Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You. Sofie Hagen
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 doxxedfn14 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