She’s Seething With Empowerment
Meanwhile, in the world of the well-adjusted Guardian columnist:
It was July 2014, Nashville Tennessee. I was walking into a gas station for a bottle of water when the man behind me stepped up to open the door for me. With that act of kindness, something inside me snapped and I flew into a blind rage. I began screaming at him at the top of my lungs.
This latest admission of derangement is by Stacie Huckeba, a photographer and video-maker. She continues,
“No, you cannot open this door for me! You wouldn’t have opened it two years ago, so you damn sure can’t open it now!” I scowled and stormed away, completely enraged.
You see, he’s not allowed to do that – holding open the door for her – or for any woman, presumably. Because although Ms Huckeba didn’t know this polite gentleman and had never seen him before, she’s nevertheless sure of what his views on holding doors open for people must have been two years previously, back when she was fat. It’s intersectional science. And then, inadvertently, a punchline of sorts:
It was the third time that week that a man had done something polite for me.
Damn the patriarchy and all its works.
First a man had bought me a drink at a concert, and then there was the nice man who had helped me scoop up my groceries after I dropped my bag, and now this man with the door.
At this point, thankfully, Ms Huckeba offers an explanation, and justification, for her erratic, rather alarming mood swings:
Two years before this, in July 2012, I weighed 365lb, which roughly translates into 26 stone. I was enormous, and had been my entire life. I grew up an obese kid, was an obese teenager, an obese young adult, and by my mid-40s I had ballooned into a hugely obese adult. But that summer I started a massive journey to lose 220lb, or almost 16 stone, over the course of four and a half years. As I sit here today, I’m literally a third of the body mass I used to be. I am an average-sized woman who wears a size medium pretty much across the board. And, I am happy to report, I am also a fairly happy, confident person.
Yes, of course. That would explain all the random screaming.
But that day I had just begun experimenting with regular-sized clothes, and I was not confident. I was uncomfortable.
Ah. Still, though, it does seem like an awful lot of vehement and irrational hostility to be excused with a wardrobe choice.
I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. And it wasn’t until I saw that man’s hand reach for the handle of that door that I knew why – and it pissed me off… He opened that door for me because I wasn’t physically offensive to him, and I knew.
Telepathy being one of the less remarked benefits of embracing fat-activist wokeness.
This realisation broke me. It broke me in a way that I’ve never been broken before. He certainly didn’t deserve my outburst, but in that moment I couldn’t help myself. The idea that the size of my trousers had had anything to do with simple politeness was heart-breaking to me.
A classic sentence, perhaps. And I don’t know about heart-breaking, but it is a little odd, and just a tad presumptuous. After all, the assumption here – even now, years later – is that the gentleman in question, the one being screamed at, was being polite atypically, judgementally, and only because he admired the conventional proportions of Ms Huckeba’s slacks. And yet there’s no mention of any flirtatiousness or any hint of romantic interest. As described, it’s just an act of courtesy, onto which a great deal of supposition has been eagerly piled. It’s a tough conceit to sell. In my experience, people who hold open doors for others generally do so reflexively, out of habit, a learned courtesy, and rarely with any great premeditation or guile. However, the petrol station outburst has apparently been cathartic, even revelatory, with Ms Huckeba embarking on a second career as a writer and public speaker:
It has now become my life’s mission to help people realise their true beauty and strength; right now, in the body they occupy, this second… Hopefully I can change the way we all perceive beauty.
A sentiment not entirely consonant with the very next paragraph, regarding her newer, slimmer self:
I love my ass the size it is now. I love the way I look and feel, and the freedom it gives me. I can breathe. I actually love taking exercise. I love that my feet don’t ache and my back doesn’t crack.
Well, yes. Politeness aside, some proportions are more practical than others. Being able to breathe, for instance, is generally a good thing. Though I’ve yet to be convinced that the size of a person’s trousers is the most obvious determining factor in whether or not I hold open a door for them. But this being the Guardian, I suppose what matters is that Ms Huckeba can invoke victimhood to rationalise having behaved like a complete and utter cow.
Update:
A footnote of sorts, added via the comments, where B’Radical says,
It is a fact that an attractive woman will receive much more positive attention from males than a morbidly obese woman. Should this be the case? That’s not relevant. Her meltdown was a recognition of that fact.
Well, Ms Huckeba doesn’t elaborate on this point – which you’d imagine she might for persuasive effect – beyond claiming to have been “overlooked.” She doesn’t cite any illustrative examples, or offer any evidence of active dislike, merely a non-specific indifference: “No one had ever done those things [i.e., holding open a door] for me before.” And whether or not someone had previously held open a door while she was very big seems a small thing on which to hang her much larger claims, assuming one trusts her account. And then of course it seems a little odd to have a screaming fit at someone behaving courteously, i.e., in the way you’ve supposedly always wanted. It suggests baggage.
