Читать книгу Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You - Sofie Hagen - Страница 14

We need a fat Disney princess

Calling out a guy in a private message is vastly different from calling out an entire industry and therefore an entire system, especially when you do so more or less accidentally.

A few years ago, I sat down to watch a Disney film with my younger cousin. It is completely irrelevant which Disney film because what happened could have happened with any of them, literally any of them. The female lead was thin. No shocked gasps there. Classic Disney princess – eyes bigger than her mouth and nose combined (I have a fat head and it’s really difficult finding glasses – I can imagine it’s impossible for Disney princesses), and the circumference of her waist smaller than the one of her throat. I felt a twinge of self-hatred creeping up through my fat body. Immediately, I became annoyed that I felt that way. If an adult who prides herself on being body-confident can suddenly feel bad about herself because she is looking at a thin Disney princess, how does a little fat eight-year-old feel?

I took to Twitter. I tweeted, ‘We need a fat Disney princess’^fn10 and I put the phone away to watch the rest of the movie.

A lot of people tend to see social media as nothing but a platform for teenage girls to post selfies. But even if that’s the case, to me that is still inherently positive. A platform just for young women to decide exactly how the world gets to see them, instead of only seeing themselves portrayed on television mostly through the male gaze,^fn11 often as nothing but a virtually mute sex symbol. We are so used to seeing women as objects through a man’s lens. When the woman holds the lens herself and directs it at her, that is powerful, regardless of filters and amounts of make-up. They use Photoshop to make us look the way they want us to look, so there is no reason why we cannot do the same.

The internet is powerful. Important movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectTransKids, #EverydaySexism and #MeToo started on Twitter. If you grew up as a nerdy teenager in the early 2000s and probably later, the internet was where you found your peers. I had pen pals from all over the world who understood me better than anyone at my school. If you refuse to or are unable to conform, being a child can be lonely. The internet can be a better playground than the one down the park.

Saying that the internet is a trivial thing is a very privileged statement. And let us be honest – it is boring. Whenever someone takes a photo of a bunch of people on the bus all having their heads bowed down, looking at their phones with a caption mourning the loss of ‘real-life’ contact, or asking ‘why are they not just talking to each other?’ it makes me want to scream into a pillow. We live in a world where the person sitting next to us on the bus could be any kind of threat to our personal identity or our safety. In an ideal world, I would react with a smile when a man talked to me on a bus, but due to a significant amount of very uncomfortable interactions with men on buses, I no longer have any interest in engaging with any of them.^fn12 I am just saying, there is a reason why people might be on their phones when they are on public transportation. There are no men trying to grope my thigh inside of my phone. Instead, I have a community full of fat, queer, social-justice activists who preach messages of self-care and a need for a revolution.

So it deserves mentioning. After having watched the Disney film, I tweeted, ‘We need a fat Disney princess,’ and put my phone away, like a good millennial.

The backlash lasted days. I got thousands of comments. Each time I checked my social media, the negative comments were everywhere. I say ‘negative comments’ but that is misleading. It sounds like these are cool-headed people decently suggesting that I am wrong. That is the furthest from the case. These people were enraged. It was hard not to imagine them frothing at the mouth, leaned in over their keyboards, typing so furiously that their fingers couldn’t keep up, just spewing anger into the world wide web. This had hit them at their core.

‘i want a disney princess that’s a lumbering whale so i have something to relate to’

‘You need yo go gym and put the cakes down you embarrassment to little girls everywhere’

‘Get ready to deal with the loneliness and isolation of your own old age’

(This actually sounds really nice. If I end up old, alone and isolated somewhere, I will die with a smile on my face. The introvert dream.)

‘to be kissed fat princess will have to lose the weight to be attractive to any self respecting prince, effort leads 2 reward’

‘fat people are a stain on our society. they’re a giant health risk, they are greedy, insatiable and rely on their emotions to get their way’

‘Sounds like you just need a fat dick and you’d probably chill the fuck out’

(How can someone be both so right and so wrong at the same time?)

‘Lose weight fat ass’

‘Why, so you feel better about your inability to stop shoving lard into your cakehole? You eat too much why would princesses do that?’

(Uhm, that is actually incredibly believable. Princesses do fuck-all with their time. What else should they do but eat? They are princesses. If you cannot eat loads when you are a princess, why even be a princess?)

