Tik Tok On The Clock But The Party Don't Stop, No, Especially Not With These Kinds Of Terrible Comments on Facebook

If I were you I would probably be more worried about waking up feeling like a misogynist, slur-using, sexual-behaviour-policing asshole but maybe that's just me.

P.S. I have included some subtle iconography for you to work out how I feel about the person who left that second comment.

Gingerly Negotiating Your Rage on the Internet

Do you know what Internet? It makes me so happy when you send me emails about your rage. I quite like getting emails in general actually, but I especially love the rage. This is possibly only because it makes me feel like I am not the only furious psychopath on the Internet, but the heart wants what the heart wants. So you guys should keep emailing me, because it makes me feel like I am reuniting with my many long lost siblings of fury. As if we were all adopted out by one extremely angry mother, and now we are finding each other through our shared distaste for idiocy on the Internet. Although, I think I'll stick with my own mum because she has a crystal necklace that spells out CUNT and she doesn't mind when I blog about cum towels on the Internet.

In the latest installment of Your Rage and My Blog, we are going to talk about this little gem here that I was sent by my pal A:

And A, as a sibling of Internet fury, was offended by this. She said:

'Ginger' hate has to be one of the stupidest possible sorts of discrimination. Its a hair colour! Come the fuck on. It is just senseless bullying. I think hair anywhere in the strawberry blonde- violent red spectrum is awesome. Naturally red headed people have the loveliest hair, and often wonderful pale skin freckly complexions.

People really are idiots.

Funnily enough, I happen to agree with A. And not just because I am biased. I was almost on board there with Izzy because it was a Harry Potter joke, and I do like to think of myself as bearing an uncanny resemblance to Madam Rosmerta. Almost on board, but not quite. Because I didn't find it that funny when a friend in first year explained that you call a "hot" red head a unicorn. And I didn't find this funny either:

Decidedly no laughs there. Any possible points that I might have assigned for critical analysis of Twilight (alternatively known as Stephanie Myer's Pro Life Allegory of Stockholm Syndrome) have been counter balanced by Izzy's casual homophobia. And the strawberry blonde thing? How awkward. God forbid, letting somebody describe their body using the terms that they choose. :L indeed.

I mean, you guys probably know this by now, right? I like to be offended by stuff. And yes, blah blah, ginger hate is just a joke! I should probably calm down or get over it or lighten up or take a chill pill, or something else completely dismissive. But surely, by now I'm on record as being completely humourless and a total boner killer. So humourless, in fact, that I was one of the 700 New Zealanders who made gleefully made official complaints about Paul Henry because I'm just not that into state funded racism. So bitterly humourless, that I just don't think that ginger jokes are that funny. I don't think it's that funny to imitate all of the other types of discrimination by joking about hair colour. If it's that funny then why don't we all play a little light hearted round of eugenics? Or maybe we could sit down to a game of Khmer Rouge? Lynch mob role play anyone?

I know. Nobody is dying. It's a hair colour. But why imitate this shit? It's still bullying. It's still body policing. It's these kind of jokes that normalize how divisive our society can be. Sometimes bullying leads to stuff. And ginger hate has lead to some pretty crap stuff. And seriously, if Perez Hilton says he is going to stop bullying people, there has got to be hope for us all.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Rage On, My Babies: The Birth of "Your Rage, My Blog"

My dear readers, it has come to my attention that many of you are suffering from acute cases of rage. I don't hardly blame you, because we live in a time where our political representatives are either dead baby fraudsters or they see merit in banning the most vulnerable of sex workers from public vision. (Surprisingly, the Prostitutes Collective thinks that the Manakau City Bill might put prostitutes at risk. In other news, the world might remain spherical.) We live in a rage inducing time where everybody loves Christopher Nolan, which also happens to be a time where my UTI just will not fucking go away. So it is okay. I feel your rage. That is why I sit here, tip tapping at my keyboard. I needed a rage outlet or else my girlfriend was going to keep encouraging me to join a gym to deal with my aggression. So I made a blog instead, and now I just share my rage with the internet.