Perhaps, as is sometimes the case, some of this passion is being redirected from a more obvious target. After all, no amount of public speaking or articles in the Guardian is likely to have much effect on how people in general may view the eye-catchingly rotund in terms of physical attractiveness. It’s a pointless endeavour, like shouting at rain. The more practical alternative, the one over which a person might exert some actual leverage, is losing weight, such that one can breathe properly and is not in continual discomfort, as the author admits, or not becoming quite so huge in the first place. Thereby avoiding the mental and emotional complications exhibited above, such as acting like a mad woman and bullying a stranger for being nice to you.
It seems to me the moral of the article, albeit unintended, is that it’s probably best to avoid (a) excessive weight gain, and (b) wokeness, both of which seem likely to engender alienation, resentment and fits of random hysteria.
Update 2:
David, I put a little something in your jar in appreciation of gentlemen everywhere. Have a happy Mardi Gras and let the good times roll!
No one wants to hold the door open for the biglys because they might get stuck.
David, I put a little something in your jar in appreciation of gentlemen everywhere.
Bless you, madam. Much appreciated.
One thing I wonder about though at a social level is whether treating people with unhealthy behaviours is a net gain or loss to society.
As I’m sure I’ve said before, I don’t much care how big a person is. I don’t regard it as any of my business. If someone is big and happy about it, fine. But in the world of ‘fat activism’ – which usually means leftist activism – there seems to be an awful lot of unrealism, dishonesty and displacement. Such that the unremarkable fact that people tend to seek out partners who aren’t hugely overweight is decried as some heinous discrimination, an injustice to be corrected. Apparently, we should be made to be attracted to people we aren’t attracted to.
You’ll also find quite a few ‘activists’ who insist that a person’s general preference for remaining a practical size, or regaining a practical size, somehow makes them “fat-phobic” and personally complicit in the “oppression” of fat people. This claim crops up repeatedly. And so we arrive at the strange logic that if you try to lose weight, to feel attractive or healthy, then you’re being irresponsible and selfish.
And so it’s not the chunkiness that’s objectionable; it’s the psychodrama that often goes with it, at least among self-styled ‘fat activists’.
Thanks for the post and the insightful comments. I read the article and liked it. The author admits she was wrong and is just expressing her very human feeling that she would like to be accepted for who she is not how she looks. She writes about all the positives such as career advancement and being perceived as funnier and as having a better personality.
She recognized that is not how the world works and she finds that sad. She is positive and upbeat about the present but acknowledging the journey to get there.
Overall, if I were single and had the opportunity I would ask here out. She is cute and I like the way she writes. Were she still three times the size she is now, given the chance I would hold a door open for her but I would not even consider asking her out because I don’t find fat to be physically attractive and I should be free to decide what I find attractive or unattractive.
For the commenter about “taking exercise”, the article is in the Guardian. She works internationally so perhaps she interacts with people from their enough tha she used one of their phrases since she was writing for a British publication.
If I get to the door first, I hold it open for the person behind me. If someone holds the door for me, I say “thank you.”
This is called “good manners.”
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best. ~~ Robert Heinlein
they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.
That.
“…was anyone else’s first thought, ‘So she used to be a man?’ ”
[Slowly, sheepishly raises hand.]
The act of opening a door for someone/ or holding the door open for someone may be unusual in our more populous “blue” metro areas where our more enlightened/intelligent live. Contra, the act is common among folk in red states and where people are polite/courteous/kind to others.
It is simply common sense that both men and women are more likely to treat better those who are attractive. This is evolutionary psychology writ large based upon the fundamentals of mate selection and pecking order.
I have to say, failure to see this seems symptomatic of our “enlightened” times.
Of course, men are more inclined to be gallant with women whom they find sexually attractive, and for men the primary, though not the only, determinant of sexual attractiveness is physical appearance. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with human evolution.
To set a higher priority on wealth, fame, power, and/or social standing than physical appearance when choosing a mate — which seems to be more typical with women — is hardly indicative of moral superiority.
To set a higher priority on wealth, fame, power, and/or social standing than physical appearance when choosing a mate — which seems to be more typical with women — is hardly indicative of moral superiority.
Heh. That too.
Instalanche! That’s two in one week. 🙂
Instalanche!
Help me hide the liquor cabinet. And this suspicious-looking parcel.
Never mind what’s in it.
When they read that two years ago, people didn’t open doors for her, was anyone else’s first thought, “So she used to be a man?”
Given the subject matter in the news lately, I re-read the sentence twice to check for a gender switch in pronouns. Was sure I had missed it.
I strongly suspect that the man who opened the door for her was an obvious beta, beneath her new strived-for, starved-for, self-perceived standard of attractiveness.
