I can’t believe we do this to each other.
I can’t believe we look around at gun violence and racial turmoil and war-torn Iraq and decide what the world needs is more hate.
But we do. We find people spreading messages of acceptance and love and we tear them to shreds. We shame them and scold them and tell them to get out of our faces with their positivity.
Just ask Brittany Gibbons.
Gibbons, who I interviewed at Printers Row Lit Fest earlier this month, is the author of “Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin … Every Inch of It” (HarperCollins) a New York Times best-selling memoir of life as a curvy girl.
She’s lovely and hilarious and wise.
Dr. Oz, he of the controversial medical advice and dubious weight loss tips, read and enjoyed “Fat Girl Walking,” which strikes me as a good sign — maybe he’s looking to reinforce to his viewers that more than one body type can be healthy.
He invited Gibbons on his show. He plugged her book and asked about her health (which is quite good, she says, for the record), and the whole ordeal was pretty positive, Gibbons said.
Until she went online.
“On his Facebook page he posts about the day’s show, and people started to get really mean about what I look like and how I had no place on a show like that,” Gibbons told me. “They found me on Instagram and left really terrible comments about how fat I was. They made up fake book reviews on Amazon. It was a whole day of being beat up on the Internet about my size.”
She wrote about the experience on her blog Tuesday.
“No matter what I said, fat would never be healthy or beautiful or brave,” she wrote. “My message was one of lies and harm, not of empowerment. And those viewers would never pretend that a plus-size person was anything other than an ugly sack of personal failure and laziness.”
Gibbons has been blogging for years and she’s no stranger to cruelty. She addresses online attacks in “Fat Girl Walking,” and she’s the first author I’ve encountered who reveals, without equivocation, a dirty little secret of Internet body shaming: A lot of it comes from other women.
“Negative male commentary about my body is primarily full of superficial generalities, like ‘you’re fat’ or ‘you’re ugly,’ further backed up by all the ways they wouldn’t sleep with me,” she writes. “It’s important to note, however, that the majority of online response I get from men is positive.
“Women are a completely different monster,” she continues. “There is no species better crafted for emotional terrorism than women. We slice away at the Achilles until our victims are left feeling completely devoid of value and unfit for love, friendship, and in extreme cases, air. We’ve been bred to see others’ successes as a direct assault to our own, and this is especially true when it comes to weight.”
I asked her Tuesday: Were the Dr. Oz comments from women?
“They were almost all women,” she told me. “I think it’s a really upsetting, emotional thing for them because they’re watching a man who’s telling them how to lose weight every day, ‘Lose weight, lose weight, lose weight, it’s your ticket to health.’
“And then I come on the show and say, ‘Just wait a second. Let’s approach this differently.’ Having someone like me on the show, a plus-size girl talking about not losing weight, really p—– people off.”
How depressing. How utterly opposite of what we ought to be doing, in light of doctored Victoria’s Secret models and the ludicrous “belly button challenge” and startling eating disorder statistics.
We should throw our arms around women who step forward and say, in so many words, “I’m enough. I’m whole. I’m not a work in progress.”
But we don’t.
Comments aside, Gibbons said she’d go on Dr. Oz again without hesitation.
“I’m really good about knowing that sometimes what I do isn’t for the audience I hear from,” she told me. “I would go on again, just for the people who aren’t saying anything, who maybe needed to hear my message.”
Or, as she wrote on her blog …
“It is not my job to teach you how to be nice to fat people. That is something you learn from your parents, peers or from various social cues that direct you toward basic human decency.
“It is my job to empower the people you belittle, shame and degrade publicly on a daily basis so they can grow to see that the horrible crap you dish out to make yourself feel better is just that … crap,” she wrote. “They are who I break barriers down for, they are who I wrote the book for, and they are the reason I sat on that stage. My message was for them.”
hstevens@tribpub.com
Twitter @heidistevens13
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