Basically, I've gotten an inkling about your rage recently because you've told me about it. You've sent me a whole lot of emails and Facebook messages and texts, and sometimes we have even talked face to face about how furious you are with all of the sizeist and racist and classist and ableist and transphobic and whorephobic and homophobic and misogynist and slut-shaming and xenophobic assholes that you know. So I was thinking, you guys should keep telling me about this stuff and then maybe I could actually blog about it. To do this, you should email me at alexandra.hazel.garrett@gmail.com and possibly screencap your examples of internet assholery. Examples which I can instantly and magically make anonymous through the use of Perez Hilton inspired MS Paint, and by the by, I really hope this is the first and last thing I do that is inspired by Perez Hilton. Then you guys will get to share your rage and you totally won't have to join a gym, unless you want to. And if you are going to join a gym, then you probably shouldn't join Contours, because my friend Erin told me this about it:

"Two of my workmates went to sign-up at a gym at lunch. During the fitness tests and sign-up thingy they had a weight check according to a chart on the wall. I shit you not this was the scale NORMAL > FATTER THAN NORMAL > FAT > OVER FAT"

As you probably know, I am all about using the word fat more often to try and take away some of the shame and stigma. But Contours, I'm not really sure if differentiating between 'fat' and 'normal' in such a specific and obnoxious does this. Maybe somebody could be both fat AND normal, Contours? Also, maybe not everybody wants to actually lose weight? Maybe they want to come to your gym to do this:

[Created by Susan Surface, who is selling merchandise at CafePress, and who almost makes me want to join a gym.]

So, in the first instance of Your Rage, My Blog I am going to post something here that was sent in by my friend M, a stone cold fox who makes amazing lasagna. M felt offended when this popped up on her Facebook:

Which yeah, that's offensive. Sure, I've never met C but this is probably just him making a little joke, because he's young and liberal and he can get away with it because obviously he's being ironic. He makes jokes like this but he's not actually sexist or anything. But actually, the things we joke about are the things we think about. And in the words of Bidisha from the Guardian, casual sexism is nothing but misogyny.

Is this supposed to be funny because equality has apparently been achieved? Because it isn't and because it hasn't. Women are still paid less than men. Abortion law in New Zealand is classified under the Crimes Act, not the Health Act, and I can't tell anyone that I'm making a play about womanhood in New Zealand without them asking if it is about periods. Which is another kind of intentionally-humorous-but-actually-derogatory statement, or in this case a question, because women are obviously so hysterical that we all couldn't hang out together without talking about menstruation. Which is actually just offensive in itself, because if we wanted to make a show about periods, or any-fucking-thing about the female body we should be able to do so without derision or even the subtlest of sneers. Because if we did, it might be fucking brilliant. Possibly somebody might even want to see it, what with the prevalence of menstrual bleeding among half the planet. But then again, every single review of the Vagina Monologues at the Basement prefaced itself with some kind of OH MY GOD HOW EMBARRASSING AND 90'S, A PLAY ABOUT VAGINAS, OH MY GOD HOW UNCOMFORTABLE commentary. But hey, I'm probably overreacting. What's the point in living, if you don't have a dick? LULZ!

Just quietly, C, was it nice when you were being kept alive inside the body of a woman for nine months? Was it good having a dick then? How about when your little minuscule baby dick was pushed through your mother's vagina and into the world, or when you emerged from the gaping hole in her stomach? A hole in the body of the woman who gave you life. I'm kind of loathe to place too much emphasis on motherhood here. Ladies shouldn't be defined by their ability to breed and there are a whole lot of women who can't have babies and who don't want to. Also because it is this kind of naturalisation of maternity and of women's work that means that stay at home parents don't get paid, and teachers and carers and nurses don't get paid very much, because it is natural and it is what women do and they are supposed to enjoy it, not get paid for it. And also, because there are people who neither have dicks nor are women, and people who have dicks but also consider themselves as female, and I don't want to get too gender binary up in here. So, C, I am aware that my argument is a little problematic, but maybe the next time you go to assert your masculinity through some casually misogynist joke, you should just remember that your mother actually gave you your dick. Maybe you should shake what your mama gave you and learn to treat women with some respect.

Would A Rose By Any Other Name Smell As Misogynist?

Okay, so. Rosie. We need to talk. On Facebook, you liked a group called Curvy girls do it better... only a dog wants a bone! By "needing to talk" I mean that I need write a blog post about this page that you clicked, probably mindlessly while you were at work or something. A blog post that you will most likely never read because we haven't talked since high school and because you have probably moved on to much loftier things in life than trawling your Facebook news feed like a pedant. But anyway.

