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
There was a scene in Aziz Ansari’s TV show Master of None that exasperated me. Aziz plays ‘the good guy’. All he wants is love. He is confused, like a lot of us, when it comes to love, but it is important to note just how much of a ‘good guy’ he is. Aziz Ansari being the lead of a TV show is a great thing, in a lot of ways.fn15 Diversity on TV is important and the show touched upon many important topics such as race, sexism, feminism, family, morality and so on. Which is probably why it hit me right in the chest when this scene happened.
Aziz’s character Dev goes on ten dates with ‘different kinds of women’. And boy, are they different. There is, for example, a thin, young, nondisabled, femme brown woman, a thin, young, nondisabled, femme blonde woman, a thin, young, nondisabled, femme brunette, I mean, the list goes on. It was so freeing to see Dev date all the women on the front covers of all of the magazines. It is refreshing to see just how many versions of essentially the same woman exist. And it is far from the worst example on TV. But when you zoom out – and look at the two seasons in total – there are two fat people in the entirety of the show. There is a scene where the character Dev and the woman he is on a date with see a fat person walk into a restaurant, and conclude that therefore the food must be good. And there is a three-second scene where a fat woman climbs on top of a man, who tries desperately to get out from underneath her.
When a show that is trying to do the right thing, trying to be diverse and inclusive, fails to include, it somehow hurts more than when an obviously oppressive show does the same.
Hollywood is so full of thin, white women that it is hard to comprehend. There are whole films I have not been able to enjoy because I found it impossible to tell the two
