{"id":83792,"date":"2015-12-30T08:43:09","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T16:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83792"},"modified":"2015-12-30T08:43:09","modified_gmt":"2015-12-30T16:43:09","slug":"when-your-fat-pic-goes-viral-as-a-feminist-cautionary-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83792","title":{"rendered":"When your fat pic goes viral as a feminist cautionary tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fat\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hale Goetz writes for Jezebel<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Entitled \u201cEmpowered Feminist,\u201d the post on Imgur (a photo-sharing site that serves as unofficial Reddit companion) went up 10 months ago and now has over 750,000 views, a number that goes up by the thousands each day. The picture on the left\u2014me, as a skinny girl\u2014is taken from my high school yearbook. It doesn\u2019t exist on social media, or it didn\u2019t until someone I went to school with took a grainy, washed-out cell phone pic to post on Imgur. It\u2019s labeled \u201c2009,\u201d but it was actually taken in 2007. I had just turned 16 and was entering my junior year.<\/p>\n

On the right, my hair is shorter, I now have glasses, and I am fat. Get the joke? I was skinny, and now I\u2019m not. The likely cause of my weight gain, says the internet, is Tumblr and my (not actually) recent flirtation with social justice.<\/p>\n

After a few apologies from my friend and some quiet thank yous from me, I hung up. My family rushed to my defense when I told them what had happened; they were livid, with raised voices and tears in their eyes. For a moment I was furious, too. I clicked the link my friend had texted me to Reddit. I looked at the image. I read the comments. And then, I laughed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, they\u2019re not wrong?\u201d I said, shrugging on that last word, my inflection suggesting a question. They\u2019re not wrong that I was skinny, and now I\u2019m not anymore. So what?<\/p>\n

I think I look pretty good in that \u201cafter\u201d picture, the one on the right where I am very fat. It\u2019s from when my now-husband and I announced our engagement in June 2014, and it was taken on a MacBook near the best source of light in our shitty Chicago apartment. I think of my lipstick, dark red and painstakingly painted, as a moment of perfection frozen in time. If my husband\u2019s face hadn\u2019t been cropped out of the meme, you would see his bushy, red beard and thoughtfully closed eyes. We had spent all day calling our families, telling them the news, and then we took a round of pictures to send to our friends. This is the same picture that\u2019s sitting on my husband\u2019s dresser, printed and framed by my mother-in-law. This is us, happy and cute and in love.<\/p>\n

Of course, 750,000 of my closest friends do not agree. Cross-posted between MRA sites and Reddit boards aimed at humor and fat-shaming, my 16-year-old self smiles on the left while my 23-year-old self smiles on the right. The comments debate my fuckability, posing inquiries like: How many dicks would I have gotten had I stayed thin? Didn\u2019t I know the dangers of being obese and the medical conditions that could arise? And, was that really even the same person?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hale Goetz writes for Jezebel: Entitled \u201cEmpowered Feminist,\u201d the post on Imgur (a photo-sharing site that serves as unofficial Reddit companion) went up 10 months ago and now has over 750,000 views, a number that goes up by the thousands … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42690,142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fat","category-feminism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83794,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83792\/revisions\/83794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}