I like to imagine all art as a house of mirrors. Most people when coming face to face with the way popular culture reflects them might notice that it is more or less distorted. We all know that television, for example, is not an accurate portrayal of reality. Even reality TV has been oxymoronically constructed and edited, with elaborately chosen clips, background music and leading questions from the producers. We know that very few people in real life can walk away in slow motion from an explosion behind them. That if you were to murder someone detrimental to your career in crime, you would not take up valuable time explaining to them your exact plan in great detail, giving them a chance to escape.fn1 Deep down, we know these things. Yet art is often so similar to our lives in many other ways. The hero tied up and beaten in front of the villain is scared, the same way we would be if that happened to us. The woman kissed by Chris Pratt has a big smile on her face – the same way we would probably react in that situation.fn2 How are we meant to be able to fully distinguish between the real world and the artificial reality that’s been manufactured to entertain us?
If art is a house of mirrors in which you see yourself reflected, it can be hard to tell which mirror is you – and which is slightly altered by Photoshop, a TV producer, the ad company or a camera lens. If you are a white, straight, cis-gender male in your thirties, you might see yourself reflected as a ‘strong and manly’ man. This is quite possibly not much different from how you have been brought up. You will often see yourself fight in wars, battle criminals in a big city, climb buildings, jump out of helicopters, save the fair maiden and kiss her passionately. You will see yourself as having a multifaceted personality – you can see yourself as the angry white, straight cis-gender man, as the happy white, straight cis-gender man, you can see yourself as the evil character, the goofy, the geeky, the nerdy, the good character, the intelligent character, the funny character, the sexy, the handsome, the ugly, the hero, the villain, the king, the president, the cab driver, the lawyer, the janitor. You can be thin, muscular, chubby, young and dating a young woman, or old and dating a young woman. (As a white, straight cis-gender man you can even see yourself reflected back as both black, gay and transgender, and Hollywood will even trust you to portray such a character more than people who live in this identity every day.)1
You may not relate to all or any of the images reflected back at you, but at least you will have a choice. There is no stereotypical ‘white, straight cis-gender man’ in art. You can be it all. You are it all. A study has shown that among children, the only group whose self-esteem increases by watching television is white boys.2 The other groups tested, white and black girls and black boys, all showed a decrease of self-esteem.
As soon as there is a segment of your existence that is not seen as mainstream – whether you are a woman, fat, a person of colour, visibly religious (wearing a headscarf, for example), trans, queer, someone with a disability – you find yourself limited by the representation of you. There is a lot to say – and there has been a lot said – about the stereotypes surrounding most of these labels, but I would like to dive into the representation of fat people in particular.
When a fat person walks through the house of mirrors that is art, the mirrors almost exclusively show you as a person who is unattractive, unintentionally funny, evil, lazy, unintelligent or unwanted. Ursula, the evil Sea Witch who grabs Ariel’s voice, Fat Monica in Friends, Hitchcock and Scully in the otherwise inclusive show Brooklyn 99, who are two dum-dums who can’t figure out how to do anything and just spend all day eating, Brad Pitt’s character in Friends who used to be fat and now is ‘hot’ (as it’s apparently impossible to be both), the fat characters in The Simpsons – Homer, who is unintelligent, Barney who is an uncontrollable drunk, Ralph, who is unintelligent and unlovable. And of course, in Family Guy, we have Peter Griffin who is unintelligent – alongside every single fat person that ever shows up in Family Guy only to be mocked horrendously. Like when Peter imagines that his son Chris is dating a fat woman, we see her needing to back into the garage, like a truck, after which Peter says, ‘So do you prefer Fatty or Miss Boombalatty?’ Or when Bryan is forced to hit on a fat girl and he does it by saying, ‘Is that highlights in your hair or potato chips?’ and she answers, slightly dim-wittedly, ‘Highlights!’ Then, in a slow voice, ‘You got me sweating above and below my ass.’ When she leaves his house the following morning, Stewie says that Bettina is way too fancy a name for her: she should be called ‘Thud or Oof’.
In New Girl, there are often flashbacks to the show’s hotty Schmidt being fat (where he is wearing a fat-suit). When he is fat, he is generally a whole other person. He is pathetic and sad all the time. He is clumsy and lazy. It is laughable that he used to be fat – like when the group of Friends look back at Fat Monica – where she was also a whole other person. Jolly and in no way obsessed with neatness and tidiness. It is almost as if it is impossible for television to portray a fat character with the same traits as a thin person.
