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[post_date] => 2021-06-30 22:44:26
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[post_content] => Living in Berlin, where the obsession with dieting and the pursuit of a perfect body type don't exist, led to a shift in thinking.
Bikini bodies and “hot girl summers” have been hot topics across social media for the past month or so. Legacy media platforms have been publishing tips for how to lose the weight gained during the sedentary pandemic months, while exercise apps are marketing big discounts to incentivize us to lose weight. I find all this a bit troubling.
Like many other women who grew up in the 1990s, I was brainwashed by an industry that equated healthy with thin—and not today’s thin, but anorexic thin. These were the days of “heroin chic,” of Kate Moss wearing her Calvins below the hip to reveal pubic bones that protruded over her belt loops. My coming-of-age online was at the height of the “pro-ana” madness of the early aughts, and I succumbed to my own disordered habits in college, counting calories in the hope of reaching some absurd “goal weight.”
In the years that followed, my weight fluctuated with moves abroad, job changes, and shifts in eating habits and exercise. In Morocco I was slim, thanks to a vegetable-heavy diet and the fact that I had to walk everywhere. In Boston I joined a gym that I loved and discovered muscles I didn’t know I had. My mind grew healthier, but the culture around me didn’t. The message that there was an ideal body was clear. And though that body changed over time—the heroin chic aesthetic eventually giving way to the slender curves of Gwyneth Paltrow and later the robust curviness, and booty, of Beyoncé—the common denominator was that the ideal body was unattainable.
When I moved to Berlin in my early 30s, my thinking shifted dramatically. Berliners surely have their own ideas of what the perfect body looks like, but the pervasive diet and exercise culture that permeates US society simply doesn’t exist here; nor does the idea that there’s a single, ideal body shape. Going to the sauna, where all genders, ages, and body types mingle—either wrapped in towels or nude—allowed me a glimpse at a much wider range of bodies than I’d ever had the opportunity to see before. And seeing that people here were comfortable with their bodies changed my relationship to my own.
But US culture is pretty inescapable no matter where you are in the world, and for those of us working from home, online at all hours, the pandemic made it even more pervasive. As COVID-19 restrictions began to ease in the US, the talk of “hot girl summer” and the ideal bikini body penetrated my brain’s defenses. Despite all of the progress I’d made over the past decade in how I viewed and cared for my own body, I became increasingly preoccupied with my weight gain.
This is where it’s important to mention the unique circumstances under which I spent most of the pandemic. In 2017, I was diagnosed with a type of chronic leukemia for which the treatment plan is, at first, to “watch and wait.” To those who have experienced acute cancers, this may sound odd, but the logic is that the treatment is often harder on one’s body than the disease, and so it makes sense to wait until treatment becomes utterly necessary.
For me, that moment came just a month before the pandemic. Then, as I began to work with my doctor to make plans for treatment, everything was put on hold for a few months, and I was told to stay at home.
When summer arrived Germany’s COVID-19 case numbers were low, so we began my treatment. By autumn my health was improving, but the virus was spreading rapidly and the government rolled out strict lockdown measures. Throughout our winter isolation, my body was healing, but my mental health was suffering. To sublimate, I turned to my favorite comfort foods (cheese, baguettes, pizza, and wine among them); and within a few weeks, I gained about 15 pounds. At first it didn’t bother me, but as summer hit with a vengeance and the diet-industrial-complex began its ad campaigns, it (no pun intended) began to weigh on me. I stopped weighing myself years ago and I don’t own a scale, so I judge my body based on how my size eight jeans fit; much to my dismay, they didn’t...at all.
And this is where it was imperative to put to task all of the tools I’d gained over the years, to remind myself that my body had not only survived a once-in-a-lifetime (I hope) pandemic, but had fought off cancer and won. Those extra pounds not only sustained me during a hard winter, but the cheese and wine and chocolate that put them there helped me at the end of long, stressful days stuck at home.
At first it wasn’t easy...but as the rainy spring finally turned to hot vaxxed summer and I began spending more time outdoors—and became more physically active—my mindset began to change. One afternoon shortly after lockdown ended in early June, I met some friends in a park. It was a bright, hot day and I put aside any thoughts of my thighs as I slipped on a favorite pair of short shorts. Later that evening we danced. Our winter-pale thighs jiggled—and not once did I think about mine or compare them to anyone else’s.
Since the weather warmed, I’ve lost about half the weight without even trying, simply by spending as much time as possible outside and walking and cycling as much as I can. But I have decided that I don’t care anymore. I will go loudly and proudly into my vaxxed girl summer wearing whatever I feel like, not giving a second thought to whether my body fits the advertising industry’s definition of a “bikini body.” And I will be encouraging my friends to do the same.
[post_title] => How I got over the anxiety of my pandemic weight gain and even had fun
[post_excerpt] => Like many other women who grew up in the 1990s, I was brainwashed by an industry that equated healthy with thin—and not today’s thin, but anorexic thin.
