by Lindy West
So, I dropped the argument (I’d said my piece, I stood by it, and a lot of people agreed) and we fell back into a normal routine. Gotta get the paper out. Meanwhile, I started getting e-mails from fat people, both friends and strangers, telling me that my post had made their lives better in small ways—emboldened them to set a boundary of their own, or take in their reflection with care rather than disgust. To this day, those e-mails make my job worth it.
A few weeks later, Dan and I went out for beer and soft pretzels to make sure we were cool.
“It’s like,” I said, “here we are at this restaurant. Say both of our chairs are broken.”
“Okay,” said Dan.
“If my chair collapses under me right now, people will assume it’s because I’m fat. But if your chair collapses under you, it’s because you sat on a broken chair.”
“Okay.”
“Do you get it?”
“I get it.”
I never wanted an apology, I just wanted it to be different. And, after all that, it was. While writing this chapter, when I went back and read Dan’s response for the first time in years, I was shocked at how dated it feels. The Dan I know in 2016—I don’t see much of him there. Whether I had anything to do with it or not, he writes about fat people differently now. When someone asks him for advice about body image, he reaches out to a fat person (sometimes me) for input. When fat people would make an easy punch line, he doesn’t take it.
We, as a culture, discuss fat people differently now too. If you go back to just 2011, 2010, 2009—let alone 2004 or 2005, when Dan was writing about the Sioux Falls water park and low-rise jeans—the rhetoric, even on mainstream news sites, was vicious. Vicious was normal. It was perfectly acceptable to mock fat bodies, flatten fat humanity, scold fat people for their own deaths. You only have to look back five years to see a different world, and, by extension, tangible proof that culture is ours to shape, if we try.
Obviously there’s no shortage of fat-haters roaming the Internet, the beach, and America’s airports in 2016, but an idea has taken root in the hive mind: We do not speak about human beings this way.
I tell this story not to criticize Dan, but to praise him. Change is hard, and slow, but he bothered to do it. Sometimes people on the defensive rebound into compassion. Sometimes smart, good people are just a little behind.
Why Fat Lady So Mean to Baby Men?
I’m on hold with the FBI. I clack out an e-mail to a customer service rep at MailChimp, simultaneously filling out boilerplate help desk forms for Twitter, Google, and Yahoo. Intermittently, I refresh my e-mail and skim through hundreds and hundreds of spam letters (“Confirm your subscription for Subscribe2 HTML Plugin,” “European Ombudsman Newsletter,” “Potwierdzenie prenumeraty newsletter tvp.pl”), tweezing out legitimate messages from my agent, my editors, my family. I know I’m missing things. I’m probably losing money.
When the e-mails started trickling into my inbox that morning, I’d thought little of it. Some days are spammier than others. Around ten a.m., the trickle swelled to a flood, and then a creepy tweet popped up too: “Email me at [[email protected]] if you want the spam to stop. I simply want you to delete an old tweet.”
I sigh, scrubbing my face hard with a dry palm. Does this have to be today? I was going to write about my abortion today!
The receptionist from the Seattle FBI office picks up.
“Hi,” I say. “I have… a problem?” I’m already grasping for words. How do you explain to someone who might not even know what Twitter is that you’re being anonymously extorted via e-mail newsletters into deleting an unspecified past tweet? Beyond that, how do you convince them that it actually matters? My understanding of the FBI is 90 percent X-Files. As far as I know, they’re off trying to solve Sasquatch crime, and here I am begging them for tech support.
It does matter, though. It’s costing me time, potential income, and mental health. If you consider Twitter part of my work, which I do, it is tampering with a journalist’s e-mail to coerce them into pulling a story. It is, I think, illegal. More significantly, though, it’s part of a massive, multifarious online harassment campaign that has saturated my life for the past half decade—and, on a broader scale, is actively driving women off the Internet. Disruption, abuse, the violent theft of time, then writing about it to illuminate what we go through online—this is my whole deal now. Unsurprisingly, the tweet that [the toilet] wanted deleted turned out to be a screenshot of a rape threat I’d received from a popular troll. He was harassing me to scrub Twitter of evidence of my harassment.