Firstly, everybody 'wants a bone'. Or like, they want 206 bones because that is how many bones adult human beings have. If you want less bones than that, you might be a pedophile. If you don't want a bone at all, then you probably want to fuck an octopus. Yes, I realise that this group is actually just using the term 'bone' as an attack on thin women. We'll get to that. I just wanted to get my little quip about the octopus out of the way.

Secondly, curvy girls do WHAT better exactly? Write poetry? Swim triathlons? Make spinach and ricotta cannelloni? Oh. Right. I get it. They FUCK better. Because at the end of the day women are sexual objects. And the key word here is objects and not sexual, because this Facebook group is not about the innate power of female sexuality or even about masturbation. I wish it was, but it is about validating your body shape by your ability to fuck. Which is what counts, right, because women everywhere get paid less than men do and it doesn't even matter because a lady is always going to be defined by who and how and when and why and how often she fucks, and whether she gets paid for it and whether she is married and by what she does with the baby if she gets pregnant. And because the patriarchy hurts everyone, not just women, and if you are a straight man you best be putting on a show that you care most about the fucking and not about her poems or her cannelloni. This might be a generalisation, sure, but we have got to learn how to make positive statements about bodies without talking about how they are going to be shared by somebody else.

Thirdly, saying nasty things about thin women's bodies only justifies every single cruel thing that has ever been said about fat women. Loving your body does not have to be, and nor should it be, a competition. Because then nobody wins, apart from psychotherapists. And possibly Jenny Craig. Comparing thin women to 'bones' and the people who fuck them to 'dogs' just validates sizeism. It validates my being called a 'fat bitch' in the street that one time and it validates the pithy existence of the term 'chubby chaser'. Attacking men who like thin women just gives them the power to attack the sexual preferences of others, rather than something interesting like their political beliefs or whether or not they think Tony Soprano actually died at the end of the series. I know this is like the letter to James again, but there have got to be ways of being body positive without tearing other women down.This is not about whether or not it is okay to express your sexual preferences in a public forum, it is about body-fucking-solidarity. Fat acceptance is body acceptance. It is about accepting each and every body in its own right, no matter what it looks like or what gender it is or what colour or whether it fits into some kind of narrow societal mold of appropriate ability. Glorifying fat bodies through the vilification of thin ones only celebrates and cements a culture of body shame.

Some Crap Advice From Facebook

Really? Actually? Australia being "the fattest nation on earth" is something that warrants me to weep salty tears from my very eyes? Is this really necessary? I wasn't aware that it was even common practice to cry over the sexual behaviours of others (sluts, also possibly bitches) in the first place, but crying over what a bunch of people look like seems to be kind of a crap alternative.

My suggestions:

- A death in the family.

- Darfur.

- Sex trafficking.

- This.

- Beaches, or possibly Stepmom.

- The gender wage gap.

- Bosnia.

- The way that The Real L Word portrays lesbian sexuality.

- Tilda Swinton signing a petition in support of fugitive child rapist Roman Polanski.

- Kiana Firouz.

- That bit in the final episode of Sex and the City after Charlotte finds out she is getting a baby and Miranda's house-keeper kisses her on the forehead and tells her she has found out what love truly is, and then Carrie comes back from Paris and Samantha has an orgasm while the bulbs sprout into flowers because SPRING HAS FINALLY ARRIVED.

An Open Letter to James, Who Lives In Christchurch

James, first things first, I want to say that I'm not writing to reminisce about all of the hormonal and opportunistic sex we had in the summer of 2007, or the sex in 2006, or the sex in the more desperate university holidays in 2008. I don't really want to talk about it, mainly because you never made me come and you also kept a cum towel by your bed, which you would hand to me after you were finished with it. I am now concerned about whether or not it was the same towel over a three year period and also about the spelling duo of cum and come, and I can't seem to bring myself to write the word 'cum' for orgasm, because it seems obscene and also ugly and it always reminds me of jizz, which I don't have any of, and I hope that this isn't because of some kind of deep seated sexual issue. I also hope you have washed the towel.

