People don’t expect the writer who will be speaking at their event to look like me. At one event, a gathering of librarians, a man asked if he could help me and I said, “Well, I am the keynote speaker.” His eyes widened and his face reddened and he stammered, “Oh, okay, I’m the man you’re looking for.” He was neither the first person nor will he be the last to have such a reaction. In the early days, before there were a lot of pictures of me available online, I would show up to an event and organizers would often look right through me.
I’m supposed to remember that the kind of people who would do such cruel things are beneath my regard. They make memes of me with captions like “Typical Feminist” or “The Ugliest Woman in the World.” Sometimes Google Alerts takes me to a forum of MRA acolytes or conservative assholes having a field day insulting my looks with a picture of me from an event or magazine. When a certain kind of people see me on television, they take the time to email me or tweet at me to tell me that I’m fat or ugly or fat and ugly. «As my career has taken off, my visibility has exploded.
