So earlier this month the feminist writer and serial-misogynist-annoyer Lindy West announced that she was leaving her job at Jezebel “to work on personal projects. (I am also available for freelance. Hire me!)”
I took this to mean that she was leaving her job at Jezebel to work on personal projects and do freelance work, because this is something that writers, especially talented writers with a lot of options, sometimes do.
Over in the Manosphere, though, the fellas had a rather different interpretation, which went something like this HA HA THE FAT SLUT GOT FIRED HER CAREER IS OVER WE WON YIPPEEEEEEEEE!!!
Or, as the always charming Roosh Valizadeh put it, in a comment on his site’s forums:
[S]he has been defeated. It would be like me quitting my blog and saying I’m going to focus on Twitter. No matter how they try to sugarcoat it, she quit a site which has given her the biggest possible bullhorn she can have. Unless she’s going to the NY Times or anchoring the nightly news, her voice will now get much more quiet.
This is great news for men, and America.
The delightful domestic violence advocate Matt Forney devoted an episode of his podcast to a “Lindy West Jezebel Firing Celebration Party.” On Thirty Days to X, a minor-league manosphere blog, “Robert” titled his celebratory post “Why Lindy West will go broke and fall into obscurity.”
SPOILER ALERT: It turned out that Lindy West did not so much go broke and fall into obscurity as GET HIRED BY GQ YES THAT GQ less than two weeks after leaving Jezebel.
Big news: @thelindywest is coming to http://t.co/iWLJv8Giyw as our new culture writer. Trust us, she's worth a follow.
— GQ Magazine (@GQMagazine) September 17, 2014
In your face, baby men!
On Roosh’s forum, the fellas went through all five stages of grief as they attempted to come to terms with the tragic news.
1) DENIAL:
Private Man wrote:
The announcement that Lindy West snagged a job at GQ is likely satire.
That’s the only explanation.
Aphelion agreed:
I’m convinced that Lindy writing for GQ is satire. I would have to see it to believe it.
2) ANGER:
RioNomad sniffed:
GQ is probably read mostly by homos and women anyways.
3) BARGAINING:
AnonymousBosch tried to convince himself it wouldn’t be so bad:
Lindy West doesn’t have strong convictions one way or another, but will simply pump out whatever her employers require, so I doubt her GQ writing will be ALL CAPS / excessive punctuation, or have a major feminism focus, even for a blue pill mag like GQ.
Most likely she was hired because, as I long ago mentioned on here, the Jezebel page views for her ‘celebrity culture’ pieces quadrupled the numbers for any of her ‘political’ pieces.
4) DEPRESSION:
Bacchus sighed:
even GQ, despite having an audience of single men, cannot avoid advancing the feminist agenda by hiring the mouth of the fat slut movement. There are no males spaces left in mainstream American culture.
5) ACCEPTANCE:
Days of Broken Arrows offered the fellas some hard truths:
GQ doesn’t care if you hate Lindy. They care if you click on their Web site. That’s what brings in advertising dollars. They know she’ll probably enrage men, and her stories will go viral via Facebook and Twitter.
Also, come on, she’s a great fucking writer. Not that any of you twits will ever admit it.
Anyway, let’s just gloat a little bit more at this FLAWLESS VICTORY over manosphere delusions by quoting some of what the baby men wrote back when they thought the great and powerful Lindy West had been defeated.
“Robert” on Thirty Days to X confidently predicted disaster for West:
She’s starting a free Tumblr blog and begging for others to hire her.
No, really. The best that this strong independent woman could do was stick her hand out and write on a platform that people use to share erotic fan fiction about My Little Pony dolls. That’s pretty pathetic if you ask me.
I’m 21 and somehow manage to afford my own website, and do it without ever asking readers for a dime. …
Lindy West, like her lard loving pal David Futrelle, built a career around providing idiots with mindless trash that ridicules the labors of others. An article about doing something like building up a blog, or increasing your brain power has longevity. An article about “12 things dudebros need to stop mansplaining” is relevant for about 30 seconds. …
If you look at the situation that Lindy’s in it is easy to see why she will fail with all future endeavors.
[BORING WRONG CRAP OMITTED]
Lindy West is a great example of what not to do as a professional writer. I look forward to checking in on her “exciting new career” in about two months so that I can say “I told you so!”
D’oh!
On Roosh’s forum, meanwhile, the fellas spewed out fat jokes, declared her boyfriend gay, and wished her the worst.