What?!?, she thought, I lived all that time on arugula and beans for you? Begone, peasant!
/applause for Lincoln Annie
“A problem being that on that point we’re expected to rely on Ms Huckeba’s judgement and sense of proportion, which, as illustrated above, seem somewhat unreliable.”
A belated reply to this, but: On what grounds does a single reported instance of inappropriate loss of temper constitute evidence that someone’s judgement and self-reporting about how they have typically been treated should be taken as unreliable? Disproportionate expression of displaced anger may indicate “baggage,” sure, but the presence of baggage is universal and is not always taken as grounds to dismiss self-reporting of one’s experiences as de facto incorrect.
She’s still the self-hating fat woman on the inside, and rather than spend time “getting used to the new you” and recongizing that her weight was not her only area for improvement she has decided to cast blame.
I’ve known more than a few morbidly obese women who had bariatric surgery to shortcut the problem, and no mater how much they claim their “body dysmorphic disorder” is now cured, cured, cured, I can’t help but remember this bit from Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.
A belated reply to this, but: On what grounds does a single reported instance of inappropriate loss of temper constitute evidence that someone’s judgement and self-reporting about how they have typically been treated should be taken as unreliable?
You’re right, screaming at strangers is normal
This article made me recall an incident 30+/- years ago: I was on a NYC subway train standing and holding on to a vertical pole, as was a young woman. The train suddenly lurched, she lost her grip and started to fall backward. I reflexively grabbed her arm to keep her from falling and she (reflexively) kicked me in the shins. I was stunned. she was embarrassed. I started to explain; she started to apologize, then we both (nervously) laughed and she exited at the station we were entering.
My action was simply reflexive rather than courteous and would have been the same had she been obese, statuesque, or in fact another guy. For a woman though, traveling alone on the subway, her conditioning was such that a man’s “aggressive” outreach actually overcame, in that instant, the fear of falling backwards. “Way back then” though, it was natural for the woman to realize within a moment what had actually occurred, as she did.
The difference today, I think, is that there is now the likelihood that even after the fact and upon reflection, rather than recognizing that she was “saved” from potential injury, she might well retain the reactionary repulsion and anger that she instinctively felt at having been “touched” by a male stranger.
It seems to me that societal “progress” has so dulled feminist perception, civility, or to some extent even self preservation, that all too often, even after time for reflection, the formerly natural understanding has been replaced by a new progressive reality.
I have myself always wondered if the morbidly obese have real feelings like us normal human beings?
I may just be lacking in empathy of course.
“Well bless her heart, where boners go to die.”
Heaven forbid that I would ever appear equally……insensitive, but wouldn’t she have to fart to at least give one a clue in any case?
She’s an SJW, which means that whatever you do, you’ll be in the wrong.
For example; I’m guessing if someone DID hold the door for her two years ago, she would have gone into a fit and complained that they’re only doing that because they see her fatness, um, largeness as a disability.
Sheesh
You’re right, screaming at strangers is normal
Screaming at strangers regularly isn’t normal. Screaming at strangers once is atypical, but hardly abnormal, and needn’t require assuming the judgment of the person in question is generally unreliable or distorted.
Is there anybody here who has never, not once, ever, in their entire lives, blown their top at someone who didn’t deserve it simply because that person happened to say or do exactly the wrong thing at the wrong moment? I know I have; I’d like to think that doesn’t immediately and automatically disqualify anything else I say about my experiences and perspectives from being trusted.
“Consider the alternatives? Would you rather people be ignorant? Or worse?”
If you were always actively looking to be offended and triggered?
@Stephen J: You didn’t then go on to write a piece about how your explosion was The Fault of the Patriarchy, I assume, and “the wrong thing at the wrong moment” is exactly what’s in question. Nothing even slightly “wrong” was done, making the act of screaming at a stranger more acutely and obviously a psychotic act.
Most have blown up at least once at an unintended or subtle slight. She manufactured a slight where none existed, and not even the easiest to manufacture (door held for woman because chauvinism) – going instead straight to “HE HELD THE DOOR BECAUSE I’M PRETTY NOW BUT HE HATES FAT CHICKS”.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, not a sign of being well adjusted, and the proof in the pudding is finding it entirely rational to continue the outburst with a cooler head in staircase wit and column form. The act of writing *as she did* clarifies the initial act as less than reasoned – things do not occur in a vacuum.
Her piece, as an apologia, casts her act in a certain light which calls her judgment in the piece into question. This is not circular, merely holistic.
Has she considered a Burka?
Disproportionate expression of displaced anger may indicate “baggage,” sure, but the presence of baggage is universal and is not always taken as grounds to dismiss self-reporting of one’s experiences as de facto incorrect.
You’re right, screaming at strangers is normal.