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[post_modified] => 2026-08-06 20:41:15
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Nancy Mitford[/caption]
Linda abandons her first husband: that is Diana, who left her own husband to marry Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of Britain’s tiny smudge of fascists. She falls in love with a communist: Jessica. Then a Frenchman: Nancy. She is superficially kind: Deborah.
Linda is that mercurial thing: charming. Charm is the ability to seduce people against their better instincts. She is a feather in the wind. Such people do not take responsibility. They do not have to. The Pursuit of Love is essentially redemptive: for the Mitfords and for the aristocracy. It is the founding document of the Mitford cult—without it, there would be no cult—and it is self-serving. They only pursued love, after all—who doesn’t? In response, I can only purse my lips and say: Nazis?
The truth of their fascism—Diana was Mosley’s lover and helpmeet and Unity stalked and worshipped Hitler—is more repulsive than mere viewers of The Pursuit of Love can know. There is, for instance, no scene in the novel or TV adaptation in which Unity, living in Germany, boasts that her home is a flat belonging to Jews. Which Jews, and where are they now? (It would have made a better novel than Linda shtupping a boring Communist, but Nancy was writing absolution, and the family appreciated it. On reading it, Lord Redesdale wept with happiness.)
There are many examples. “Everyone should know I am a Jew hater,” wrote Unity to the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, in case mere speech was not loud enough. As late as the 1980s, Diana was blaming global Jewry for the Holocaust. If they had stepped in and saved German Jews from the consequences of their own evil—by resettling them, she suggests—it might not have happened. Consider the 1938 Evian Conference, at which the assembled representatives of 32 countries expressed their regrets at being unable to provide refuge for the Jews of Germany and Austria. Apparently she missed it.
There is a tendency to present the Mitfords as Nancy did: as eccentric and therefore unthreatening aristocrats whose attachment to murderous tyranny in life was no more significant than their clothing, their manners, or their speech. They were young and they succumbed to the jackboot: that is, the line. (Unlucky, that’s all. Poor Lady Redesdale.) It is convenient—it defends the wider aristocracy from accusations of racism, of hating democracy—and it is unjust. That Unity failed to kill herself when war broke out—she lived for nine years with a bullet in her skull—does not forgive the bullets she wished on others, if they were Jews. She was once found in the garden of a friend, practising shooting for the day she could legally kill Jews. (She was a terrible shot. When she shot herself, she missed.) In England, she is only remembered as a bit odd.
[caption id="attachment_2771" align="aligncenter" width="677"]
The Mitford Family in 1928.[/caption]
I think that, in retrospect, their vernacular absolved them. It makes them sound unserious; gossip columnists near tyrants, and amateurs at that. For this I blame Noël Coward and Enid Blyton. We are so used to hearing the cadence and idioms of English as it was spoken in the light comedies and children’s stories of the 1930s, that it is easy to laugh at Diana’s defence of 
Diana Mitford, later Lady Mosley.[/caption]
Diana does not write about her physical passion for Oswald Mosley, but it is made obvious by what she gave up for it. She left a rich, loving husband—Bryan Guinness— to be Mosley’s mistress, only marrying him after his wife died (of peritonitis or heartbreak, depending on who is telling). Diana not only ruined her reputation for Oswald; she was also interned for three years as a fascist sympathizer during the Second World War. She could never admit to need (six siblings and stubbornness prohibit it) and was never short of words—she posed quite successfully as a pseudo-intellectual, mostly on the basis of possessing books—but on her passion for Mosley she only said: “He was completely sure of himself and of his ideas.” Conviction was not something her father, Lord Redesdale, who raged and squandered his fortune, ever had.
Redesdale was self-hating. His older brother Clement was killed in the First World War, and he was the remnants: a disappointing younger brother in competition with a ghost. In response he destroyed the great fortune that shamed him, which is now a few cottages, a pub, and a snack bar. (He was also likely a manic depressive. But if aristocrats had family therapy the history of Great Britain would be a different tale.) So that was that: Diana settled into Mosley’s iron fist like a pretty bird. She called him “The Leader"; by the end she was almost the only follower. Having read almost everything about Diana, I wonder if her fascism was both convenient and retrospective. Because the best and worst thing I can say about Diana Mosley is that she isn’t a convincing fascist. She was trivial and flinty; she was skin deep. She said in old age, “I don’t mind in the least what people’s politics are.”
Her family say she never changed her views: Were these, then, her views? I believe it because she was no intellectual—we are back to Hitler’s dietary imperatives and beautiful hands—and, after she was imprisoned with Mosley during the war for national security, how could she perform a retreat, admit a wrong? Diana destroyed herself for lust, and so trapped herself. It is a fair fate for someone so visual.