We sometimes see ourselves reflected, but then the entire character will be defined by the fatness. The role of Kate as played by Chrissy Metz in This Is Us is exclusively built around her weight – her need to lose it is the only thing that we see in her life. Precious in the movie Precious, played by Gabourey Sidibe, is victimised by her class and by her fat body. Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect almost exclusively makes fat jokes about herself.
More often than not, we are not reflected at all. When I watch television, most of the TV shows seem to portray this science-fiction world in which all fat people have been eradicated. At some point you might be lucky to spot a fat person behind a cash register in the background and you start to feel empathy for this poor guy, who seems to have been the only one to survive the Fatpocalypse.fn3 It is bittersweet that the upside to this is that, at least, they do not portray us negatively. We walk into the house of mirrors and when we look into the mirror, there is no reflection. It is like we do not exist.
It’s called ‘symbolic annihilation’. It’s a term coined in 1976 by George Gerbner to describe the absence of representation in the media. Basically: by not being represented at all, it sends the signal that you don’t matter. It’s a method of making sure that we keep oppressing the same groups of people. If, every time we look at a television, everyone who is not a white man feels a bit worse, it helps to maintain the current system: where the white man is in charge of almost everything. Representation is directly connected to self-esteem – one of the most important traits to possess when asserting yourself in the world. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – if you believe that you matter more than others, you will place yourself in that position. Likewise, if you feel like you don’t, you will let others assert themselves over you.
In 1978, Gaye Tuchman divided symbolic annihilation into three aspects: omission, trivialisation and condemnation, saying that it’s not just about lack of representation, it’s also the ridicule and trivialising of these groups – say, when a TV show or movie only places a fat person in the show as the ‘fat friend’ (Rebel Wilson in How To Be Single) or when a character is temporarily (very temporarily) put in a fat-suit to signify that they’re depressed (Andy in Modern Family, when he realises that he isn’t in love with his fiancée) or that they were a loser once (Schmidt in New Girl, Fat Monica in Friends). In a lot of movies, you will often see women getting murdered or raped. It seems like Hollywood’s go-to tool to get a storyline going. The woman is angry because she was once raped. The man is a bit of a bad guy, so he murders a lady. It trivialises something that is an actual issue and uses women’s lives as props to add excitement to a film. There are more naked (for no apparent reason) and murdered women on television and in films than there are women with multifaceted personalities.
There are more naked and murdered women on television and in films than there are fat women.
So, when talking about reflection and representation, it feels appropriate to look at the industry I belong to.
A few years ago, I was waiting to go on stage at a comedy club in central London. The comedian was killing it. He had the audience in the palm of his hand. At the end of his set, he roared into the microphone, the final punchline of his show, ‘Fat people shouldn’t compete in the Olympics. Only if there was a … pie-eating contest.’
I eat, sleep and breathe stand-up comedy. From the first moment I watched it on television when I was ten years old; plunged into an armchair, gasping for air, tears of laughter wetting my sleeves, frantically shouting at my grandmother to ‘come quick’ because someone on television was making my insides jump up and down just by talking. That was it. Someone just talking. To me, it seemed. About me.
Six years later, when I was so depressed I could not face showering, eating or being awake, I dragged myself down to the local mall, the sunlight hurting my eyes and highlighting their redness, to buy as many stand-up comedy DVDs as I could for the money I needed to spend on rent. I valued stand-up higher than a place to live because stand-up was pure survival. Ellen DeGeneres talking about waiting for lifts, Ricky Gervais talking about Noah’s Ark,fn4 Danish comedians like Tobias Dybvad and Carsten Eskelund and their hilariously relatable material about things in my everyday life.
I will watch the same comedy show six times in a row in an attempt to analyse every single technicality, every movement, every choice of words.
When I was twenty-one, I discovered the comedy scene in Denmark. Comedians I had never seen before because they had yet to release DVDs and be on television. It blew me away. It meant that on top of eating, sleeping and breathing comedy, I could now also make love to comedy. I threw myself at the comedians, a sultry comedy fan who was soon to realise that the lust was not after the artist but the art. One of the comedians gracefully suggested that I should do comedy. I don’t think he meant to suggest that I did comedy instead of comedians – nevertheless, that was what made sense to me.
