up, just spewing anger into the world wide web. This had hit them at their core.
‘i want a disney princess that’s a lumbering whale so i have something to relate to’
‘You need yo go gym and put the cakes down you embarrassment to little girls everywhere’
‘Get ready to deal with the loneliness and isolation of your own old age’
(This actually sounds really nice. If I end up old, alone and isolated somewhere, I will die with a smile on my face. The introvert dream.)
‘to be kissed fat princess will have to lose the weight to be attractive to any self respecting prince, effort leads 2 reward’
‘fat people are a stain on our society. they’re a giant health risk, they are greedy, insatiable and rely on their emotions to get their way’
‘Sounds like you just need a fat dick and you’d probably chill the fuck out’
(How can someone be both so right and so wrong at the same time?)
‘Lose weight fat ass’
‘Why, so you feel better about your inability to stop shoving lard into your cakehole? You eat too much why would princesses do that?’
(Uhm, that is actually incredibly believable. Princesses do fuck-all with their time. What else should they do but eat? They are princesses. If you cannot eat loads when you are a princess, why even be a princess?)
‘You’re cancerous’
‘No. Being fat is a bad thing. It’s ugly and it’s unhealthy. It’s sick to encourage kids that it’s ok to be fat. It’s not’
‘We should have a fat unhealthy disney princess for our daughters to laugh at and mock. I’m all for it. Have her be cursed with diabetes’
‘Or maybe you could loose weight and be a normal princess, land whale’
(I’m pretty sure I need to do more than just lose weight, I’d have to also meet a prince, make him fall in love with me, convince him not to google my name and magically transform myself from my land whale form to human form. I do not have time for this, thus, I need a fat Disney princess.)
None of these Twitter trolls were angry because they thought I would actually change the sexism that so often seems to drive the Disney corporation. They were, as these types of people often are, furious that A Fat Woman Spoke. It doesn’t even just happen to fat women, it just happens to women, queer people, black people and really, just anyone with slightly left-leaning views. On 3 January 2017, writer and fat activist Lindy West announced that she had deactivated her Twitter account in a Guardian article:
Twitter, for the past five years, has been a machine where I put in unpaid work and tension headaches come out. I write jokes there for free. I post political commentary for free. I answer questions for free. I teach feminism 101 for free. Off Twitter, these are all things by which I make my living – in fact, they comprise the totality of my income. But on Twitter, I do them pro bono and, in return, I am micromanaged in real time by strangers; neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit; and men enjoy unfettered, direct access to my brain so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.
As with fat women speaking, equally furious are the trolls about Black Women Speaking. Or actually, just black women existing. In 2016, actress Leslie Jones played one of the ghostbusters in the all-lady reboot of Ghostbusters. Breitbart editor and infamous internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos led an army of trolls to send her so much abuse that she eventually left Twitter as well.fn13
But of course, it’s the internet, so no one (belonging to a marginalised group) is safe. That same year, Chelsea Cain, a Marvel writer, was chased off Twitter by trolls. They doxxedfn14 her and sent her so much abuse on a daily basis that she eventually left. Her crime was writing a female superhero. Sinead O’Connor, Sue Perkins and fourteen-year-old actress Millie Bobby Brown also all left Twitter due to large amounts of abuse.
Author Malorie Blackman (get ready to have a new idol) was forced off Twitter temporarily in 2014 due to racist abuse but returned with this message, ‘Hell will freeze over before I let racists and haters silence me. In fact, they just proved to me that I was right to speak out. I only meant to take a few days break to write an article about this whole issue. Racists and haters will never make me run away. Ever!’3
Bow down to Malorie Blackman, bow down.
The trolls want attention. The term ‘trolls’ stems from the word ‘trolling’ which originally had nothing to do with ogres under bridges. It meant ‘trolling’, the fishing term, where several fishing lines with bait at the end of them are dragged through the ocean on the back of a moving boat. Because these people online are just randomly throwing out bait, hoping to catch just anything. Just any kind of attention.
Their feeling of self-worth is so low that they believe they can only get acknowledged if it is negative. I remember seeing a troll who had a screenshot as a banner. The screenshot was of musician Cher’s Twitter profile and it said: This user has blocked you. He was so proud of this; Cher blocking him meant that Cher had seen him.
I am used to these attacks. Whenever I tweet about feminism, toxic masculinity or Fat Liberation, I have begun to almost expect them. Whenever I post anything to do with social politics, I have to check social media once every fifth minute, otherwise it gets too overwhelming having to delete all the comments at once. It is easier to spread it out over a few days. During some of the worst attacks, I have had to wake up several times a night just to put 1–200 accounts on mute on Twitter.
During a filming of a sitcom pilot, one of the actors on set rolled his eyes at how much I was checking my phone. When I told him that I had to routinely check for trolls, he told me I shouldn’t let it bother me. So I started reading the tweets out loud to him, as they were coming in. A few times a minute, I would tell him to kill himself, that he was a piece of fat lard, that I would not rape him because he was so gross, that he would die alone. He did not last long before he asked me to stop – and I could satisfyingly tell him that he shouldn’t let it bother him.
These trolls are sad people. And there are two different ways of dealing with sadness. You can create something, or you can destroy what other people have created.
I became slightly fascinated with trolls. During the latest barrage of online abuse, Twitter suddenly introduced filters, so it was possible for you to never see a single negative comment. (Which is a quite infuriating thing as it means that Twitter definitely has the possibility of sourcing all of this hatred and vitriol and so it should not be too hard for them to delete these troll accounts.)
Instead, they just make sure that they can exist in their own shithead vacuum. I am hesitant to write too much about the way social media handles women’s safety online because I have the seemingly unrealistic hope that by the time you are reading this, they have somehow decided to prioritise blocking Nazis and trolls instead of protecting them.
Despite
