shrill notes from a loud woman by lindy west

And more pour in, multiplying and multiplying. You push on, even with the grim certainty that describing your pain will invite more. Rape jokes are now rape threats, and they’re pouring in, a flood of them, every day, except some of them say, “You’re too fat to rape”, or “Kill yourself, pig lady”, because the internet is a place where your most private self is up for mauling, where the rules for how to treat other people don’t apply. So people make more rape jokes, except this time they’re about you. This is how it goes: let’s say somebody makes a rape joke. “Kill yourself, dumb bitch”: if you have experienced bias or harassment, talking openly about it will almost certainly bring you more. People reveal themselves to you when there is no accountability: behind a screen, you can say almost anything. If being a fat woman gives you a front-row seat on human cruelty, being a woman who writes on the internet pushes you into the arena with the lions.

“Every cell in my body would rather be ‘fat’ than ‘big’,” she writes. But West is a witty, joyfully vulgar, and, yes, fat writer unwilling to accept the story that her body is shameful.

In the real world, “fat” is often replaced with simpering euphemisms such as zaftig, Rubenesque, big, heavy – with the implication that “fat” is so bad it is literally unspeakable. Online, it is spat at women like machine-gun fire. Fat can’t be argued with: it is not just an aesthetic condemnation (You’re ugly), it’s a moral condemnation (You’re lazy). Because fat is normally one of the bad words, toxic in its blunt monosyllabic force. Fat as something luxurious, friendly, and plentiful rather than gross and wrong. I always like to come across the word “fat” in a snug, happy, adjectival nook somewhere. Fatness gives you an insight into a world of cruelty many people can’t imagine. Fatness thus confers a grim power of discernment, an antenna for character that survives even if you become skinny. In a subsequent conversation on the radio programme This American Life, he said (his name isn’t given) he had been overweight, and, as West writes in Shrill, “reading about fat people, particularly fat women, accepting and loving themselves as they were, infuriated him in ways he couldn’t articulate at the time”.īeing a woman means certain men think they have dominion over your body being a fat woman means they don’t bother to hide it. There is a living, breathing human being who is reading this shit.” When you included it in your latest Jezebel article” – West was a columnist for the online magazine – “it finally hit me. “It was the lowest thing I had ever done. And – as they say – you won’t believe what happened next. “What could I do? It’s not illegal to reach elbow-deep into someone’s safest, sweetest memories and touch them and twist them and weaponise them to impress the ghost of Lenny Bruce or what-the-fuck-ever.” But that Twitter message was something different: it was about her dad.

Shrill notes from a loud woman by lindy west