A comedian once left the bed straight after sex, because he had been inspired to write a joke. He sat, naked, in front of his laptop, typing furiously. I sat, naked, on the bed and watched him, and I felt like I was watching Picasso paint a picture. It was so artistic it hurt my little 21-year-old heart. And I needed more comedy. Just more and more comedy.
So when a comedian offered me a five-minute spot at an open mic, I did not dare to say no. I went home and wrote sixteen pages of what can barely be described as jokes. From then on, it was never an option not to go on stage. It sounds like a cliché and it has been overused by characters in movies who do not mean what they are saying, but: I was home.
Comedy is about trust. The audience trusts you to be funny and more importantly, you trust yourself to be funny. If you don’t trust yourself to be funny, you won’t be. The audience can smell fear, you learn that very quickly. I have done a joke to cheerful applause only for my next joke to fall flat on its face and for people to start booing. All because in the beginning of that joke, I stuttered a little bit.
Which is why the pie-eating-contest joke worked for this comedian. Essentially, the crowd of about four hundred people trusted that this comedian on stage was funny and, oh boy, did he trust it as well. He delivered that joke like every word could bring a person back to life. And they laughed. Soon after, he left the stage and my name was called.
We call them fat jokes. You can recognise them by the fat people being the butt of the joke. And if you are fat, chances are, you will recognise them by that knot they place in your stomach whenever you go to watch comedy. The ‘oh no’ feeling.
You are being ridiculed, not just by the comedian in question, but by the entirety of the audience which agrees. As a fat person, public ridicule is something you will have come to expect. All you wanted was a fun night out and now – you’re reminded that you are less in the eyes of society. You wonder if people are looking at you. If they are embarrassed for you.
When people do jokes about fat people, you are not expected to be in the room. I have never heard a comedian tell a fat joke starting with ‘you fat people’. It’s they. Them. The others. Outside of these comedy club walls. Let’s laugh at them. Suddenly, it is like walking into a room while someone is talking about you – except they do not go quiet, they keep talking, because you do not exist. My therapist once told me that the most dangerous thing you can do to a person is to ignore them.
Comedy has to be relatable to a certain extent, unless we are speaking about surreal, alternative comedy. There are utterly silly comedians doing whole shows about space-dogs and it is delightful and hilarious. But if you are talking about real life, you have to be on the same page as the audience. You are talking to a group of strangers, so you can only base your jokes on the ‘general truth’ of most people’s lives. Which is why a lot of comedy plays on stereotypes: men should be manly men who never cry and are always the big spoon, lesbians are butch and hate men and always ask me on datesfn5 and fat people are unintelligent and lazy. Stereotypes mean that you can make a joke about a group of people without having to explain it. ‘Fat people shouldn’t compete in the Olympics … Unless there was a pie-eating contest. Because fat people eat a lot, that’s why they’re so fat’ – this would not work as a joke. But it works when the punchline is implicit. For fat jokes to work, we all have to buy into the validity of the stereotypes.
I once saw a comedian get a huge laugh because he said that his son wanted to dress up as a princess. He just stated that fact – and the audience started laughing. The subtext was that men are not allowed to dress up as princesses.
But we are beginning to collectively understand now that some men do want to dress up as princesses and they should be allowed to. That lesbians are not necessarily butch and that they almost never ask me on dates and that men should probably be allowed to start feeling their feelings.
And people don’t necessarily laugh because they agree. Sometimes it’s an initial reaction because the rhythm automatically lends itself to a laugh. Or perhaps you laugh because you don’t want to be the dry and boring mood-killer of your friend group or maybe you laugh out of pure self-defence.
When I dated a guy in the military, he once came home laughing hysterically because of a story he had heard one of his soldier friends tell. They had all been sharing stories about how they ended up in the military and this one guy had been quiet. When he finally cracked, he told them all why.
He had wanted, his entire life, to become a gynaecologist. He went to school for years, studied hard, got good grades, got the education. On his first day as a gynaecologist, his first ever patient was a fat woman. My boyfriend at the time wiped tears of laughter from his eyes when he said, ‘And she had been sweating, of course,’ because of course we sweat. The guy had finished the check-up and walked straight out of the clinic and into the military, never looking back. The joke was that he had wanted to fondle pretty women’s privates and he ended up having to give a fat woman a medical check-up.
