Recently comedienne Margaret Cho got some new tattoos that she was very happy with. So, she tweeted a pic, to share them with her fans. Unfortunately two people decided to let Cho know that they think she doesn’t look very attractive. Cho didn’t take too kindly to their rude comments, and not only blocked these two users, but told them off as well.
Some people think she reacted a little harshly, but she feels completely justified:
I did not choose this face or this body and I have learned to live with it and love it and celebrate it and adorn it with tremendous drawings from the greatest artists in the world and I feel good and powerful like a nation that has never been free and now after many hard won victories is finally fucking free. I am beautiful and I am finally fucking free.
I fly my flag of self-esteem for all those who have been told they were ugly and fat and hurt and shamed and violated and abused for the way they look and told time and time again that they were “different” and therefore unlovable. Come to me and I will tell you and show you how beautiful and loved you are and you will see it and feel it and know it and then look in the mirror and truly believe it. If you are offended by my anger and my might at defending my borders and my people you do not deserve entry into my beloved and magnificent country.
Read the whole article in Jezebel HERE.
This whole thing made me think about HNT again. Very few people in the world have “perfect” bodies, most of us have flaws that could be objectively criticized. Yet, during my time perusing people’s photos, I never saw any negative comments on people’s HNT photos. Commenters always seemed supportive and often grateful to the photo submitters for sharing these private (and sometimes very explicit) photos. And you know what, that’s how it should be. If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone’s photo, it’d better to just not say anything at all.
People usually know what their physical flaws are and don’t really need an anonymous person to point them out.
What are your thoughts on Cho’s comments?
It sounds like she got trolled by a couple of virgins. It seems like any time a woman puts up images of herself that there’s going to be some little kid (little mentally if not physically) who thinks that if a body isn’t “perfect” that it shouldn’t be looked at. I’ve known a few guys like this. One was twenty-five before he lost his virginity. The other was twenty-eight when I lost track of him and, as far as I know, he had never made it past a first date or second base. The attitude that a woman must be “perfect” rarely survives a first sexual encounter. Margaret Cho should take solace in the fact that if she was naked in a room with either of these trolls that the chances are slim that they’d turn her down.
You’re right about the lack of negativity in HNT. There were isolated incidents, and they were almost always from non-HNTers who stumbled in thinking they were going to get something vastly different. Were the positive comments gratuitous? Of course they were, a lot of the time. I think that those who participated understood the trepidation in posting HNTs, since they had to undergo it themselves.
People are pretty shit. I will never understand people who flip out at internet trolls though, just like I will never understand Internet trolls. I personally prefer the idea of some little twit making a shitty comment and then sitting around waiting for an angry response that never comes over them getting a mouthful of righteous anger which is basically giving them what they want.
When you are out and about though it is a slightly more serious issue and it sickens me when you see people thinking they can say whatever they want to someone because they are overweight or dressed in a way they consider gay. When my girlfriend was younger she was walking around town in a PJ Harvey t-shirt and some dude just shouted out and called her a ‘fat lezzer’. Quite what makes people think they have the right to act like this I don’t know but thankfully now people don’t seem as quick to shout stuff at her when she is holding hands with a huge bearded chap that looks constantly irritated. Bonus!
Generally when it happens to me I have an attitude of “fuck you and the horse you rode in on” and I ignore it. Me and my GF have a very loving relationship and I don’t know if I am actually beautiful or not, but she has definitely brainwashed me into thinking I am and hopefully she listens when I tell her how beautiful she is.
I have no idea if this is what you wanted when you asked for thoughts in her comments though Shay. It just seems to have turned into some sickeningly romantic gibberish.
Sincerely, I agree with Bob above; in fact, I find myself thinking that there is nothing right with responding badly to a bad comment, though I wouldn’t say there’s anything necessarily not right to it either… It all boils down to the situation at hand (and you will always find me, frankly, stressing that point — that wide, all-covering, ever-applicable absolutes are really, as I say, chimeric, plasmatic, not pragmatic).
On the other hand, I never quite saw the original messages, only the very thinly contained and consuming language Cho used: “slow genocide” and what not. And I find myself understanding why I’ve come to hate our modern society. Rather than uniting, rather than trying to find what is that connects and how it does that, we are very much projecting me-ness, a focus on how we are or have been or will be abused or bothered or anything. That is not bridging gaps, that’s establishing your personal territory and demanding that those who trespass be out of it now. While useful, it does not establish a link to compassionate and kind people, and if some people do connect with those who do so, it’s only because of their own kindness. That I need to stress.
Whoever’s been in an “LGBT” (I have reasons of my own to absolutely abhor the label and do prefer to use other terms, but that is beside the point) group or other such function has come across actual infighting regarding how either or any subgroup in “the community” harms the rest… From actual accusations of indecision flung at bi-/poly-/pansexuals to very real attacks between homosexuals of one gender to the other and endless name-calling on the terminological faults and pitfalls of defining intra-/inter-gender/-sex boundaries, it is my personal favourite example of a case where humanity can prove how low it can get from the posited high point of moral achievement.
So, about how Cho was treated and how she responded and so on and so forth:
1. I don’t know what those people said, but calling somebody fat and ugly is by all means a very callous and hateful act that I consider beneath any person who is not completely rude.
2. Her response is understandable; justifiable, I am not sure I would call it.
3. Whether justifiable or not, it can and does not help other aspects of what issues exist.
I’d like to quote this bit, because it says a lot:
“When someone says something negative about my face or body I will always and forever just completely lose my shit, because I have so much hatred in me, a violence that lies just beneath the surface of my delightfully illustrated skin. Being called ugly and fat and disgusting to look at from the time I could barely understand what the words meant has scarred me so deep inside that I have learned to hunt, stalk, claim, own and defend my own loveliness and my image of myself as stunningly gorgeous with a ruthlessness and a defensiveness that I fear for anyone who casually or jokingly questions it, as my anger and rage combined with my intense and fearsome command of words create insults meant to maim, kill and destroy.”
This is wrong. It is a wrong she did not pursue and largely not at fault for, but it is not right. Whoever argues against this (especially from what I have seen already) follows that same pattern of: “Well, she’s been a victim, so she deserves to so just that.”
I call bollocks.
If somebody has caused you damage, it doesn’t justify causing damage in turn. Sure, it does have some base foundation in our animal nature, and it can sure as hell be pleasing, but no justifiability stems from that. Retributive actions are just their own justification in the eyes of the people who commit them, but her remark in the end says it all (though I have in reality come to question the broad innocence of joking at other people’s expenses).
In simpler terms, if somebody is overweight, and they do know that, reacting as if some absolute beauty they do not possess has been insulted only speaks of issues, not a healthy standpoint. It tells the lie of the belief. In fact, not even a person who would fit some absolute standard of beauty (of which there is none) would be justified to do so. Thus, any action that goes the whole length towards making an example of the attacker is just that.
All wonderful points – thank you all for sharing!
I feel like many of you did touch on the sentiment that it’s just worth not the effort to “feed the trolls” – which I definitely agree with.