What I am writing to talk to you about is a group that you joined quite recently on Facebook. I don't know if you've noticed, but I like to over-analyse what other people do on the internet, mainly because I'm fascinated by this global and public and intending-to-be-social forum as well as liking the fact that it gives me hard evidence to copy and paste into my blog, rather than just having to recount offensive conversations I have with people in the real word. You mightn't have noticed because although we're friends with each other on Facebook we never really talk, not because things are awkward or anything but mostly just because we never really had anything to talk about in the first place. The sex we would have, usually at your flat because I was home for the holidays and my family is liberal but not that liberal, it was just mostly based upon convenience and inebriation and low self esteem and a similar sexual appetite, so I think it's pretty normal for us not to talk anymore, especially now that it's 2010 and I have a girlfriend and you have a jet-ski. But the page that you liked recently, I guess I found it kind of offensive. If you don't know what one I mean, I have helpfully labelled it for you here, just in case:

You liked Curvy Girls Are Better Than Skinny Girls, along with 1,772,675 other people. And like, that's cool. On the surface, this group seems like it might be trying to be progressive, in some way, like that movie with America Ferrera, because the title is size-positive and it makes a statement about how thin bodies are valued over fat bodies. (Although curvy really is a problematic euphemism for fat, because curvy should just mean having curves on your body, and if the word fat wasn't used as as a death sentence and a humiliation maybe people wouldn't need to clutch onto their curves so tightly). But while this group might technically be size-positive, it isn't body positive. It isn't woman positive. It's still rating women against each other, it's still making bodies a competition, it's still body surveillance culture. (Consequently, there seems to be a whole lot of surveying going on on that website.) Fat acceptance isn't saying that fat bodies are better. Fat acceptance isn't saying that everybody should be fat. It's about accepting bodies because they are bodies and they are attached to people with thoughts and feelings and it's about self esteem and it's about how everybody deserves respect, no matter what they look like. Fat acceptance is not body snarking on thin women, and it is not saying that real women have curves. A hip to waist ratio does not make anyone any more 'real' than anyone else. Curves do not a woman make. Criticizing thin bodies is actually just validating sizeism. Celebrating one thing by tearing down something else isn't really very celebratory at all.

And James, if you really want to publicly announce your sexual preferences, there are heaps of groups that you could join to proclaim your love of T&A, without hating on any other kind of body type. Not any of these ones though, because then I would probably have to write another blog post about you. You could just become a fan of Curvy Girls or of Boobs or of Tits and Ass or even the misspelled, but straight to the point, I Love Curvey Woman. (I noticed you are friends with your dad on Facebook though, I hope he's into it). Although really, it still is kind of problematic to reduce what you like about women to their body parts.

I think that part of the reason I felt so uncomfortable with the group you joined, is because I have fucked you. Multiple times. With my curvy body. Should I be pleased that I fit into this so easily definable category of women that you like? Is the Facebook page some kind of compliment? Do I even get to say anything about the way that these Facebook groups turn women into commodities, when I just had sex with you because I was 19 and drunk and horny? Am I allowed to complain when I have sent you a pxt of my tits? Am I allowed to complain when I knew that you would probably show it to your friends and that I didn't mind? Do I have an argument against objectification when I showed all my cellphone pictures of your cock to the other waitresses I worked with at the time, to make a long shift go faster and to show off that I was getting some? In the words of the Shortland Street theme song, is it you or is it me? Do I get to complain about raunch culture, when sometimes I like the raunch? It's confusing, when you start thinking about it. Let me know what you think.

Kind, and now somewhat confused, regards,

Ally Garrett.

A Fat and Punchy Post

I thought that the next blog post I write should be relatively short, so that perhaps I could start occasionally tapping out something short and maybe even funny while I am procrastinating at work. My urge to actually write this short and witty post eventuated into action, or as much action as it really takes to open a new tab on my Internet browser, when my work blocked my usual procrastination hive of, Jezebel. To some add some colour to this description of the puritanical regime of the modern office environment let me tell you that my work also just blocked a bra website:

Access to this URL is currently restricted because of its classification.