I remember laughing. I think I even found it funny. In doing so, I hoped to erase the fact that I was also fat. That my sweaty vagina is so gross that it sends grown menfn6 directly into a war zone in the hope of a quick and painful death. Ha ha. My boyfriend told me how everyone had laughed so hard and for so long. I remember not turning up at my next gynaecologist appointment. Maybe I will just wait till we’re in a new war against a country and they need the manpower.
A few years ago, I was sitting backstage in a comedy club watching a comedian perform. I was enthusiastically laughing at all of the new jokes he was telling that I had never heard before. He is a good comedian. Let me just speak from a comedy point of view, for a second:
Comedy is a lot of things. It takes years, sometimes decades, to learn how to do it well. Shorter words are funnier than longer words, words that begin with a hard-sounding letter are funnier than words that begin with a soft-sounding letter, the word that reveals the surprise-twist in the joke has to go at the very end of the joke, rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. A stand-up performance, if you only listened to the beats, should sound like jazz. Ba-da-da-bam. Ba-da-da-bam. Ba-da-da-da-da-bam.fn7 You learn about timing, intonation, pitch, where you look at which points of the show, how to hold a microphone, how not to hold a microphone, how to cut as many words as possible from a joke, to make the shortest trip from the beginning of a set-up to the delivery of a punchline. Every single comedian who has a notable career has worked very hard for it, has died on stage in a nightclub in Plymouth for no money only to go back to a Travelodge and cry their eyes out – and yet they have driven for six hours to Leeds the next day to do the same again. Even the comedians whose jokes are hurtful.
And a comedian can be a good comedian and still be an absolute piece of trash. Jokes can be both horrendously offensive, damaging and dangerous and at the same time, be well-constructed and technically funny. Comedy is all about technique. This is not a book about how to do comedy, but I feel like this is an important point to make when I am about to criticise stand-up. And it is important for you to know when you do decide to criticise stand-up.
The comedian I was watching from the dressing room on this particular night was a good comedian. He knew how to write jokes. He knew his craft. And then he closed on his final joke:
‘This girl was unattractive. I’m not going to say in what way, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So if you think brunettes are unattractive, imagine she was brunette. If you hate big noses, imagine she had a big nose. And if you’re me, imagine she’s fat.’
He left the stage and came down backstage to the sound of the audience applauding. I couldn’t congratulate him on a good set. I couldn’t make myself do it. The joke had worked, the crowd had laughed, but I couldn’t look him in the eyes. Fortunately for me, another comedian spoke:
‘You’ve been in the sun all day?’ she asked him, as his face was bright red.
‘It’s because I’m a redhead and I forgot to put on sunscreen today,’ he explained with a sadness in his voice. ‘I don’t think you guys understand how hard it is. How many comments I have to listen to every summer. From friends and strangers. You guys don’t understand,’ he said.
And looked me in the eyes. I blinked a few times, not really understanding how he couldn’t see what had just happened. How he didn’t feel like an absolute fraud, doing jokes about fat people being unattractive but somehow wanting sympathy for being teased himself – from a fat person. How he could be so ignorant as to what he had just done.
When pointing out that some jokes are hurtful and damaging, we always hear the same comments: ‘But what about freedom of speech? Can we not say anything anymore? It’s a dictatorship now. A joke is just a joke. You need to be able to laugh at yourself. Chill out.’
Freedom of speech is a good thing. Don’t get me wrong. Although sometimes I daydream that we do live in a dictatorship and it is run by a strong, powerful non-man – a radical, communist, intersectional feminist, powerhouse of a non-man. We would have one day a week – say, Monday? – where men were not allowed to speak at all. That would be the day we would get things done. Then we would emerge on a six-day weekend because we would not need to work anymore. Without a man mansplaining our thoughts back to us, a man interrupting our every sentence to repeat literally what we just said, without a man needing to assert an ego or flexing his muscles, we would get shit done.
Then there would of course be all-men-are-jailed-Tuesdays. Men are allowed to talk but they can only talk to each other, because they are all in the same jail. Meanwhile, we would have a day where we did not consider the length of our skirts and where we did not need to place keys between our fingers on our way home at night. If a white van drove past us, we would just shout ‘Hi Betsy’ because it would probably just be Betsy in her white van again.fn8
But, comedy was, for me, always something free-flowing. Something that was meant to have flaws. This act of escapism where I could just make fart sounds with my mouth for ten minutes and there would be no consequences. It was something I could do without anyone telling me what I can or cannot do. There were meant to be no rules because no one could stop me.
