I recently spent some time engaged in what I will politely call a discussion in the comment thread for an article in a British Magazine. The article was about a recent finding in obesity research, and the comment thread was, to quote Motormouth Maybelle, “a whole lotta ugly comin’ at you from a never-ending parade of stupid”.
Actually, it was more than that. It was raw, undiluted hate. And it made me sick.
I guess I have lived in a bubble. I am white, middle class, and college educated. I have lived a life of privilege, and I can’t pretend that it has been anything else. I have encountered my fair share of people who dislike me, and endured the same asshattery as any other person on the planet, plus I live in the South, so I have seen more than my share of racism, but I had never experienced anything quite like this.
I am not going to go into details, and I am not going to link to the article, because I would hate for any of my readers to get a concussion banging their head against their desk. I will just tell you that people said, over and over again, in a variety of words that all mean the same thing, that fat people are stupid. ALL fat people are stupid. And they are liars. ALL liars. That they are delusional, that they are lazy, that they are a plague on society. One guy said that if he ever had kids he would not allow them to play with fat kids. One guy said twice that the person who wrote the article could not be believed because “she’s on of the obese” and that no matter what one of “the obese” writes about or what she says, it is wrong. Once I actually got involved in the conversation those insults went from the general to the specific. Strangers, people who have never met me or spoken to me, told me over and over and over that I was stupid, and deluded, and lying, simply because I am fat. When it became clear that I refused to buy into their bullshit and that I was not a good little self-hating fatty, things got even more vicious. I won’t lie, I was not always pleasant myself, I can throw around some serious sarcasm when I want to. But I was responding to individual asshats — they had judged me to be inferior before I even stepped on the scene.
Hate is a strange thing. It’s so completely irrational. It is a waste of time to try to reason with it, and yet that very fact makes me want to try. I can’t understand its blindness. I can’t understand how some one can look at an individual and see only one characteristic about them and hate them for it. The ratio of adipose to muscle tissue in my body has no bearing whatsoever on my intelligence, or my ability to reason, or on my value as a human being, but to those people, it didn’t matter who I was orwhat I did, all that mattered was that particular characteristic.
I don’t regret the experience I had. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t fun, but it was important. I learned that I am stronger and more resilient than I thought I was. I learned that what I claim to believe really is what I believe, even in the face of violent opposition. I gained some empathy for those who have to deal with this irrational hate every day, directed at skin color or sexual orientation or religion or any of the million other things people find to blindly despise. But I have to grieve a little for lost innocence. Naivete is never a good thing, but it’s loss is painful.
So thanks, all you who participated in that thread. I have taken your hate and turned it into good, and I will pray that sometime you can do the same.