URL: http://www.curvykate.com/

Content classification: Intimate Apparel/Swimsuit

Thank heavens for that. I might have accidentally stumbled upon a pair of togs; the obscenity of which I surely would never have recovered from. Lace and Lycra, the smoking guns of office Internet censorship. I hate to think about what would happen to this Internet blocking system if it were actually a person and they were accidentally to go to a beach or a lingerie shop, and to suddenly be accosted with a smorgasboard of strips of breast covering fabric. And so because my work finds feminist blogging and boulder holders so offensive, I am here to write a post about being offended. A post that I hope to be several onomatopoeic words, all describing things that are short and yet effective, like 'zippy' and 'zappy' and possibly 'punchy', although I am not really sure if that meets the onomatopoeic criteria.

.

And so in the spirit of keeping things punchy, in every possible sense of the word, I thought that maybe I would post something else from my "All Of The Negative Things That My Facebook Friends Have Said About Fat People and Bodies In The Last Couple of Months (Unless They Said It In The Period Of Time Where I Went To Ohakune Or To Christchurch Or When I Went To See Lady Gaga In Auckland AKA The Best Weekend Of My Life) File". And so, here is snippet from my stash:

And I think this post is interesting, because it taps into the whole thing of 'fat' automatically being a derogatory word, rather than just a describing word, like I talked about a bit in my second blog post and also written about by the Messiah of Fat Acceptance, Kate Harding. Just because the fat guy behind the IT desk appears to be an asshole, it seems that Anonymous Facebook Commenter thinks it is sweet to make snide remarks about his body. And even though it may seem that way, AFC is not just describing the appearance of the IT guy. Words mean things. Saying "Go see Brown Hair Guy another day" or "Go see Red T-Shirt Guy another day" would not mean the same thing. AFC describing the IT Guy as Fat Guy means she already has a joke, because I'm not sure if you've realised but our culture seems to find fat hatred hysterically funny. And this stuff seems to be okay. I am sort of loathe to compare fat othering to racism, because it is the easiest thing to do and I think there is already some kind of Godwin's Law type deal that whenever any kind of privilege is discussed on the Internet it will inevitably boil down to being compared to racism, which usually ends up weakening the essence of the argument in the first place. But in the interests of keeping this post zippy, zappy and punchy I am going to play the race card:

Would it be okay for AFC to say "That has happened to me soooo many times. It's something to do with logging in campus, or whatever. Bleh. Go see Black Guy another day"?

And in response to my card playing, I think the answer might be no. And I don't really want to compare the legacy of slavery and racial oppression to a fat joke on the Internet, but the words do make for an interesting comparison. And often, sizeism is more than a fat joke. Kate Harding has written an article here about anti-fat hate crimes. And I know that race is a construct. And I know that a lot of people get their knickers in a twist when sizeism is compared to racism, because obviously every fat person in the world has chosen to be fat and if they just put in a little bit more effort into not being so lazy they wouldn't be such a drain on the health system. (Which is a fucking stupid argument by the way, if you exist you are inherently a drain on the system. We all pay tax and that is what society is, we are all just leeching off each other and if you expect to shit in a pipe and have it flushed away or to be able to catch a bus ever you can't complain about somebody HYPOTHETICALLY needing more medical care than you.) And I know that nobody in any kind of official position can decide whether sizeism is hate speech yet, and Jezebel wrote a kind of interesting article about it the other day. (An article which, by the by, I had to read ON MY OWN TIME, when I wasn't even getting paid, thanks a lot to my corporate office censorship lifestyle.) But the answer to the race card is no, it wouldn't be okay to be so blatantly racist, but it is totally okay to be hell for leather sizeist. Why couldn't AFC just have told the Facebook-User-Who-Has-Problems-With-Uni-Computers to go and see Smug Asshole Guy another day? Shouldn't being a total and complete dickwad be a bigger insult than being reminded of your own body shape?

(And to the Facebook-User-Who-Has-Problems-With-Uni-Computers, I am impressed that you didn't take the easy fat joke bait, but maybe if you ever want someone to actually put your dick in their mouth, you should possibly stop using it as put down. Maybe My.Victoria actually truly wants to eat all the dicks? Bodies, they're anatomy, not an insult. And this post, it might be punchy, but I guess it's not so short after all.)

Thinking about acting like an idiot on the internet. And sizeism. And a picture of Beth Ditto's sweet behind.