But I now need to be more aware of every word I say. It’s not a terrible tragedy that I actually have to think before I do my job. It’s just a matter of, for example, not saying ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ but instead saying something like ‘People of the audience’ since we now know that there are not just two genders. It’s a simple action and after a few times of saying it, it just becomes your automatic go-to phrase. It is not hard work to make sure the words you say do not contribute to an already toxic culture.
I’m in the privileged position to be able to get up on a stage and keep an audience’s attention for a certain amount of time. And it is certainly a privilege to be able to get up in front of an almost exclusively white audience and feel safe in the fact that my whiteness is relatable. But being known as a woman in comedy did not make things easier – the majority of the people in the audience inherently believed that I was therefore unfunny – an attitude that is slowly beginning to change. So I am not saying that getting on stage was easy. But I felt like it was easy because I felt like I could say whatever I wanted to and not get hurt. I had never considered the fact that what I said could hurt others.
Even though it is legal for you to stand on a stage and speak from the heart, it does not mean you are not hurting people. As a comedian, I have made truly awful jokes on stage. My very first television spot was three minutes long, during which I made a joke about sexual assault, ending with the words, ‘Because women aren’t funny.’
I did not know about rape culture or internalised misogyny because I had never heard those terms before, and nor did I particularly understand why it was all so wrong.
Now, gradually, it is different. Comedy seems to be moving into an era where we are becoming more and more aware of the potential damage our words can cause. And now I stand on a stage on a daily basis in front of a lot more people and I have a lot more time in which to speak. Because of the way my career has progressed, I am now listened to more than I was when I was a 21-year-old with mediocre comedians’ spunk in my hair. I am now a professional comedian, meaning I only allow very famous comedians to spunk in my hair.fn9 So I have had to realise that I need to be careful with what I say on stage.
An audience member told me once, after a show, that she had gone to see a show in which the male straight comedian did a homophobic joke. She said, ‘I was the only one in the audience who looked queer. Everyone stared at me.’ When she left the show, two men in the queue to leave addressed her with a homophobic slur – with the confidence of a straight male comedian doing a homophobic joke supposedly ironically, but without the humour and the irony.
So I love comedy. I breathe, sleep, fuck and eat comedy, but my words have been harmful in the past and they will be in the future, because that is the very nature of existing. I still love comedy but I see how comedy is not a safe haven anymore where anything goes – comedy can be a weapon and you need to be careful that it is not pointed towards the wrong people.
I love comedy and I truly wish that I didn’t often hear fat people tell me that they feel unsafe in comedy clubs. That they always watch comedy with the expectation to be the punchline.
The comedian who did the pie-eating-contest joke recently messaged me to ask me if I would tweet about his upcoming show in London. (It’s a delicate situation, professionally. It is delicate for him to ask, and in doing so revealing to me that he was not selling a lot of tickets. And it is delicate for me to answer, because I should not create any kind of professional tension. But I decided to answer him anyway.) ‘I don’t think you want my followers to come. I can’t really tweet about someone who does negative jokes about fat people. My audience is full of fat people who are not – and should not – be ashamed of that. I hope you understand that. I’m sure you’ll sell out the show without my help.’ (He didn’t.)
He wrote back, ‘I understand,’ and I am not sure he did that either.
But I was grateful that his answer was polite. Usually, when I have called out someone for being problematic, it has not gone so well.
Calling out a guy in a private message is vastly different from calling out an entire industry and therefore an entire system, especially when you do so more or less accidentally.
A few years ago, I sat down to watch a Disney film with my younger cousin. It is completely irrelevant which Disney film because what happened could have happened with any of them, literally any of them. The female lead was thin. No shocked gasps there. Classic Disney princess – eyes bigger than her mouth and nose combined (I have a fat head and it’s really difficult finding glasses – I can imagine it’s impossible for Disney princesses), and the circumference of her waist smaller than the one of her throat. I felt a twinge of self-hatred creeping up through my fat body. Immediately, I became annoyed that I felt that way. If an adult who prides herself on being body-confident can suddenly feel bad about herself because she is looking at a thin Disney princess, how does a little fat eight-year-old feel?