Germanico indulged a sadistic fantasy:
Freelancing? I would be willing to chip in a few dollars if someone … can find a way to troll her into taking some job that embarrases herself.
You spelled “embarrass” wrong. Embarrassing!
Quintus Curtius pontificated about her alleged hackery:
The shelf-life of a mediocre party-line hack like West is never going to be longer than 5 years.
They last while they last. Having nothing interesting or original to say, and nothing to offer except a repetition of the same hackneyed slogans, they are cheerfully rotated out by their masters, who are always looking for fresher, newer flunkies to mold.
She’s old, used-up, and has nothing to show for all her screeching. They’ll let her go to pasture, and there she can write melancholy homilies about the virtues of raising her surrogate brood.
I hope it was worth it, Lindy.
Yeah, it kind of probably was, don’t you think?
Erika Miller,
Do you know what Lindy West’s diet is? Do you know if she practices disordered eating? Either way it’s not your business, but who are you to presume you know everything about a person’s relationship with food just by looking at them?
I have an unhealthy relationship with food and am neither obese or super skinny. But according to you I can’t possibly have a history with disorder eating because I look “normal” right?
I do have to say WHTM is so great. It took a really long time to get a concern troll comment about Lindy West’s weight. On Jezebel there was a flood of them at all times.
Erika Miller’s argument is just the same tired “food as morality” nonsense.
Food is not a moral system. Eating is a thing you do to stay alive, nothing more or less than that. You know what causes eating disorders? Making food a moral system. Making a person’s moral standing dependent upon food, or upon your uninformed assumptions about food.
When did anyone ask you to “accept” the food decisions of people you don’t even know? Why is it your place to accept or reject what someone else puts into, or does not put into, their mouth?
emilygoddess, I have no personal concern for Lindy West but with some of her writings on obesity. There are people out there who use food to cope with issues in their lives and that is not ok. I remember awhile back there was a Salon article where the author wrote about her decision to embrace her obesity as a way to cope with her trauma and was applauded for it in the comments. It was incredibly sad and made me think about a lot of the things I went through growing up. Weight isn’t a measure of a person’s value and I know there are other factors that make it hard to loose weight that need to be addressed but none of that means obesity is healthy and I just can’t agree with her stance on this issue.
Maybe think a little bit less about people’s weight, and you’ll find that you don’t need to agree with her. You don’t actually have to have an opinion about other people’s location on the food morality spectrum if there is NO food morality spectrum.
Again I ask, how do you know Lindy West is doing this? You’re assuming that you can tell whether or not someone practices disordered eating by looking at them. You can’t.
@Erika miller: You can’t tell a damn thing about what people eat by looking at them. Most people can’t look at me and tell that I have schizophrenia, chronic pain, scoliosis, etc.
When you can dx via teh intertubes, get back with me. I have a bridge to sell.
All we know is Lindy West is fat and obesity increases your risk of various health complicatíons, particularly with age. Whether she eats her feelings or not, I don’t fucking know.
I think that’s shitty that anyone would consider obesity a healthy long-term coping mechanism. It’s not sustainable. It’s progressively dangerous. You’re right, Erika, that shouldn’t be applauded.
We still don’t know whether Lindy West is fat for this reason though. It might just be something she’s made an informed decision about and doesn’t hate herself over.
I play extreme sports. I think about how likely it is I’ll break my back all the time. I make the informed decision to keep doing it though. Maybe that’s why Lindy West isn’t losing weight. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with coping. Maybe she knows the risks and the benefits of being fat outweigh the risks for her. It’s very personal. Let’s not claim to have some telescope into her brain.
And then there’s the fact that, for the vast majority of people, dieting just doesn’t work. Even if they keep dieting. Even if they diet harder.
You know what they call that in thin people? An eating disorder. They should call it that in fat people too, but they don’t.
There is one thing that you are at least somewhat right about- sadly, some fat people have an unhealthy relationship with food that can get them put in the hospital. It’s just that it gets called “dieting.”
And that group? There are many, many more of them than the hypothetical “overeaters” that so many people think are everywhere.
Gah. I’m sorry. I just had to post this for some reason.
Erika:
You may want to do some reading on the Health At Every Size movement. They work on decoupling judgements about body shape and size from notions of healthy living. Just because someone is bigger than your arbitrary definition of “normal”, and doesn’t feel guilty about it, does not necessarily mean a) that they’re unhealthy or b) that you can make any pronouncements about how they live their lives. As commenters here have pointed out on many occasions, the relationship between food intake, metabolism and body shape is immensely complex and trying to reduce it to an armchair diagnosis is ill-informed at best and actively harmful at worst.
