Devon over at Fat Nurse (I adore her style) found this miserable terrible Facebook fat hate page that lifted a picture from her blog as an illustration of why fat women shouldn’t wear leggings. 

The page has sixty thousand fans in countries all over the world. The admin is barely literate and the folks commenting are dim bulbs, but still—SIXTY THOUSAND people thought that would be a fun group to join? Sixty thousand hateful clicks. I wonder how many of those people are nice to kittens? My guess—zero. The amount of hate you have in your heart must be immense to think something like that is funny. 

Of course this all sent me down a bad and dangerous path and I promptly typed in “fat” in the Facebook search bar and I came up with dozens of similar sites (maybe more than dozens—I had to give up after a few pages for the sake of my own sanity). 

And this led me to remember something that I haven’t though about in almost 20 years. Back when I was a teenager, a pal of mine was seeing a new guy who went to a different school. He told us about a party going on at a friend’s house, and asked us to come along. I was terrified, but said yes to be nice.

When we arrived, there was a large hand-drawn banner tacked to the front bushes:

NO FAT CHICKS

This is the kind of thing that sounds like it’s a scene from a poorly-written YA novel, but it’s true. The sign was there. And when I saw it I felt all the blood in my body just stop moving around. My ears rang, my face turned red and I was pretty sure that I was going to die from embarrassment. Because we walked through the door, and we went in. I spent the next hour convinced that a group of cruel boys would start screaming at me while throwing eggs at me and hitting me with sticks. I have never felt a terror so pure and primary as I did that day. And at the time, at most, I was a size 14. Maybe. 

I have a hard time making articulate political statements on most things because my heart overtakes my brain by force. Why does kindness seem foreign and unreasonable to so many people? What does cruelty accomplish? Is a cheap laugh worth hurting a person?