I took to Twitter. I tweeted, ‘We need a fat Disney princess’fn10 and I put the phone away to watch the rest of the movie.
A lot of people tend to see social media as nothing but a platform for teenage girls to post selfies. But even if that’s the case, to me that is still inherently positive. A platform just for young women to decide exactly how the world gets to see them, instead of only seeing themselves portrayed on television mostly through the male gaze,fn11 often as nothing but a virtually mute sex symbol. We are so used to seeing women as objects through a man’s lens. When the woman holds the lens herself and directs it at her, that is powerful, regardless of filters and amounts of make-up. They use Photoshop to make us look the way they want us to look, so there is no reason why we cannot do the same.
The internet is powerful. Important movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectTransKids, #EverydaySexism and #MeToo started on Twitter. If you grew up as a nerdy teenager in the early 2000s and probably later, the internet was where you found your peers. I had pen pals from all over the world who understood me better than anyone at my school. If you refuse to or are unable to conform, being a child can be lonely. The internet can be a better playground than the one down the park.
Saying that the internet is a trivial thing is a very privileged statement. And let us be honest – it is boring. Whenever someone takes a photo of a bunch of people on the bus all having their heads bowed down, looking at their phones with a caption mourning the loss of ‘real-life’ contact, or asking ‘why are they not just talking to each other?’ it makes me want to scream into a pillow. We live in a world where the person sitting next to us on the bus could be any kind of threat to our personal identity or our safety. In an ideal world, I would react with a smile when a man talked to me on a bus, but due to a significant amount of very uncomfortable interactions with men on buses, I no longer have any interest in engaging with any of them.fn12 I am just saying, there is a reason why people might be on their phones when they are on public transportation. There are no men trying to grope my thigh inside of my phone. Instead, I have a community full of fat, queer, social-justice activists who preach messages of self-care and a need for a revolution.
So it deserves mentioning. After having watched the Disney film, I tweeted, ‘We need a fat Disney princess,’ and put my phone away, like a good millennial.
The backlash lasted days. I got thousands of comments. Each time I checked my social media, the negative comments were everywhere. I say ‘negative comments’ but that is misleading. It sounds like these are cool-headed people decently suggesting that I am wrong. That is the furthest from the case. These people were enraged. It was hard not to imagine them frothing at the mouth, leaned in over their keyboards, typing so furiously that their fingers couldn’t keep 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 fully understanding that all the abuse I received came from sad, sad people, I was not any less inclined 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.
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 lead women apart. Tall, thin, blonde, symmetrical faces. At least give one of them a hat or a different haircut, Hollywood.
Hollywood feels like such a closed, glamorous exclusive place that I was surprised they allowed me to go there a few years ago. I simply bought a plane ticket and when I landed, I was in Hollywood. I think I had expected someone at the airport to measure my thighs and then send me to a lesser Hollywood. B-Hollywood. Paul Hollywood. But I went. To do meetings. Meetings, in my industry, often means meeting with people who tell you that they adore you, that they love all of your stuff and that they can’t wait to work with you, after which you never hear from them again. There is a lot of networking – which is you dropping hints about how successful you are and how well you are doing but also how you are actually pretty free at the moment to be in lots of television. I have always been quite rubbish at this. My manager knows this so he decided to come with me to Hollywood to sit in on all of these meetings. We never expected anything to really come from this – so we were very surprised when we got a phone call. A production company wanted me to audition for a role in a huge new drama series by a very famous writer and director.
A few days later, we were sitting in my manager’s rental car on the parking lot of the huge Fox Studios lot in America.
‘This is like in the movies,’ I said.
‘It’s because this is where they film the movies,’ my manager said. I read the script over and over again.
‘Uh. This is …’
‘Yeah.’ he replied. I looked over the words. ‘How will I ever find a man when I look like this?’ one of the lines said. In the description of the character, it was made very clear that she was fat. ‘I need to lose weight,’ the character exclaimed on another page.
I turned to my manager and said, ‘I can’t say these words. It is so wrong.’
He understood. I added, ‘Also. I think I am meant to have an American accent.’
‘The main difference is in the word “water”,’ he told me, ‘Try rolling the r in water.’