The FBI receptionist, sounding bored (I know the feeling), says she can’t help me. She tells me to call the Washington State Patrol, which seems weird. It is unmistakably a brush-off. I call the number she gives me and nobody picks up. I drop it and try to get back to work. There is no recourse.
I didn’t set out to make a living writing about being abused on the Internet.
As a child, I was really more looking for an open position as, say, the burly and truculent woman-at-arms protecting an exiled queen who’s disguised herself as a rag-and-bone man using cinder paste and some light sorcery. Or a flea-bitten yet perspicacious motley urchin who hides in plain sight as a harmless one-man band jackanapes in order to infiltrate the duke’s winter festival and assassinate his scheming nephew with the help of my rat army. Is that hiring? Any overweening palace stewards (who are secretly a pumpkin-headed scarecrow transfigured by a witch) want to join my professional network on LinkedIn?
I was an avoider, an escaper, a fantasist. Even as an adult, all I ever wanted was to write jokes, puns, and Game of Thrones recaps.
Instead, here I am, sitting at my computer dealing with some fuckface’s insatiable boner for harassing women. Earlier, when I said the “violent theft of time,” I meant it. Online harassment is not virtual—it is physical. Flooding in through every possible channel, it moves and changes my body: It puts me on the phone with the FBI, it gives me tension headaches and anxiety attacks; it alters my day-to-day behavior (Am I safe? Is that guy staring at me? Is he a troll?); it alienates my friends; it steals time from my family. The goal is to traumatize me, erode my mental health, force me to quit my job.
Anytime I complain about Kevins* harassing me online, no matter how violently, sexually, or persistently, someone always pipes up with this genius theory: Rape and death threats are part and parcel of the Internet; you just can’t handle it because you’re oversensitive. Never mind the fact that coding sensitivity as a weakness is bizarre (what do you think this is—the Ministry of Magic under Voldemort’s shadow government?), it’s also simply out of step with reality. You can’t do this job if you have an emotional hair trigger. Undersensitivity is practically a prerequisite.
I was at the Stranger for the advent of comments but prior to the ubiquity of social media, so I sat through several years of relatively innocuous variations on “hipster douche bag” before my readers ever discovered what I look like, where I was vulnerable. In retrospect, it was bliss. I never took those comments home with me. They were cumulatively tiresome, but they didn’t sting. I think of my first real troll as the first person who crossed that line from the impersonal into the personal, the first one who made me feel unsafe, the first to worm their fingers into my meat-life and attack who I was rather than what I wrote.
At the time, I covered movies and theater. I didn’t write anything political; I didn’t write about being fat or being a woman. My name is gender-ambiguous, and for the first few years of my career, many readers thought I was a man. People’s assumptions tend to default to white and male, especially when the writer is loud and unapologetically critical and sharp around the edges, which was kind of my brand. (Not that women aren’t naturally those things, any more or less than men are, of course, but we are aggressively socialized to be “nice,” and to apologize for having opinions.) So, while the tenor of my commenters was often snide, disdainful of the Stranger’s snotty teenage brand of progressivism,
they stuck to hating the message, not the messenger.
Those years were liberating in a way I can barely imagine now—to be judged purely on ideas and their execution, not written off by people with preconceived notions about fat female bodies and the brains attached to them. Now I spend as much time doing damage control—playing whack-a-mole with my readership’s biases against my identities (fat, female, feminist)—as I do writing new material, generating new ideas, pitching new stories, and promoting myself to new audiences. I received more benefit of the doubt as an unknown regional theater critic than I do as an internationally published political columnist. What could I have accomplished by now if I had just been allowed to write? Who could I have been?
I sometimes think of people’s personalities as the negative space around their insecurities. Afraid of intimacy? Cultivate aloofness. Feel invisible? Laugh loud and often. Drink too much? Play the gregarious basket case. Hate your body? Slash and burn others so you can climb up the pile. We construct elaborate palaces to hide our vulnerabilities, often growing into caricatures of what we fear. The goal is to move through the world without anyone knowing quite where to dig a thumb. It’s a survival instinct. When people know how to hurt you, they know how to control you.
