“Pretty much every day, at least one stranger seeks me out to call me a fat bitch (or some pithy variation thereof),” she writes, adding that together with rape and injury threats, “This is the barbarism - the eager abandonment of the social contract - that so many of us face simply for doing our jobs.” No sane boss would tell his or her employees to get over it, or “hey, just don’t listen to the taunts,” if this was happening face-to-face.īut what about when it happens online? As West writes in her excellent new memoir Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman, this nasty breed of vehemence is a regular and under-addressed workplace occurrence for many female journalists who make a living shedding light on issues pertaining to how we treat and talk about women - particularly self-proclaimed fat women like her. It’s unfathomable that modern American society would tolerate such threatening language as valid expressions of differences of opinion. Not awful enough? Picture an office where hundreds of men drop by your cube to, as shrewd feminist essayist Lindy West writes, inform you that “you’re too fat to rape, but perhaps they’ll just saw you with an electric knife.” Imagine a workplace where any time you took a stand on a controversial issue, a choir of men who disagreed ticked off a litany of violent acts that should be done to you.
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