I gave it my best. Waterrr. I sounded just nasal enough that it felt American. I kept repeating it to myself. Waterr. Waaarrrteerrr. Waterrrr.fn16
The situation felt so ridiculous. I felt like I was on TV, auditioning to be on TV. So I stepped out of the car and walked in to do the audition. In the midst of all of this chaos, I had seemingly forgotten one very important detail: I am not an actor.
At no point had I questioned my acting skills until I finally stood before the casting director. She looked like a casting director. Imagine a casting director. Yes, that is her. I went inside a little shed-like office and was placed in front of a white wall. I started saying the lines, tripping over the words and looking down at the script. The lady did not blink once. She kept smiling at me, intensely not wishing to squander my dream of becoming an actress. It is quite possibly one of the nicest things anyone could have done for me, seeing as the most natural thing to do would be to ask me to stop wasting her time.
‘Great! Now, can you do that one more time and this time … could you do an American accent? Your character is the twin of a man who is American,’ she explained.
I took a deep breath and looked her straight in the eyes and said, ‘Waterrr.’
‘What?’
‘Waterrr. Waarrrteeerrrrr.’
‘Uhm. Could you do a line from the script, please?’
And I went back to reading from the script in my Danish accent. ‘How am I ever going to find a man when I look like this? Tell me to lose weight, goddamnit.’
The lady’s smile had now faded into something a bit more stern as she said, ‘Well, thank you, that was great. We will be in touch.’
‘Don’t worry about it, I know I won’t get it,’ I said with a relieved smile. I forgot that Hollywood might not be the place in which you can successfully seem realistic about life.
‘Oh, don’t say that, you were great. Don’t give up.’ With that, she shut the door behind me. I still think of her occasionally and whether or not she thinks I am out there, saying ‘water’ to strangers, wanting so desperately to be an actress. I hope she knows that the situation is much more positive than that: I merely wasted her and everyone else’s time.
I can now say two things that sound more impressive than they are:
1. I auditioned for a part in Hollywood.
2. Waterrr.
A year or so later, I was sent another script. This was in Danish – an accent I am much more comfortable with. The role was a 45-year-old fat woman. I was twenty-seven. The woman is meant to aggressively hit on a ‘poor guy’ who is visibly turned off by her.
At one point, she sexually assaults him. I had to check again that this was indeed a comedy script written by comedians. The punchline of the scene is his friends hearing him scream for help. When he sees his friends afterwards, one of them says to him, ‘You smell of fish.’
In another scene, the woman asks for a car battery for her dildo.
There was absolutely no indication that the casting director of this role found it to be in any way problematic. I turned it down.
Soon after, I was offered another role. This role was likewise for a fat characterfn17 – a role I am, demonstrably, perfect for. This was a comedy sketch about a fat spinning instructor.
This fat spinning instructor just wanted a boyfriend. And she had tried internet dating – and they all wanted to date her when she had only put up her occupation but once she put up her photo, no one wanted to meet her. (The joke here is that men saw that she was a spinning instructor and assumed she was thin and therefore hot, but then when they realised she was fat, they no longer found her attractive.) And she was utterly puzzled by this (the joke is that the fat woman is too unintelligent to understand this). In the same way as she was also puzzled by being unable to lose weight, even though she had cheat days. (The joke is that she only cheats on days that end with the word -day and it’s funny because that’s EVERY DAY and also, the joke is still that she is too unintelligent to know this.)
I furiously emailed the casting director back. Denmark is one of those places where everyone pretty much knows everyone – you walk down any street of Copenhagen and you are bound to run into an old teacher, an ex-boyfriend and a cousin. And that is just one person.fn18 The boy I fancied when I was fifteen now works in Danish radio. (When as a teenager I wrote the poem which included the line ‘when your brown eyes tell me I can stop pretending, I let my guard down and pray for a happy ending’ and sent it to him, I had not ever imagined that I one day would be writing him a professional email asking for a contact. And when he spent all night recording my poem about him as a ballad only to send it back to me, I do not think that he imagined that he would ever send me a work email asking me to do a radio show.)
I suddenly had a portal. A portal to someone who actually had the power to effect change. No one was ever going to read my tweets and change their policy, no one was ever going to give us a fat Disney princess, but this – this one person was casting a fat woman for this particularly awful sketch and I – I had been asked to do something. In a way, this could be my only chance to ever make a difference.
