Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(24)

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.