If you follow me on Twitter or look at my Facebook page, you’ll see I use an actual photo… despite, you know, being a fat person. I sometimes get asked why I do this– after all, I AM a fat person. I guess the reasoning behind that line of questioning is that they want to know why I’m effectively setting myself up to get trolled?
Well… yes and no. It’s true, I understand the risk I take by showing my face, as someone who isn’t conventionally attractive. The reality is that I haven’t gotten much fat-trolling from strangers. Like… three, ever? The actual threat is from people I have bonded with.
Let me back up a bit. Before Twitter and such, while I showed my face sometimes, it wasn’t very often, and not so openly. It was usually by demand to people I have bonded with and deemed worthy of showing them my face. In most cases, it went quite well, and by that I mean “they didn’t flee at the sight of a fat nerd woman.”
As for the rest of them… that’s where it gets ugly. I’ll spare you the slurs, but those aren’t even the worst. The worst is the accusation that I betrayed people, that I had tricked them into thinking I was a hot chick (when I said no such thing… and sometimes I even said I was a fat person well beforehand and they didn’t believe me, thinking it was just “female modesty”).
If you know me, one of the things I hate most is feeling like I’ve cheated or deceived someone, even if it wasn’t intentional. It’s why, when I do commissioned work, I won’t take payment until the other person’s happy (even when they offer to pay upfront), I would hate to hand over a subpar product and bring up the potential of being accused for cheating.
So, now, on social media, my policy is to just show my face at the start. If a random troll comes along and gives me crap for “being fat in public,” so be it. But I won’t be accused of “betraying” people who I make friends with, who were expecting me to be a beautiful babe. Can’t make that accusation if you’ve seen my actual face first!
That said, the picture I use on FB/Twitter is quite old (like… 2008?), so I should probably take a new one. I held off because all the shirts I had were low-cut enough to make the scar from my old trache quite visible and distracting. :P
Tags: fat yoshi is fat, photo, twitter