Goose and Gander —

Warning: Assholes ahead.

In 2013, Caitlin Seida wrote about how her cosplay photo as Lara Croft became the subject of viral mockery. Her story has recently gotten a second lease on life thanks to Twitter.

I had already been mulling over this whole “public humiliation for sport” thing because of some reddit shenanigans that pulled me into that toxic little corner known as /r/fatlogic. But reading Caitlin’s story, and her uplifting followup, reminded me of the deeper impact this emotional terrorism has on random people just trying to live their lives and use social media like everybody else.

While investigating a notorious troll, I found this post on /r/FatPeopleHate by the person I was trying to ID.

It seems the troll got into an argument on Facebook with this woman:

This is Cassandra Mahoney. What crime did Cassandra commit to deserve her spot in front of the reddit firing squad? She argued with this troll about feminism. Specifically, this troll thought that women shouldn’t dress provocatively because it incites rape, while Cassandra disagreed. Because of that, the troll decided to publish Cassandra’s photo on a subreddit with 18,000 followers.

Turns out, if you’re a feminist and you’re fat, then you don’t deserve respect. Bear in mind, the troll herself is part of this Feminist community on Facebook.

I did not know Cassandra, but I put her picture on Facebook and asked if anyone knew her. One person did and put me in touch. Cassandra was understandably pissed that her photo became chum for reddit’s bottom feeders and she confronted the troll, who immediately deleted her reddit account that went back years.

Why? Because she’s a coward.

Cassandra could not immediately recall who she argued with, but came back to me a week later with a few possibilities. Unfortunately, it’s a Facebook account with a pseudonym: Bethany Boomstick.

And this is a fairly benign example of the harassment that reddit allows. At the other end of the spectrum is our own Lindsey Averill, who was harassed over the phone, received countless pizzas, and endured death threats, all because she is directing the documentary Fattitude.

Two weeks ago, Bree wrote this post about the kind of people behind these fat-shaming mobs and wondered why. Why would anyone spend their free time mocking strangers because they’re fat? Why would somebody immersed in Feminism and identity politics think it’s okay to single someone out for dehumanization simply because they’re fat? Why is anyone over the age of 13 still pulling this shit?

There are any number of motivations, but my own personal theory is that lash out at internet strangers like petulant middle schoolers because they are so desperate to validate their own worthiness that they have to find and easy target onto which they can project their self-hatred. reddit fills that niche nicely, as people can spew their bile anonymously with zero consequences, while the peanut gallery cheers them on and rewards them with upvotes and camaraderie.

Despite sharing this mutual contempt with nearly 50,000 other redditors, there’s a sense of no harm/no foul. The moderators do their best to perpetuate this by making a list of rules that ostensibly prevent their toxic sludge from leaking out onto the rest of the internet, like Caitlin. Moderators supposedly don’t allow links to other subreddits, blogs or Tumblrs in order to prevent “brigading,” but are they really so naive as to think their readers aren’t already swarming those sites looking for fodder?

Most of the fat bloggers I’ve spoken with have encountered some troll or another who provokes a discussion on Twitter or elsewhere in pursuit of a juicy screencap they can throw to their feral fuckwads, preferably out of context and with their own snarky spin on the exchange. The idea that moderators can contain the monstrosity that they’ve created with a list of rules is laughable at best. It’s troll logic.

For example, there’s the two rules governing how redditors talk about fat people:

Sit with that a minute.

How do you define “personally identifying information”? Name, address, phone number all work, right? How about YOUR FUCKING PHOTO!?!?!?!?!

Update: I have pixelated the photos of the victims. I apologize to anyone I may have needlessly exposed.

 

These are just seven posts from the last three weeks where redditors posted photos of random internet people. These aren’t activists or leaders of Fat Acceptance or Health at Every Size^® (HAES) who have chosen to become public figures (not that it makes the trolling any more justified, but their images are more public). These are just random people who are guilty of nothing more than using social media like every other person gets to do, largely without having their photos disseminated for public humiliation.

Here are the actual imgur screenshots that are connected to the /r/fatlogic submissions above:

 

No singling out? No identifiable information? No attacking users for being fat? What a fucking joke!

Every single one of these submissions made it to the front page of /r/fatlogic and its subjects are subsequently ripped to shreds by anonymous cowards. These rules are meaningless. They’re window dressing for the moderators to point to when someone says, “Hey, this subreddit is cruel and pathetic.”

“But we have rules! Look at the rules! We aren’t mean, we’re just pointing out inconsistent logic and having a laugh at the excuses fat people make for being fat.”

No, assholes, you’re cruel and pathetic. You’re scouring the internet for someone, anyone, who you can put before your equally cruel and pathetic peers so that you can forget for a moment what a barren, meaningless, unbearable existence you’re trudging through each day. Most bullies give that shit up by the time they get to college, at the latest. But /r/fatlogic and its ilk are the sediment of society who somehow make it to adulthood without realizing how petty and idiotic they’ve become thanks to the anonymity of the internet.

So a few days ago, I saw another post that made me think it might be by Bethany Boomstick again. It was a brand new account with these two submissions:

Both are referring to the same HAES activist and if you click on the imgur links it takes you to a poorly redacted screencap of the comments made in response to naturalcolours’ Facebook account. The thing is, the redaction did not completely cover the profile picture of the activist, so I thought I’d see if I could find this person.

Lo and behold, I did. I also found the entire conversation that naturalcolours screencapped out of context. Interestingly, in the first post, someone asked her why she’s only posting the activist’s response.