I read an article wherein she says she swims five miles a week and her checkups say that her blood chemistry levels are all great…She’s just stable at 300 pounds, is all.
I think it IS more about activity than the amount of fat you are carrying, but that having been said, adipose tissue has been found to put out inflammatory proteins. Inflammation is what starts a lot of degenerative changes.
Losing a lot of weight did help my asthma and allergies, for instance.
Two things:
Scientific thing first: yo-yo dieting has been shown to be worse for your body than maintaining a stable higher weight. So if someone chooses to lose weight they have to be hardcore committed to permanently changing the way they eat and permanently upping their activity level…as well I know.
Other thing: People make their own choices, no matter what you do. You can make people feel shitty about those choices by shaming them, or you can approach their choices from a harm-reduction model…What I hear from you now is a shaming approach. That did not work for me, ever.
I get that this weight issue is a trigger for you, because your mother did not care enough about you to practice self-care and stay alive. She preferred to use food to self-destruct. I am very sorry you had to go through that. I lost a grandmother to diabetes complications…my mom tried to control her diet and…nope, grandma wasn’t having it. Grandma died a long, miserable death at 62…And I am very sorry she had to go through that. It was terrible. Also part of why I eventually went vegan, as I read that vegans are much less likely to get adult-onset diabetes.
This seems to have touched a nerve. This morning I made a tweet about it, and when I got home from work it had been clicked 1111 times.
Erika, what does Lindy’s weight or her attitude towards fat acceptance have to do with her getting a job at GQ? The new job is the subject we are discussing here, along with the misogynist reaction to her getting that job. Why did you think that steering the discussion towards her weight and her writing about fat acceptance was a good idea? Does this have anything to do with misogyny? Because if not, concern trolling is exactly what you’re doing.
Also, just FYI, making any issues your mother may have had with food about the impact that had on you is pretty awful. The “I’m concerned for this person” approach tends to work better if you make it less clear that there’s a “because what about me and my feelings?” underlying it.
To clarify – there was a stage during my childhood where my mother was fat. Then she went on what even at the time (I was 8) I considered a completely over the top and scary diet (it involved fasting 2-3 days a week). She lost a lot of weight and although she gained some of it back (which child me was happy about), she never returned to her earlier weight.
None of this was about me. If I’d tried to make it about me, or make her struggles with her weight about how they impacted me, that would have been a pretty profound betrayal of the love a child is supposed to have for their parent, in my opinion. That whole unconditional love thing with parents and kids is supposed to go both ways, barring abuse (being fat is not abusing your child).
And then she got cancer, and got really skinny. Amazingly enough, neither she nor I considered that a good thing, but oh boy, the “well hey you may have cancer but at least you’re down to (British) size 10 now!” comments. Which really illustrated to me just how unreasonable people can be about the whole weight thing, that anyone would consider it appropriate to congratulate someone on weight loss caused by chemotherapy, and would present that as some sort of benefit the person had derived from having cancer.
All of which was very upsetting to me, but again? My mother’s struggle with cancer wasn’t about me any more than her struggle with her weight was. Our parents are not ill/fat/whatever at us. It’s not about us at all, really, and acting like it is really doesn’t sit well, especially when you’re projecting that feeling onto a complete stranger in a discussion about the way she’s being targeted by angry misogynists partly for the very same reason that you’re targeting her.
gilshalos:
Just for you …
http://i.imgur.com/ZlmwxI1.jpg?1
Well it’s a reason to start my research for a project in donation economics, I guess.
Holy shit, are you kidding me? An article about a writer getting a new job, and the comments are full of irrelevent crap about the writers weight? Seriously?
To anyone who thinks the average fat person A) got that way from overeating and B) can totally lose weight in a healthy way & must do so for health precious health etc etc, YOU MAY AS WELL BE SELLING METH TO ANOREXICS, ASSHOLES. Fuck y’all. Srsly, medical science is gradually connecting the dots on this shit (though the FDA is pretty much bought out by the diet industry), but anyone can figure it out if they’re paying attention.
Every “obese” person I’ve personally known eats less than me and always has. 90% of a person’s weight is determined by heredity. Most people I know who are overweight have metabolic conditions that make it nigh impossible to lose weight as hard as they try. There are entire ethnic groups that are “overweight” at the baseline average because their bodies aren’t shaped like those of the white people who invented these standards.