But when you’re a fat person, you can’t hide your vulnerability, because you are it and it is you. Being fat is like walking around with a sandwich board that says, “HERE’S WHERE TO HURT ME!” That’s why reclaiming fatness—living visibly, declaring, “I’m fat and I am not ashamed”—is a social tool so revolutionary, so liberating, it saves lives.
Unfortunately, my first troll, the first time an anonymous stranger called me “fat” online, was years before I discovered fat liberation. It was posted in the comments of some innocuous blog entry on June 9, 2009, at 11:54 p.m., what would become a major turning point in my life:
“I’m guessing Lindy’s sexual fantasies involve aliens that love big girls and release a hallucinogenic gas while making sweet love to a fat girl that instantly causes her to imagine herself as height/weight proportionate. With long sexy legs.”
The comment was so jarring because it was so specific. It wasn’t simply dashed off in a rage—it took some thought, some creativity, some calibration. Calories were burned. The subtext that got its hooks in me the most was “I know what you look like,” implying that the author was either someone I knew who secretly despised me, or a stranger fixated enough to take the time to do research on my body. Only slightly less unsettling, the comment simultaneously sexualized me and reminded me that fat women’s sexuality can only ever be a ghoulish parody. I cried. I went home early, feeling violated, and climbed into bed to marathon some SVU. I’d always known that my body was catnip for dicks, but up until that moment, writing had been a refuge. On paper, my butt size couldn’t distract from my ideas. It hadn’t even occurred to me that my legs weren’t long enough. I added it to the list.
That night, I forwarded that comment to my editors and the tech team, begging for some sort of change in the comment moderation policy. How was this not a hostile work environment? How was it not gendered harassment? These people were my friends (they still are), but the best they could give me was a sympathetic brow-knit and a shrug. The Internet’s a cesspool. That’s just the Internet. We all get rude comments. Can’t make an Internet without getting a little Internet on your Internet!
Why, though? Why is invasive, relentless abuse—that disproportionately affects marginalized people who have already faced additional obstacles just to establish themselves in this field—something we should all have to live with just to do our jobs? Six years later, this is still a question I’ve yet to have answered.
At pretty much every blogging job I’ve ever had, I’ve been told (by male managers) that the reason is money. It would be a death sentence to moderate comments and block the IP addresses of chronic abusers, because it “shuts down discourse” and guts traffic. I’ve heard a lot of lectures about the importance of neutrality. Neutrality is inherently positive, I’m told—if we start banning trolls and shutting down harassment, we’ll all lose our jobs. But no one’s ever shown me any numbers that support that claim, that harassment equals jobs. Not that I think traffic should trump employee safety anyway, but I’d love for someone to prove to me that it’s more than just a cop-out.
Years later, when I moved on to a staff writer position at Jezebel (and trolls like sex-alien guy had become a ubiquitous potpourri), Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton unrolled a new platform called Kinja, with the express mission of “investing in commenters.” On Kinja, any commenter could start their own blog, hosted by Gawker, which could then be mined for reposting on the main sites. Your commenter handle became the URL of your blog—so, for example, mine was lindywest.kinja.com. This was an alarming precedent from an editorial standpoint: Our employer was intentionally blurring the lines between our work as professional, experienced, vetted, paid journalists and the anonymous ramblings of the unpaid commentariat, which seemed to exist, most days, simply to antagonize us. It did not go over particularly well at the all-hands meeting. In Kinja, as the trolls quickly learned, comments are moderated by the writers, so to keep our work readable we had to dismiss and ban each one by hand. At Jezebel, that meant fielding a constant stream of gifs depicting graphic violence and rape. It was emotionally gruesome. But it was “part of the job.”
