A Young Woman Is Being Body-Shamed by a Breitbart Editor — and a Wisconsin Sheriff
On Jan. 21, more than 1 in 100 Americans took part in women’s marches throughout the country to oppose threats against women’s rights and make their voices heard. About half a million of those people were in Washington, D.C. — and one of those participants was Elizabeth Flora of Southport, N.C.
Flora marched that day “because I knew it would be historic, and I knew that if I passed up the opportunity to be there, I would regret it forever,” she tells Yahoo Beauty. “I wanted to be there to support and represent all of the causes I care about and meet like-minded people.” What Flora was not expecting, though, was to become the face of a mean-spirited Twitter meme that very day — and, a day later, to be one of several women being mocked for their looks in a viral video shared by Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.
In D.C. a day AFTER the inaugural. Women's march. An absolute freak show. P-T Barnum should have delayed the announcement to shut down. pic.twitter.com/b89oIFQoFF
— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) January 21, 2017
The venom started spewing on Saturday when David A. Clark Jr., sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wis., tweeted photos of march attendees — including a close-up of Flora — with the caption, “In D.C. a day AFTER the inaugural. Women’s march. An absolute freak show. P-T Barnum should have delayed the announcement to shut down.” Clark’s tweet has been liked almost 20,000 times and retweeted more than 8,000 times.
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The sheriff’s words didn’t seem to rattle Flora, though. The 24-year-old tells Yahoo Beauty, “I was not that bothered by the tweet or any of the replies to it. I even responded to some of them in order to remind them that there is a human being, living their life, behind that photo.”
A day later, in a post to his official Facebook page on Tuesday, Yiannopoulos wrote, “Share and like for free birth control…” and attached his video, which splices together images of women — most of them on the curvier side — wearing T-shirts bearing phrases such as “Love Trumps Hate” (that was Flora’s shirt) and “The Struggle Is Real.” An overlay on the video reads, “These women want free birth control.” The video had garnered 1.2 million views at the time of this story’s publication.
As Clarke and Yiannopoulos likely intended, both posts invited ruthless ridicule. Fans of Yiannopoulos — who calls himself “the supervillain of the Internet,” was permanently banned from Twitter for harassing actress Leslie Jones and has gone on record calling feminism “cancer” — were particularly brutal. The 33-year-old’s fans said such awful things as, “They don’t need birth control, because no self respecting man would have sex with one of those Cows. Besides, beastiality is against the law,” and the blatant, “You already have free birth control — it’s your face and body.”
Again, Flora summoned her strength and confidence and then took the high road, telling Yahoo Beauty: “I was initially upset. I cried for a solid 30 seconds but quickly got over it. I was mostly upset, not just for me, but for the other women in the video. I hope they haven’t seen it, and if they have, that they are taking it in stride, like me.”
It should be noted that Yiannopoulos takes pride in being a social media troll, having told Mediaite, “I will continue to be offensive as possible” after his Twitter ban. And in case there’s any discrepancy over whether Yiannopoulos’s video was meant to shame these women for their weight, he has also stated, “100 percent of fat people are f***ing gross.” So there you have it.
After watching the Breitbart editor’s video, one brave Facebooker — a man, to boot — commented: “How delightful of you to use your celebrity status to body shame random strange women whom you find unattractive because you don’t like their politics. It is neither funny or clever. It’s sad that you feel the need to succumb to the self hating gay man who hurls bitchy comments to women stereotype. You’re a pathetic little man, Milo. Just like your ‘daddy.'” (Yiannopoulos refers to President Trump as “Daddy.”)
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Twitter users clapped back at Sheriff Clarke, too. One user reacted to the post by commenting, “SheriffClarke Hey, maybe focus less on being a misogynistic a**hat and more on, you know, NOT KILLING YOUR INMATES,” and included a link to a Huffington Post story that reported on an inmate who died of thirst in a jail run by Clarke. Another called the sheriff out by tweeting, “Politics aside, that’s someone’s daughter. Name calling is not brave, manly or courageous. It’s bullying, and it’s wrong.”
The most resilient of all, though, turns out to be Flora herself. Far from being devastated by the attention she’s received, she has a healthy point of view on the whole incident — though she admits to being overwhelmed. “I had no clue when I put on that shirt Saturday morning that by that afternoon a photo of me would be used in such a way, but I’ve decided not to stoop to their level,” Flora says, adding that her objective is “to only combat them with kindness and remind them that though they may disagree with my views and opinions, I am still a human being.”
And if she had to do it all over again, she’d proudly wear her “Love Trumps Hate” shirt to the Women’s March on Washington all over again. “Even though the outcome of my attendance has been less than positive,” she admits, “it was such a moving and beautiful experience that I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
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