When I had the idea of starting a blog about being offended I talked to my girlfriend about it, and I sort of hoped that maybe one day I could be the go-to person that current affairs programs would interview about being offended. I would sit on the Good Morning couch wearing earrings and a sassy top, and I would give the new Mary Lambie a knowing and vaguely patronising look and say "Yup, that is definitely offensive". This lofty goal sort of grew and grew in my brain, until everyone was afraid of me because of the huge and all pervasive power that I had to deem things as offensive. When I was talking to my girlfriend about this she said that wanting to be feared possibly wasn't the best or the most reliable life ambition, and I probably sort of agreed and waggled my head around a bit and changed the subject to talk about the most positive and non-confrontational thing that I could think of at that moment in time. Like how great my flatmate Dan's new lemon zester is and how it creates really long strips of lemon rind without getting any of the pith. Or something.

But part of the writing-the-blog-about-being-offended thing was that I wanted to NAME and SHAME. I wanted the racist and the sexist and the privileged to SHAKE IN THEIR VERY BOOTS when they read about their offensive acts, and immediately realise the error of their ways and humbly thank me for tactfully drawing their attention to it. And I would give them the Mary Lambie expression and I would accept their apology but probably still think a little bit less of them. But in the very first post, I chickened out of the naming. And not really the shaming, but without the naming it was somewhat diluted. I went instead for the irritatingly passive aggressive and weakly confrontational first letter of people's names.

But, as I am clearly fixated with naming and shaming, for the last couple of months I have been avidly collecting anything that comes up on my Facebook newsfeed that I think is negative about female appearances. I sort of started doing it for a women's theatre project I am doing, and I liked to lie around thinking about my Facebook friends sitting in the mildly uncomfortable seats at BATS, and think about them squirming, not because of the invasive arm rests but because their WORDS OF SHAME were emblazoned on the wall. And then I sort of realised that me standing on stage reading these out might make for reasonably average theatre, and that maybe my collection of statements would be put to better use where they belong, and where they came from. (Which, in case you didn't realise, is on the multi-faceted and often mindless but sometimes revolutionary Internet).

Because I have been thinking a little bit about how Facebook turns people into idiots. About how people halfway through their honours degree feel the need to join groups like I Love the Sound of Rain as I'm Going to Sleep and why people who have an important job doing something with pylons and engineering "like" the page Clapping to the Opening Theme of Friends. My girlfriend thinks that these pages have something to do with liking feeling included in a group, and liking to feel like part of an in joke. I think that she is probably onto something. But as for the rain sounds and the Friends clapping, actually everybody in the entire world likes that shit. You do not need to join a group about these things, because you would be joining a group with EVERYBODY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD THAT HAS A ROOF AND A TELEVISION. And god, why must so many of these groups be so comfortingly banal? The other day a Facebook friend of mine "liked" The Sense Of Dread When A Feather Comes Out of Your Puffa Jacket =( and I could have written an entire blog about how BORING this is, but then I realised that I had recently "liked" Where Do All My Bobby Pins Go? and I came to the painful and inevitable realisation that I am just as boring as everyone else. So I have been consoling myself with the fact that Facebook makes everyone act like an imbecile, and that it wasn't actually my fault that I thought for a second that my friends might care about my hair clips.

And so I thought that I might want to write more posts about Facebook, and the way that it gives me this sort of bizarre insight into the most stupid thoughts of acquaintances on my friends list, and how these often offend me. I thought this could be a good place to start unloading some of the things that these acquaintances have said and that I find offensive. People from places like media studies tutorials and high school and average parties in Newtown and people that my friends have slept with and I have never gotten around to deleting. And I think that I really, really want to name people, because hello Voldemort, names have a lot of power. But I think for now I am too scared of confrontation and insipid initials feel like an easier way to unpack Facebook idiocy for a little bit.

When I started a blog I think that I also really really really heaps badly wanted to write something about fat activism, but I think that anything I try to write will be so influenced by the exhaustingly amazing words of size activists like Natalie Perkins and Lesley Kinzel and Ragen Chastain and Charlotte Cooper and Kate Harding. Because I am constantly disgusted by the things that people will breezily say about fat people, because if these things were said about black people they would be completely unacceptable and borderline psychopathic. And I am angry that BMI is supposedly an indicator for health when actually all it indicates is that everyone should go and get a blood test and BMI actually just hides that heaps of thin people eat crap and don't move their bodies; and I do resent that apparently every fat person is a drain on the health system but that nobody begrudges cyclists or highly stressed lawyers or bungee jumpers of their free health care.