The problem with handing anonymous commenters the tools of their own legitimization soon became even clearer for me. One user registered the handle LindyWestLicksMyAsshole” and began merrily commenting all over Gawker. Under Kinja, that meant there was now a permanent blog, hosted by my employer, side by side with my work, called lindywestlicksmyasshole.kinja.com. Can you imagine? At your job? That’s like if your name was Dave Jorgensen and you worked at Walgreens, and one day you got to work and right in between the fiber supplements and the seasonal candy there was a new aisle called Dave Jorgensen Is a Sex Predator. And when you complained to your manager she was like, “Oh, you’re so sensitive. It’s a store! We can’t change what goes in a store—we’d go out of business! We all have stuff we don’t like, Dave. I don’t like Salt and Vinegar Pringles, but you don’t see me whining about aisle 2.”
I emailed my boss and insisted the page be taken down. She told me she’d see what she could do, but not to get my hopes up. Sure enough, Gawker higher-ups claimed it didn’t violate the harassment policy. It isn’t explicitly gendered or racist or homophobic. Anyway, that’s just how the Internet is! If we start deleting comments because people’s feelings are hurt, it’ll stifle the lively comment culture that keeps the site profitable. What if LindyWestLicksMy Asshole has some really tasty anonymous tip about a congressman who did something weird with his penis? Don’t you care about free speech and penis news?
It is gendered, though. Of course it’s gendered. It’s sexualizing me for the purpose of making me uncomfortable, of reminding my audience and colleagues and detractors that I’m a sex thing first and a human being second. That my ideas are secondary to my body. Sure, if you strip away cultural context entirely, you could construe “Lindy WestLicksMyAsshole” as having nothing to do with gender, but that’s willful dishonesty.* I didn’t have a choice, however, so I put LindyWestLicksMyAsshole out of my mind and tried to stay out of the comments as much as possible.
It’s just the Internet. There’s nothing we can do.
When I was right in that sweet spot—late Stranger/early Jezebel—when the trolls were at full volume about my Michelin Man thorax and Dalek thighs, but my only line of defense was the fetal position, I was effectively incapacitated. I had no coping mechanisms. I felt helpless and isolated. I stayed in bed as much as possible, and kept the TV on 24/7; I couldn’t fall asleep in silence. I don’t know if trolls say to themselves, explicitly, “I don’t like what this lady wrote—I’m going to make sure she never leaves her apartment!” but that’s what it does to the unprepared.
I know those early maelstroms pushed some of my fri
ends away. To someone who’s never experienced it, large-scale online hate is unrelatable, and complaints about it can read like narcissism. “Ugh, what do I do with all this attention?” The times I did manage to get out and socialize, it was hard not to be a broken record, to recount tweets I’d gotten that day like a regurgitating toilet. Eventually, people got bored. Who wants to sit around in person and talk about the Internet?
Gradually, though (it took years), I got better. I learned how to weather the mob without falling out of my skin, becoming my own tedious shadow.
PLAN A: Don’t click on anything. Don’t read anything. Don’t look at any words below any article, or any forum to which the public has any access, or any e-mail with a vaguely suspicious subject line like “feedback on ur work” or “a questions about womyn” or “feminism=female supremacy?” EVER. Because why on earth would you do that? I can understand if the Internet had just been invented Tuesday, and you sincerely thought, “Oh, perhaps sniffmychode89 has some constructive perspective on the politics of female body hair.” However, I, Lindy West, have now been using this virtual garbage dispenser for literally twenty years, and maybe one comment in fifty contains anything other than condescending, contrarian, and/or abusive trash. I have no excuse. When I click, it is because I am a fool.
It’s as if there were an international chain of delis that—no matter what franchise you went to and what you ordered and how clearly you articulated “PAHH-STRAWWW-MEEE”—forty-nine out of fifty times they just served you a doo-doo sandwich. A big, fat, steaming scoop of doo-doo on a sesame seed bun (special sauce: doo-doo). Then you went ahead and ate the sandwich. And you didn’t just eat the sandwich one time, or fifty times, or even one hundred, but you went back and ate there—with hope in your heart, paying for the privilege—every single day of your life. Thousands and thousands of days in a row. Plus, pretty much everyone you ever met had been to that deli too, and they all ate mouthfuls of straight stank doo-doo over and over again, and they told you about it. They warned you! Yet you still went back and ate the sandwich.