Just because you used to be a bit chubby until you got into extremo fitness shit doesn’t mean that other people are biologically / metabolically or at all physically able to do what you did. I’ve known someone who exercised two+hours a day while eating less than a thousand calories and carefully balancing everything to get the RDA of every vitamin, stalled out at 200 pounds, unable to go down an ounce.
As much as our society hates fat people to death, really, brutally fucks them over in every possible way at every possible opportunity, you think they wouldn’t change if they could? Bullshit. GET THE FUCK OUT MY FACE WITH THAT SHIT. They’re trying and they’re DYING because of the ignorance of gymbunnies and doctors who squeaked through med school with straight Cs and haters of every stripe at every turn of their lives.
Correlation does not equal causation. Many people may be fat because of biological conditions that increase odds of heart attack, cholesterol & those factors are not necessarily caused by the weight itself. And could they be cured by losing weight, especially when the only means that will work for many entail organ damage or risk of death? That is what is often meant by “obesity can be healthy” statements – the only alternative for many is far, far worse – mentally and physically.
Seeing your body as an alien tool makes it far more easy to consider disposing of it altogether, so you are promoting suicidal ideation with your crap. Do you genuinely care about an “overweight” person? Let them deal with it their own way. The way our culture is at the moment, they’ll probably do what you want anyhow – fuck up their lives trying to get thin. Your love is broken.
I can’t handle this discussion tho, clearly, so this is where I flounce.
It’s like you’ve never read the comments in any article about a woman.
Why did this come up in an article about a woman…
Women are judged more harshly and shamed more intensely for being obese.
Such that it seriously impacts their wages.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117168
Btw, I am one of those statistical anomalies who’s been able to ( mostly) maintain a big weight loss…
I can’t eat anything remotely resembling a normal American diet. My immediate family does, and they are all quite large.
Touichy topic for me, cos I just realised I hadn’t eaten much in the last week. I’m overweight. I know I’m over-weight. But also I have times where I don’t eat for several days cos I forget to do so. And I don’t lose weight because of it. You know the one time in my life I was the right weight for my height/build ? I was eating 2 garlic pitta breads every 4 days, and drinking a lot of tea. Tell me why that would be considered healthy ?
It’s hard to eat well when you’re on a teensy-tiny fixed income. Right now I’m making myself eat more veg, I was putting weight back on due to eating too cheaply…beans, rice,repeat. Some of it is intestinal bacteria, some of it is activity level, some I just don’t know.
Man, why the hell did I fall into talking about this shit?
The reason women get ragged on so hard for ” letting ” themselves get fat is because women are fucking REQUIRED to be sexually attractive, and this to the broadest common denominator. They are judged by that attractiveness for a shitton of other and completely unrelated things, like their competence at work, personal integrity, and intellect.
That is bullshit,yanno? Pure bullshit. Lookism in general’s nasty, and women bear the brunt of it.
The cheapest way to eat is by far scratch cooking. The initial cost though is HUGE. You need to stock your kitchen with all the non-perishable basics and cookware. Ouch! Once you’ve got all those things meal planning and picking up a few fresh ingredients weekly is very affordable. What a lot of us can’t afford is the time required to meal plan, shop weekly and cook from scratch. Moreover a lot of us don’t even know HOW to do these things because we grew up on fast and processed diets.
So, it’s more complicated than dollars and cents.
Crockpot. Those things are cheap and ADD friendly. Put beans in, go to work, come home,eat. Lentils if you aren’t that organized, they cook fast.
I did eat a lot of burnt stuff at first, because unless it was truly charred or truly awful, I just ate whatever nasty mess I’d created anyway…sharp learning curve involved. Soy sauce can make scorched beans vaguely less horrible tasting, but with a crockpot and the right amount of water, you never have to deal with that.
I eat a lot of raw fruit and veggies now, so not much cooking involved, just mixing a decent dip or dressing in the case of the latter. You need a little oil to digest the oil-soluble vitamins in the vegetables.
I am well-off in terms of time, and I only had that pointed out recently. I probably need that, I have gotten really weird when really busy…sort of just screaming randomly sort of thing.
Oh I so know screaming randomly kinda thing. Didn’t know other people did. That’s one of the reasons I come here. Snark+kindness+people knowing about random screaming.