Well, I went ahead and did naturalcolours a favor and screencapped the entire conversation, flawed logic and all, and properly redacted everyone’s identifiable information. You can read it here.

In short, naturalcolours claims she posted an academic critique and was shocked by how the activist responded. The truth is, she first posted a link to a PubMed search for “obesity” (which is about as useful as Googling “why fat bad”), then later posted a link to this study on BMI, sex and cardiovascular disease in Hispanic/Latino adults. The biggest problem with citing this study is that it doesn’t control for fitness at all, which is the one of the points of HAES — you have to adopt healthy behaviors to improve your health.

So here’s where things get interesting: in her reddit post, naturalcolours says explicitly that she gave the activist a link to this specific study:

And if we look at her comments on Facebook, we find this exact same link:

Then, of course, there’s the fact that the two screencaps with shitty redaction on reddit are also represented in this Facebook discussion where there’s ONLY ONE PERSON ARGUING WITH THE ACTIVIST:

And now for the best part: naturalcolours has a Facebook account with her real name and a shitload of photos of herself. If you’re going to dox someone (meaning, dig up all the dirt you can on them and share it with the internet, as happened with Lindsey).

So, I went to town, researching naturalcolours and found out all kinds of great information about where she lives, where she goes to school, where she’s traveled, who her parents are, who she’s dating. It’s the kind of opposition research that would make 4chan proud.

But there were just two facts that I found relevant to her attack on this activist. First, she claims that she’s a poor, impoverished student who was offended when the activist called her a “rich bigot.”

“I’m not rich,” she protested. “I’m a poor, destitute student. Boo hoo hoo!” (I’m paraphrasing). Of course, that sob story is undercut by the photos of her traveling through Europe and across the US. I’ve been on food stamps and I can personally attest to the fact that jetsetting is not a big hobby of the down and out.

The second fact that intrigued me was the fact that there are three photos on her Facebook page where she brags about getting drunk. Granted, that’s what college students do. But if you’re going to tut-tut people for being fat (which is presumably caused by unhealthy lifestyle choices), then maybe you shouldn’t be a total fucking hypocrite about your own lifestyle choices.

In the United States, obesity is supposedly responsible for 4.6% of all deaths, while alcohol is responsible for 3.5%. Of course, that obesity/mortality number would look much different if they controlled for the fitness of subjects, but that’s a whole other story.

Armed with facts about her identity, I began to contemplate my next steps. Do I dox her? Do I share her name and photo so that any time a potential employer searches her name, they discover what this despicable asshole does for fun? Maybe just post her photos? My gut instinct was to hang her out to dry like the way cities would put heads on pikes to discourage attackers.

So, I turned to Facebook and asked what people thought I should do. The responses ran the gamut from wanting revenge for the perpetual humiliation of fat people on the internet to appealing to me to take the high road, and everything in between.

I sat with all this advice for a while and felt pretty sure I was going to expose naturalcolours one way or another.

And then I read this:

Of all the appeals to rise above, this one hit me the hardest. I have two daughters, and I would feel terrible if they saw me reacting in anger like this. Yeah, I could easily stoop to their level and give them a taste of their own medicine, but to what end? reddit’s gonna reddit. Even if this one doxxing discouraged some from humiliating fat people, the internet has the attention span of a coke-addled maggot, so it’s not likely to last.

Finally, I decided to confront naturalcolours directly by telling her that I knew who she was, that I had photos of her being a hypocrite, but that I decided against doxxing her. So, I laid it all out there:

Rather than own up to it, she decided to act tough and bluff:

Subsequently, /r/fatlogic freaked out and pinned this to the front page. They also reported me to reddit and I’ve been banned.

The lesson here is that it’s perfectly okay to swipe photos and conversations of people from the internet to mock them and humiliate them and dehumanize them, but don’t you dare suggest you could do the same or you have to give your people IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION! to shield them from exposure.

Incidentally, after the fact, someone decided to post a photo on /r/FatPeopleHate of me and my pet rat:

All of this without a single bit of information about naturalcolours being published.

And so I have changed my mind. I am going to share the photos of naturalcolours the same way that /r/fatlogic seems to think is harmless fun. I’ve redacted the identifying information and am presenting the photos as documentation of one of the many skeezy inhabitants of this fat-hating mecca of the internet.

Say hello to the hypocritical hippy who believes in peace, love, social equality and justice, unless you’re fat, in which case you get ruthless subreddits dedicated to your degradation and dehumanization:

Based on what I’ve read, I would actually get along with her quite well, as our political views are quite similar. But for a person who preaches tolerance and compassion, she draws the line at those who disgust her.

Is it about health? Well, if she felt that strongly that people who make unhealthy personal choices should be publicly ridiculed, then would she be boasting of her drunken exploits on Facebook?

Ultimately, this is just one small example of the hypocritical bullshit behind the fat hate on the internet. It’s not about health, it’s not about “logic,” it’s about mocking strangers for what they look like because you think nobody will ever figure out that you’re making your own unhealthy, stupid choices with impunity.

And I will continue to  keep an eye out for similar cases of assholes who are too stupid to cover their tracks well so that I can expose them publicly for being unrepentant douchebags. Personally, I’m tired of fat people being targeted simply because they exist proudly. The only reason /r/fatlogic has so much cannon fodder is that fat people aren’t ashamed of themselves like these cowards and cretins who are terrified that somebody might connect their identity with the hatred they espouse.