‘You’re cancerous’

‘No. Being fat is a bad thing. It’s ugly and it’s unhealthy. It’s sick to encourage kids that it’s ok to be fat. It’s not’

‘We should have a fat unhealthy disney princess for our daughters to laugh at and mock. I’m all for it. Have her be cursed with diabetes’

‘Or maybe you could loose weight and be a normal princess, land whale’

(I’m pretty sure I need to do more than just lose weight, I’d have to also meet a prince, make him fall in love with me, convince him not to google my name and magically transform myself from my land whale form to human form. I do not have time for this, thus, I need a fat Disney princess.)

None of these Twitter trolls were angry because they thought I would actually change the sexism that so often seems to drive the Disney corporation. They were, as these types of people often are, furious that A Fat Woman Spoke. It doesn’t even just happen to fat women, it just happens to women, queer people, black people and really, just anyone with slightly left-leaning views. On 3 January 2017, writer and fat activist Lindy West announced that she had deactivated her Twitter account in a Guardian article:

Twitter, for the past five years, has been a machine where I put in unpaid work and tension headaches come out. I write jokes there for free. I post political commentary for free. I answer questions for free. I teach feminism 101 for free. Off Twitter, these are all things by which I make my living – in fact, they comprise the totality of my income. But on Twitter, I do them pro bono and, in return, I am micromanaged in real time by strangers; neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit; and men enjoy unfettered, direct access to my brain so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.

As with fat women speaking, equally furious are the trolls about Black Women Speaking. Or actually, just black women existing. In 2016, actress Leslie Jones played one of the ghostbusters in the all-lady reboot of Ghostbusters. Breitbart editor and infamous internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos led an army of trolls to send her so much abuse that she eventually left Twitter as well.^fn13

But of course, it’s the internet, so no one (belonging to a marginalised group) is safe. That same year, Chelsea Cain, a Marvel writer, was chased off Twitter by trolls. They doxxed^fn14 her and sent her so much abuse on a daily basis that she eventually left. Her crime was writing a female superhero. Sinead O’Connor, Sue Perkins and fourteen-year-old actress Millie Bobby Brown also all left Twitter due to large amounts of abuse.

Author Malorie Blackman (get ready to have a new idol) was forced off Twitter temporarily in 2014 due to racist abuse but returned with this message, ‘Hell will freeze over before I let racists and haters silence me. In fact, they just proved to me that I was right to speak out. I only meant to take a few days break to write an article about this whole issue. Racists and haters will never make me run away. Ever!’³

Bow down to Malorie Blackman, bow down.

The trolls want attention. The term ‘trolls’ stems from the word ‘trolling’ which originally had nothing to do with ogres under bridges. It meant ‘trolling’, the fishing term, where several fishing lines with bait at the end of them are dragged through the ocean on the back of a moving boat. Because these people online are just randomly throwing out bait, hoping to catch just anything. Just any kind of attention.

Their feeling of self-worth is so low that they believe they can only get acknowledged if it is negative. I remember seeing a troll who had a screenshot as a banner. The screenshot was of musician Cher’s Twitter profile and it said: This user has blocked you. He was so proud of this; Cher blocking him meant that Cher had seen him.

I am used to these attacks. Whenever I tweet about feminism, toxic masculinity or Fat Liberation, I have begun to almost expect them. Whenever I post anything to do with social politics, I have to check social media once every fifth minute, otherwise it gets too overwhelming having to delete all the comments at once. It is easier to spread it out over a few days. During some of the worst attacks, I have had to wake up several times a night just to put 1–200 accounts on mute on Twitter.

During a filming of a sitcom pilot, one of the actors on set rolled his eyes at how much I was checking my phone. When I told him that I had to routinely check for trolls, he told me I shouldn’t let it bother me. So I started reading the tweets out loud to him, as they were coming in. A few times a minute, I would tell him to kill himself, that he was a piece of fat lard, that I would not rape him because he was so gross, that he would die alone. He did not last long before he asked me to stop – and I could satisfyingly tell him that he shouldn’t let it bother him.

These trolls are sad people. And there are two different ways of dealing with sadness. You can create something, or you can destroy what other people have created.

I became slightly fascinated with trolls. During the latest barrage of online abuse, Twitter suddenly introduced filters, so it was possible for you to never see a single negative comment. (Which is a quite infuriating thing as it means that Twitter definitely has the possibility of sourcing all of this hatred and vitriol and so it should not be too hard for them to delete these troll accounts.)

