Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You. Sofie Hagen
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.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
We need a fat Disney princess.
Because when calling out for better representation also annoys trolls, it’s a win-win.
Hollywood
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