Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(25)

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.