Well, indeed, it is a little odd. But it’s not just the perversity and disproportion of the reaction to an act of courtesy. Or the adamant assumption of the chap’s motive, or even the apparently supernatural knowledge of how he definitely would have behaved two years previously, though these do seem a tad mismatched with the author’s account of what actually happened. When someone complains, so vehemently, and years later invokes emotional devastation, about an imagined and wholly unsubstantiated motive – i.e., that someone is being polite only because they aren’t physically offended by the trousers of the beneficiary – this doesn’t instantly fill me with confidence in their perceptions of the world.
But then I have been called cynical.
[ Edited. ]
Stephen,
“Screaming at strangers regularly isn’t normal. Screaming at strangers once is atypical, but hardly abnormal”
What about subsequently justifying the behaviour by writing about it in publications available for free world-wide?
“Is there anybody here who has never, not once, ever, in their entire lives, blown their top at someone who didn’t deserve it simply because that person happened to say or do exactly the wrong thing at the wrong moment? I know I have”
Me too, rapidly followed up by a truly sincere, profuse and penitent apology.
If my last sentence is unclear, to write in an unbalanced way about why an unbalanced act was justified clarifies that balance as a whole is badly lacking, and brings the act and what it inspires (including a justification) into sharper focus.
“No, you cannot open this door for me! You wouldn’t have opened it two years ago, so you damn sure can’t open it now!”
But I wasn’t allowed to open the service bay door!
Not that anyone is keeping records, but … you know…. I don’t feel this is a brag in any way as I have many, numerous personality faults (perhaps this post is one of them), and while I have gotten rather livid with certain people in public, I have never, ever in my adult or even my socially awkward teenage years, screamed at someone for committing an obviously courtesy. That someone could misinterpret such a simple thing as holding the door for someone in such a way as to elicit a screaming dressing down is absurd.
No one had ever held a door open for you? I’m sorry but I don’t believe you. You are, in short, lying.
Two years ago, he may not have been ABLE to reach the door from behind her…
I’m guessing his best move would have been standing ten feet away, and throwing a candy bar behind her to distract her.
“we should be made to be attracted to people we aren’t attracted to”
That reminds me; has the re-groover been upgraded yet?
has the re-groover been upgraded yet?
It’s now more jagged and uncomfortable. Which is how it should be.
I opened a door at the local post office the other day for an elderly gentleman, must have been 80 if he was a day, stooped, slow-moving, silver-haired and wobbly, a soiled handkerchief stuffed haphazardly into his shirt pocket and a scarred old hickory cane in his knobby, blue-veined hand.
That’s the kind of people I like to fu*k.
Fat mentally ill woman is now a thin mentally ill woman.
“Posted by: jbspryjbspry”
Golf clap.
Also, I want to make the semi-Spanish pun “as published in the Gordian”. If I’m going to be regrooved I want to deserve it.
Y’know what’s also terribly, unfairly, unchangeably true? Hot chicks dig good-looking dudes. And money. So if you’re an average, or even worse — unattractive — schmoe, with average or lower income, you have no chance in h-e-double-hockeysticks of garnering the attention of Kate Upton or Emma Stone.
Curse the matriarchy!
Were I the door-opener, I would say, “Shut up, and go through the door.”
A wise man always asks an ugly woman to dance. Some are not equipped to say yes, but most will.
She worked unremittingly for years to be more attractive. Now anyone who finds her more attractive — gets both barrels. Another First World Problem.
when you’re ugly inside, it doesn’t matter how you change your outside…
the ugly still comes through.
to quote the Tom Sellick character in a western: “You don’t know how little your problems concern me…”
This is projection, plain and simple. She doesn’t believe he would have held the door for her because she believes that when she was obese, she didn’t deserve to have anyone treat her nicely.
The woman is borderline. She should be in treatment.
Please get fat again, you evil parasite. That way you’ll die sooner.
Just a paragraph or two in in order to diagnose her with some serious emotional problems, not to mention she’s a rude b****. To invite strangers into your mental illness is not right. My advice, get some help or stay home.
I had a friend years ago, the mom of one of my daughter’s classmates. We both were volunteers at the school and would occasionally go out for lunch. She was usually gregarious, enjoyed helping but I noticed that she had a very sharp tongue with anyone who did/say something she found offensive.
One lunch, after the waitress took our orders, she hissed at me “see? she talked to YOU first. It’s because I’m FAT and it is still ok to hate FAT people.”
Needless to say, I began finding other things to do when she suggested lunch and eventually realized she was, to be blunt, a toxic person.
People who obsess about any thing to the point of seeing that thing as the motivator of behavior of everyone else is psychologically disordered.
And we are now to celebrate these people, differ to them and give them their own separate safe spaces to indulge their obsession.
#doomed