Read Online Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls by Jes Baker - Free Book Online Page B

obvious problem with body currency is that thinness doesn’t necessarily equal happiness. Remember the last chapter? Our thinness quest just equals money in the pockets of companies who sell us insecurity to make sure that we’re repeat customers. It’s a real shitty move on their part, and leaves anyone who believes in the scam SOL, which then makes them angry without really knowing why. So they direct all their anger toward those who cheated the system and found the pot of gold (happiness) without doing any of the goddamn work.
    Tess is the perfect target for this sort of anger and fat hate: She’s successful (Italian Vogue , y’all), she’s in love (he’s darling and has an Australian accent), she publicly shares that she believes she’s worthy, and . . . goddamnit, she’s fucking happy. All while being very much NOT thin, and NOT in any way working toward becoming thin.
    THE NERVE! Amiright?
    In a killer interview with Yahoo! Shine , Virgie Tovar recaps it ever so eloquently (as she often tends to do):
    â€œFat” is just the current catchall word for all the things that we as a culture are afraid of: women’s rights, people refusing to acquiesce to cultural pressures of conformity, fear of mortality. [People who hate fat people] see body love as a move toward people taking charge of their lives and choosing what they want to do, no matter what the culture says. This is really scary to a lot of people. The anger they express is actually toward themselves. A person who hates seeing a happy, liberated person wishes they had the strength to do that, but they are too entrenched or “bought in” to the way things are right now to see it as a beautiful thing. So they see it and they hate it . . . People have invested a lot of time and a lot of resources into this game that says “thin wins.” So when people see exceptions to that rule, they feel personally invalidated, personally stolen from, personally affronted.” 3
    If you haven’t listened to the episode of This American Life called, “If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS,” I’d recommend you do. Within this illuminating episode, Lindy West shares her constant run-ins with Internet hate and recounts an unheard-of instance where a particularly vile “troll” emailed her with a genuine apology .
    It totally happened, so pick your jaw up off the floor already.
    Because this girl ain’t got no fear, Lindy called him up to talkabout why he hated her so much. After asking him why he chose her of all people to torment, the interview went something like this:
    Man: Well, it revolved around one issue that you wrote about a lot which was your being heavy—the struggles that you had regarding being a woman of size, or whatever the term may be.
    Lindy West : You can say fat. That’s what I say. . . .
    Man: Fat. OK, fat. When you talked about being proud of who you are and where you are and where you’re going, that kind of stoked that anger that I had.
    The man shared that he was done with Internet harassment nowadays, but confessed that during the time that he lashed out at Lindy, he was living what he called a “passionless life.” That he hated his body, had been dumped, and worked at a job he despised. He had the opposite of happiness.
    The interesting thing is that since then he’s started school again, found a girlfriend, started teaching little kids, and found fulfillment. He also no longer tries to inflict pain on others online. It’s fascinating how this works. It just goes to show what everyone has known all along: Happy people don’t try to purposely hurt other people.
    I mean, this isn’t a well-kept secret, not by a long shot. You might even go so far as to assume this is common knowledge (and as indisputable as Ira Glass’s example of the gray boxes in the podcast—OMG, go listen to the beginning, it’s