NOT a celebrity!)

When you think about the articles, they're utterly ridiculous. These are written by actual human beings, who stop and think the look of a body part in a photo is worth writing a large-scale news article about. They require editing work and typesetting. People are paid for these.

But not only are they utterly ridiculous, they are a lot of other things, too. Many I suspect are pitched by publicists for these celebrities, so the newsworthiness has an added magnitude of questionableness.

Plus, there's the whole notion of, "Doesn't it feel a bit 'wrong' to write a whole article about a person's, say, abs? What would your shrink say if you said that was your job?"

But what's also interesting is you don't see these types of articles about NON-celebrities -- which is what my satire is about.

No one cares about my abs. No one cares about my other body parts. But if someone wrote an article about mine, wouldn't I potentially go, "Hey, WTF?"

Imagine seeing an article about a photo of the abs of a random person who is neither a celebrity nor a performer, and who has not gone viral for some reason.

Creepy much?

When you see ARTICLE after ARTICLE about the same celebrity's abs or body parts, you start to think there's a cottage industry around said celebrity and said celebrity's body parts.

It might just be a matter of what my homepage pitches to me, but most of these articles are about a) females, b) of middle age (I think a majority are in their 40s-50s), and c) abs.

The tweet starting this thread is taken from an article about a male football player in his 40s.

It's fun injecting my name into these articles' headlines. It helps to show the weirdness of the news articles. It helps to show the creepiness of them. It also helps show "This Is Not News." It's more like an odd cousin of cyberstalking obsession.

If your friend started writing journalistic-style ARTICLES about people's body parts, as portrayed in a split-second of time by a photo on Instagram, ...

... Yeah, I'd wonder too.