I Remember The Very First Twitter Insult I’ve Ever Gotten
I was fresh off the high of my first piece that gained me recognition. I had written about my experience as “the ugly friend,” and how that label comes into play in my life. It had gotten picked up by a larger blog, and I was being interviewed about it internationally. I was on top of the world.
Then, I got a notification. This was in the early days of Twitter, so I wasn’t yet used to harassment. A little cartoon “Snoopy” avatar popped up and the person behind it tweeted at me something like “I promise you salad can taste as good as Oreos. It would help your horrible skin and extremely overweight body.”
Besides being wrong on about five levels (I actually eat a lot of salad and I’m good at making them, but if you think salad tastes as good as Oreos, you’re seriously mistaken), it was just a stereotypical troll thing to say. Obviously, someone who is above a size 8 has never even looked at a salad in their lives. Haha, very funny.
When I told people about the tweet, they dismissed it as one bitter asshole who was jealous and angry that I had succeeded. They shrugged it off and said since it wasn’t true, it didn’t matter and it shouldn’t hurt.
I’ve heard this same refrain many times throughout the years because this is how many people react when I write about body image. I recount times when strangers both online and IRL have been absolutely cruel in big ways (asking me to leave a gym because they thought I couldn’t handle the equipment without even trying) and small (strangers introducing themselves to everyone in a group but me). Yet people refuse to believe it. They ask why I see myself as ugly or fat, shrug it off as a self-confidence issue, but ignore me when I tell them about all the countless incidences and reinforcements of my insecurities that I can give them.
My friends cannot and, for whatever reason, will not accept, listen or understand that when a guy openly calls me “disgusting,” or refers to me as a “barrier” to get to my “hot friends.” They won’t listen when I tell them that this is not limited to a random asshole in a bar. That this is indicative of a culture that rewards social currency when you fit into a certain mold.
You get a coin for being skinny, you get a coin for being white, you get a coin for being straight-presenting, etc. And as someone who has many coins in some respects, and still gets treated like garbage when I’m in public, I am keenly aware when people are being treated like trash, and why. Those who are wealthy in social currency often don’t want to see that there are those who are not so lucky. They don’t share my same concern that these types of “little jabs” can turn into violence. It’s uncomfortable, it’s a hard thing to talk about. So we run away and deny it.
I’ve gotten a lot of heat in the past for seeming to condemn body positivity campaigns by corporate brands. I stand by my criticisms that they’re mostly created without intersectionality in mind, that they are often lazily done in order to tie in product and they don’t actually promote anything positive. But my biggest critique is how little they actually help.
Tell a fat woman, or a person who is not considered conventionally attractive, that they are beautiful on camera in order to sell soap and they might smile for that day. But, chances are, some asshole will harass them on Twitter, or a guy in a club will call them something derogatory and all of that will be washed away.
Real body positivity comes from people who have lived through that experience sharing what they’ve learned. Real empowerment comes from people of all shapes and sizes and abilities and ages and cultural backgrounds speaking to someone who is feeling like they can’t face another day where a person sneers at them on the subway. It comes from people not having their feelings brushed away. It comes from someone who looks like you telling you they get it. Real ways of combating this behavior come from both educating people about respect, and teaching people to arm themselves against this kind of abuse. It comes from someone saying “yeah, I’ve had this happen to me. It hurts, but here’s what we can do.”
And that kind of work will only come when we stop denying people’s lived experiences. It will only come when we stop ignoring what people go through in the hopes that they will forget about it.
Because it doesn’t hurt any less when you deny what I feel — it just makes me feel even more like an outsider.