So I think I want to use this blog to sometimes look at sizeism on Facebook. Because when I look through all of these horribly offensive nuggets that I have gathered, it is not just people from Newtown parties who are writing this shit. It is my friends. It is people who are friends with me and heaps of other fat people, and who are educated and left wing and funny and well dressed. It is people who say stuff like this:

And I guess that this might seem kind of inoffensive. But actually, I am offended. I am offended because calling someone fat isn't just a description of their body shape. The social meaning of the word means they are a smelly, awful, unlovable pleb who eats nine Big Macs every day and probably never has sex and also definitely has diabetes and will die of a heart attack in the next seven months. Kate Harding wrote an essay about this and you should read it because she is smarter than me. But I think that this little Facebook post here by Anonymous Facebook User [AFU], and liked by three other Anonymous Facebook Users, shows how ingrained jokes about fat people are in society. And how easy they are to make. As easy as making a cake with a cake mixer, or as easy as keeping your tights up when you know that you just have to wear a pair of black undies over the top. They're so easy because you use the word fat and you immediately have a punch line. And like I said last time, this is Facebook. It is public. I wasn't aware that fat people weren't allowed to have iPads, and also that they weren't allowed to think they are "cool". God forbid a fat person uses a piece of technology in public, in case someone thinks they are trying to be impressive. Don't you realise that you can't be impressive if you are a fat person? Even if you have an extremely well paying job that means you can buy an iPad, you better not use it in public in case ANFU thinks you are trying to impress her.

Ultimately nobody is winning by making these kind of jokes. Unhealthy fat people get the message that their body is something to be ashamed of, and they don't want to spend any time nourishing it or moving it around. I don't know anyone who has ever wanted to look after something they hate. Beauty standards continue to be perpetuated, fat people continue to be othered and thin people continue to fear being fat. How is it a good thing that 50% of women aged between 18 and 25 would rather be hit with a truck than be fat? Living in fear of YOUR OWN BODY is not a good way to live, and nobody needs to live like that ever since they figured out that spontaneous human combustion is a myth.

So, Facebook. Fat shaming. I can't sum it up as neatly as I would like to. But I'm going to keep trying. Facebook makes this kind of kitchen sink anthropology pretty easy. Almost as easy as making a fat joke.

The first post of the blog that I have just created, in which I talk about being offended

I had to create this blog because the other day a girl who was in my hostel joined a Facebook group and it really offended me.

When I say my hostel, I mean the New Zealand term for the dorm like university accommodation where for the first year of university you eat dinner at 5.30pm off plastic trays and you probably have to eat your dinner beside those who enjoy 'power showers', casual misogyny and lazy drinking games as a past time. So by hostel I do not mean a backpackers hostel or a nunnery, and by a lazy drinking game I mean something like 'Hermit' where all you have to do is lock yourself in a cupboard until you have finished your beverages of choice. Or the 100 Shots of Beer Game, where participants can't stop drinking until they drink... 100 shots. Of beer. At least Scrumpy Hands requires a degree of gymnastic effort, and I Have Never encourages creative thinking, often to avoid the seemingly prerequisite slut shaming and a particular kind of exhibitionism that seems to run on low self esteem.

And so perhaps this girl shouldn't even be on my friends list, because I know her from a time in my life when weeding out those who offended you was more difficult because everyone had just moved to Wellington and needed time to work out who their friends really were. I should have expected to be offended by someone who I knew in the hazy time of first year, a time that is filled with awkward memories of the cable car and of eagerly pleasing. I would be shocked to be offended by a friend from second year or third year, when everybody splits into flats that swiftly define the scattering of the social strata. A time when my feminist and leftist and lesbianist and thespianist tendencies came sharply into focus, having been clouded by being 18 and leaving home and the need to make friends.

