Last week I had a big reminder of the sheer sadistic horror of the maddened woke. I wrote an article stating that the casting of proudly overweight actress Nicola Coughlan as romantic lead in the latest Bridgerton series was the most interesting foray the Netflix blockbuster had yet made into diversity. In casting a fat actress in that role, the programme was asking us to believe that she would finally catch the eye of her prince – the aristocratic Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton). I wrote that this was not plausible – for good or ill, because of the world we live in (this isn’t rocket science).
And yet the article spawned waves and waves of personalised abuse, including hundreds of people going through my online photos and writing how hideous I am. I am still on the receiving end of this vile torrent. I have marvelled at the sheer crudeness of the insults – a disgusting tone and style (swears, threats, scathing, hectoring, taunting) that takes the breath away and makes one despair about the future. For if this is what the internet generation are like, what hope? It’s like they’re barely human.
This deluge of excreta has shown several things. One is the rise of the total inability to separate out culture from personal offence; these people don’t seem to grasp that a huge blockbuster for Netflix is entirely fair game for criticism. Coughlan is seemingly a wealthy star with a terrifying fan base, while her troll-warriors moulder in their basements writing expletive-laden insults to me – yet to them she is the victim. It’s clear that all sense of scale, not to mention civility, is dead and that people’s language abilities have been seriously degraded by a decade on social media.
The big takeaway, though, is that those who shout loudest on behalf of inclusivity and moral virtue – be it antiracism, Palestine or fat rights – are amongst the most aggressive, most anti-virtuous, and least humane people of all.
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