My email was a shorter version of this:
I would have been so sad if I had seen that show as a fifteen-year-old girl who went to spinning classes every other day and was fighting through therapy that I needed, due to years of the bullying that I had endured because of my weight. I would have lost all desire to work out – and my love for comedy. Comedy – the thing I ended up trusting more than anything and anyone; the art form that ended up being my calling and the thing to give me life. I would have seen that on television and felt excluded. Additionally, everyone at my fitness centre, who would have also seen this sketch, could have seen me on my exercise bike and made their jokes. Now that their comedy idol had done it on television – why could they not do the same?
I am actually sad right now – even though I have reached a point where I am finally fine with how I look. It even hits me now, just reading it. I cannot imagine how many young people will see this and how hard it will hit them too. It breaks my heart. You are intelligent, well-educated, seemingly empathetic people – and yet you are creating a piece of work that will be seen by thousands of people, which will actively damage the lives of people. I cannot see how you can ever justify putting that on television.
I can in no way endorse or participate in a sketch which, to this degree, confirms a negative stereotype in a time where body-shaming is one of the main causes of a super high teenage suicide rate.
When you make jokes – or even just fiction – based on stereotypes, you are upholding the status quo. And the status quo is killing people. Be it the way you strengthen the beliefs of people who hate the ‘others’, people who commit actual hate crimes, people who bully, exclude and kill. Or be it the way you add to marginalised people’s internalised hatred, which makes them lead lives that are quite possibly miserable, sad and empty.
After further investigation, I can see that your writing staff consists exclusively of white, straight, cis men. I suggest that when writing about women or from the point of view of women, you will consider hiring – and this might seem like a long shot – a woman.
Kind regards,
Sofie
And I won.fn19
Due to the negative portrayals of fat people in the media, I am now constantly on guard. When I listen to musical-theatre soundtracks, if a character sounds like an outsider or someone who is considered unintelligent, I feel a knot growing in my stomach as I think to myself: Please, do not be a fat character.
Like when I was reading a book and a fat character popped up.4 I immediately felt the knot and thought: Please, do not be lazy or unintelligent or the laughing stock of the book.
In this particular instance, I was taken aback. The fat character in the book was not any of the stereotypes. She was feisty, strong, intelligent and very, very desired by the protagonist of the story. Not because she was fat. He just wanted her – and also she was fat. The fact that she was fat was not mentioned other than when necessary. It never defined her. It just … was. Eventually, in the book, they end up sleeping together. And a line stood out to me, in the middle of the page:
He feels, with a wild joy, the weight of her on top of him.
I read it over and over again. My stomach felt like a tumble dryer full of emotions. ‘Wild joy’ is never a term I have heard associated with fatty sex before. Someone describing wanting a fat woman sexually, but without, in any way, fetishising it.
But another thing hit me, when I read that line.
I had never before considered how sex with me feels. Now, stay with me. Allow me to explain. In my lifetime, I have probably thought more about how my naked body looks to everyone than I have thought about anything else. Ever since I started finding boys cute right up till now, when I find everyone cute, it has been on my mind. When embarking on a one-night stand, the only thought on my mind has been: I wonder what this person will think of the way my body looks. And during the sex, my only thought will be: I wonder how I look from this angle. And this. And this. Also, why is he making that face? Wrong hole, abort mission.
I have never once thought about the physical sensation of having sex with me and how it differs from having sex with a thin(ner) person. I imagine it might be softer, more squishy, some positions will be harder to do, I will feel heavier if I am on top of someone and there is just more flesh to grab and kiss. I am considering these things neutrally. The way I would talk about feeling up a beanbag chair compared to groping a coat stand.
This blew my mind. Sex is more than looks. I started thinking about smells, tastes and sounds. In a peculiar way, I felt like I was capable of adding dimensions to my person. As if, up until this point in time, I had just been a person who looked a certain way. I was my appearance. That was all I was. In terms of sex, I had disconnected from my body and treated myself as a canvas to be observed.
These thoughts led me to see myself in a very different light. It was life changing, in a way. All from having read one sentence in one book. The only positive description I have ever read of someone having sex with a fat woman. It was the first time I truly felt – instead of just stubbornly believing – that representation matters.
Which is why, and I can’t stress this enough, we need a fat Disney princess.
Don’t @ me.