But when S 'liked' a Facebook page called "Holocaust jokes aren't funny, Anne Frankly, I won't stand for it" I felt really fucking offended. And when I clicked on the group itself, I felt like I wanted to cry. The creator of the group had gone to the effort to find that lovely picture of Anne, the one where her hair sticks out at the side and she grins at the camera and looks sunny and beautiful and free. This one. They had used this photograph for the display picture of a group that pokes fun at the fact that eight million people were viciously murdered, and persecuted for things they can not change, like their sexuality or their disability or their religion. A group where you can find a photograph of Anne, and written over the top of the photo it says "What's burning? Oh it's my family". I was offended that Anne Frank's name could so casually be used in jest, when she was a smiling, ice-cream eating, completely-articulate-far-beyond-her-years diary writing, bike riding, crush-getting teenage girl who was viscously murdered by Nazis. Because I don't think the holocaust is funny, and I think that Prince Harry should have been punished for his costume, and when I heard about a law student whose name begins with C dressing up as a Nazi for a racial stereotypes party that was attended by mostly white, entitled law school types I thought it was just really gross. Because really, could anything be more indicative of character than dressing up as symbol of hatred, bigotry and murder? (And on a side note, how well does this party bode for the future of the New Zealand justice system? Get out now while you still can, there's a one way Air New Zealand flight leaving for Vancouver on Sunday for $1,937).

I think what offended me further is that S has sensibly moved on from from Victoria University, and is soon to graduate from the New Zealand Broadcasting School. I feel fine about her decision to do this, and maybe if I had also taken on a similar kind of specified course I would not be writing this post from my moderately challenging desk job. But I feel offended by those who in the media industry who so easily laugh at other people, and when audiences are offended by their racism, or their insensitivity or their xenophobia or their sizeism or their blah blah blah they spout about their right to say what they want about whoever they want, and they trump free speech and journalistic freedom over the feelings of others. Yesterday I saw that a dude I know with an enviable side job writing for a newspaper, had 'liked' a Facebook group called "OMG is that Sarah-Jessica-Par....... wait... its just a horse" and I felt a similar sort of rage. I know that the ethics of humour suggest that humour is art, and I don't think that art should be censored. I am just bored with media personalities, who have such an awareness of pop culture, saying offensive things for the shock factor and the publicity. I also think that the jokes about Sarah Jessica Parker are fucking villainous and perpetuate hideous beauty standards, because a woman who is not conventionally attractive must obviously look like a horse. And if SJP looks like a horse, and that is something that we really care about, then New Zealand should probably be wiped out, because our gene pool is fucking limited. But not only are these gags problematic, SJP jokes are boring. Jokes were being made about her face ten years ago. And ten years ago, even if the jokes weren't boring, they still rested on cruelty and misogyny, the founding fathers of Internet snark.

I was talking to my girlfriend about this, and she thought that I couldn't judge people so easily based on what groups they join on the Internet. Because people just see a group, laugh about it, "like" it and then never think about it again. And that is true and she was right, like she usually is. But I am largely an irrational person, and rather than risking her growing tired of my impassioned and relentless ranting I had to start a blog to vent to the Internet instead. I don't think that S sits around all evening thinking about how glad she is that Anne Frank died, and she probably doesn't have an anti-Semitic bone in her body. But Facebook is public. Even if it makes everyone act like an idiot, Facebook is still the public sphere. Liking a group is not that same as making a joke in your lounge amongst your equally small minded and bigoted peers. When an offensive joke is told in public I feel like letting that kind of humour float into the ether without comment permits the teller to be offensive, as well as sending the message that I am sweet with hearing such bullshit. Just because it's offensive doesn't mean it's funny, and just because I'm offended doesn't mean I need to lighten up. I know that supporting freedom of speech means supporting freedom for the speech that I hate, and while I support the right for people to defend their inane and offensive jokes until they are blue in the face, I will also defend my right to write a blog about my offence. And yes, I have commented on these Facebook groups in possibly the most cowardly way; by creating a blog. The Internet really does provides endless opportunities for stilted confrontation. And yes, thanks to the button-pushingly-easy passive aggressive Facebook, I could de-friend anybody whose views I don't agree with. And lately, I have been doing just that, taking a lesson from my perceptive friend Scarlett who once de-friended an acquaintance for joining a group called 'The Only Library I Visit is my Music Library'. But now, maybe I won't de-friend so easily, as I will probably need material for the blog.

It turns out I was too hasty when I deleted Amber for updating her status with the pertinent message that Anna Paquin is "ugly". I might have needed her for my next post.