(Credit: Hale Goetz)

When Hale Goetz finished her Christmas dinner this year, she received a phone call.

It was from a friend, who told her she had made the front page of R/funny, a popular subpage on Reddit.

Unfortunately, the reason wasn’t due to Hale’s work, nor was it due to something humorous she’d penned on Twitter.

This was because – in Hale’s own words – she had ‘gotten fat’.


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The post was this split photo above, entitled ’empowered feminist’, featuring a picture of Hale when she was 16 and a more current image from last year.



She said: ‘On the right, my hair is shorter, I now have glasses, and I am fat. Get the joke? I was skinny, and now I’m not. The likely cause of my weight gain, says the internet, is Tumblr and my (not actually) recent flirtation with social justice.’

Hale and her husband (Picture: Twitter)

The post had received more than 750,000 views and that figure was growing by the thousands every day.

But rather than sit back and wallow in the internet’s poor humour, Hale instead chose to write about her experience on Jezabel.

“Well, they’re not wrong?” I said, shrugging on that last word, my inflection suggesting a question. They’re not wrong that I was skinny, and now I’m not anymore. So what? I think I look pretty good in that “after” picture, the one on the right where I am very fat. It’s from when my now-husband and I announced our engagement in June 2014, and it was taken on a MacBook near the best source of light in our shitty Chicago apartment. I think of my lipstick, dark red and painstakingly painted, as a moment of perfection frozen in time. If my husband’s face hadn’t been cropped out of the meme, you would see his bushy, red beard and thoughtfully closed eyes. We had spent all day calling our families, telling them the news, and then we took a round of pictures to send to our friends. This is the same picture that’s sitting on my husband’s dresser, printed and framed by my mother-in-law. This is us, happy and cute and in love.

And she didn’t stop there.

To me, being fat is just another bullet point on my list of attributes, something factual but not all that interesting, like how I’m 5’6” or that I dye my hair. Maybe someday being a fat woman won’t feel like a political statement, but for now, I’m happy to exist in accidental defiance: I am happy and I am fat. Let’s eat.

Brilliant.

Now, all that is left to do is track down the person who trawled through the old yearbook at her school to pick out and post those pictures to Reddit.

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