Instead, they just make sure that they can exist in their own shithead vacuum. I am hesitant to write too much about the way social media handles women’s safety online because I have the seemingly unrealistic hope that by the time you are reading this, they have somehow decided to prioritise blocking Nazis and trolls instead of protecting them.

Despite fully understanding that all the abuse I received came from sad, sad people, I was not any less inclined to try to make them sad. That is not the most empathetic approach, I am fully aware of that. Plenty of people engage in polite chats with these people. Comedian Sarah Silverman famously found out that a troll who called her a ‘cunt’ had back problems and ended up making sure he got the right care. This was met with an incredible amount of positivity all over the internet. ‘See What Can Happen When You Respond With Kindness’. I am happy for her and I am happy for the troll’s back.

Yet there is nothing revolutionary about a woman reacting to abuse with kindness. We are taught to step down, to be polite, to assist men and to make them feel better. We do not dare to say ‘no’ too many times because then we will be branded a ‘bitch’ and we apologise more frequently than men. In some ways, having a man call a woman a ‘cunt’ only to have the woman ask him why he is sad and proceed to crowdfund his back surgery does not smell of progress. I believe that it is important that women like Silverman exist – let’s face it, having back problems does suck and can often lead to misogynistic abuse. (I once woke up with a sore shoulder and immediately told a woman to go and make me a sandwich – what can I say? That’s just the way physical pain works.)

I believe that it is also important that vitriolic women exist. I refuse to feed the stereotype that we have to be nice, that we have to be quiet and that we have to be better than them. Sometimes we have to fight ‘cunt-sayers’ with ‘cunt-saying’.

I found the website from which these attacks originated. Someone had posted my tweet and urged people to attack. At this point, a few nice people had already messaged me, offering me support so I had tweeted that I was fine – due to the new Twitter layout, I was not seeing any of the abuse. This sent the trolls into a frenzy.

One troll posted on the website, ‘She has just tweeted that she isn’t seeing the abuse. Can this be true?’ and another commented, ‘No, don’t worry, she is lying, she definitely sees it’, and another, ‘Yeah, I promise you, she is seeing it’, and the original troll, ‘Okay, thank you.’

It was almost beautiful. When I was a child, my biggest dream was to be part of a gang. We are not talking motorcycles and cocaine (that is merely my current dream), I just wanted to do normal kids’ stuff like solve crime. At one point, a couple of friends of mine found a car park full of abandoned and broken lorries. We managed to get into the back of a lorry, which was where we established our gang. Our first attempt at solving local crime started with us buying sweets at the gas station, then eating them, then going home, realising that no criminals had been jailed this time around. The next day we were just bored. Our gang went our separate ways after that. If only we had known back then what we know now: that if only we had all got together and started hating women and sending them abuse online, we would have felt a camaraderie beyond anything we had ever felt.

On another group, a troll suggested that people should stop sending me direct abuse – at first. Instead, they should start by asking me in a kind way, ‘What do you mean?’ or ‘Care to elaborate?’ and then, once I had wobbled into their clever trap and attempted to answer their question, they would turn around and tell me to kill myself or that they wanted to disembowel me. All this meant was that I received hundreds of tweets at the same time saying ‘Care to elaborate?’ from various Twitter accounts that Cher had blocked, with drawings of Pepe the Frog as avatars. One of the things I love about misogynists is that their hatred of women makes them underestimate our intelligence, which makes it easier for us to eventually win.

As I saw the notifications come in on my timeline, I awaited an emotional response. Surely, when a lot of people shout at you, you are meant to feel sad. But it was like when a villain in a superhero movie gets their superpower and the meek police force try to shoot them, but the bullets bounce off. You see their face change as they realise their immortality and superiority. I felt much like that. It was no longer about the fact that we need a fat Disney princess. We do – we definitely need a fat Disney princess, but that was never going to be my main objective. It was no longer about chubby Cinderella, plump Pocahontas, rotund Rapunzel or Ariel with a great personality. It was about something much bigger – fighting back.

So even though I was wearing slippers with rabbit ears and I had just had Coco Pops for dinner, the word-bullets bounced right off my chest. And I started typing, posting tweet after tweet with a repetition of the same six words, frothing at the mouth (half froth, half whipped cream, you know, from the Coco Pops), fuelled by not wanting to be silenced, refusing to be quiet:

We need a fat Disney princess.

Because when calling out for better representation also annoys trolls, it’s a win-win.

Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You

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