Unity (middle name Valkyrie), who was conceived in a small town in northern Ontario called Swastika—which still exists—is more horrifying. She went to Munich in 1932 to stalk Hitler. She hung round at Nazi party offices and lurked in his favourite restaurant—the Osteria Bavaria—with the confidence of the British aristocrat with golden hair. He considered her a lucky charm—she was related to Winston Churchill by marriage—but it consumed her. You know how stupid some people sound on Twitter? Unity wrote like that on paper. “It was all so thrilling,” she writes of one encounter with Adolf, “I can still hardly believe it. When he went, he gave me a special salute all to myself.” She would stand on street corners to “waggle a flag” at him.
It was not abnormal for women to react to him like that. One 
Unity Mitford in 1938, wearing a swastika pin.[/caption]
One 
Afro-Surinamese ceremony honoring Sylvana Simons (center) on March 31.[/caption]
A still from the film shows Bosniaks taking refuge at the UN Dutch peacekeeper base in Srebrenica.[/caption]
In 1993, at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Elie Wiesel made an 
During the decade prior to the 2011 uprising, Egypt saw a blogging boom, with people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds writing outspoken commentary about social and political issues, even though they ran the risk of arrest and imprisonment for criticizing the state. The internet provided space for discussions that had previously been restricted to private gatherings; it also enabled cross-national dialogue throughout the region, between bloggers who shared a common language. Public protests weren’t unheard of—in fact, as those I interviewed for the book argued, they had been building up slowly over time—but they were sporadic and lacked mass support.
While some bloggers and social media users chose to publish under their own names, others were justifiably concerned for their safety. And so, the creators of “We Are All Khaled Saeed” chose to manage the Facebook page using pseudonyms.
Facebook, however, has always had a policy that forbids the use of “fake names,” predicated on the misguided belief that people behave with more civility when using their “real” identity. Mark Zuckerberg famously claimed that having more than one identity represents a lack of integrity, thus demonstrating a profound lack of imagination and considerable ignorance. Not only had Zuckerberg never considered why a person of integrity who lived in an oppressive authoritarian state might fear revealing their identity, but he had clearly never explored the rich history of anonymous and pseudonymous publishing.
In November 2010, just before Egypt’s parliamentary elections and a planned anti-regime demonstration, Facebook, acting on a tip that its owners were using fake names, removed the “We are all Khaled Saeed” page.
At this point I had been writing and communicating for some time with Facebook staff about the problematic nature of the policy banning anonymous users. It was Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S., where I lived at the time, but a group of activists scrambled to contact Facebook to see if there was anything they could do. To their credit, the company offered a creative solution: If the Egyptian activists could find an administrator who was willing to use their real name, the page would be restored.
They did so, and the page went on to call for what became the January 25 revolution.
A few months later, I joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation and began to work full-time in advocacy, which gave my criticisms more weight and enabled me to communicate more directly with policymakers at various tech companies.
Three years later, while driving across the United States with my mother and writing a piece about social media and the Egyptian revolution, I turned on the hotel television one night and saw on the news that police in Ferguson, Missouri had shot an 18-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, sparking protests that drew a disproportionate militarized response.
The parallels between Egypt and the United States struck me even then, but only in 2016 did I become fully aware. That summer, a police officer in Minnesota pulled over 32-year-old Philando Castile—a Black man—at a traffic stop and, as he reached for his license and registration, fatally shot him five times at close range.
Castile’s partner, Diamond Reynolds, was in the passenger’s seat and had the presence of mind to whip out her phone in the immediate aftermath, streaming her exchange with the police officer on Facebook Live.
Almost immediately, Facebook removed the video. The company later restored it, citing a “technical glitch,” but the incident demonstrated the power that technology companies—accountable to no one but their shareholders and driven by profit motives—have over our expression.
The internet brought about a fundamental shift in the way we communicate and relate to one another, but its commercialization has laid bare the limits of existing systems of governance. In the years following these incidents, content moderation and the systems surrounding it became almost a singular obsession. I worked to document the experiences of social media users, collaborated with numerous individuals, and learned about the structural limitations to changing the system.
Over the years, my views on the relationship between free speech and tech have evolved. Once I believed that companies should play no role in governing our speech, but later I shifted to pragmatism, seeking ways to mitigate the harm of their decisions and enforce limits on their power.
But while the parameters of the problem and its potential solutions grew clearer, so did my thesis: Content moderation— specifically, the uneven enforcement of already-inconsistent policies—disproportionately impacts marginalized communities and exacerbates existing structural power balances. Offline repression is, as it turns out, replicated online.
The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency brought the issue of content moderation to the fore; suddenly, the terms of the debate shifted. Conservatives in the United States claimed they were unjustly singled out by Big Tech and the media amplified those claims—much to my chagrin, since they were not borne out by data. At the same time, the rise of right-wing extremism, disinformation, and harassment—such as the spread of the QAnon conspiracy and wildly inaccurate information about vaccines—on social media led me to doubt some of my earlier conclusions about the role Big Tech should play in governing speech.
That’s when I knew that it was time to write about content moderation’s less-debated harms and to document them in a book.
Setting out to write about a subject I know so intimately (and have even experienced firsthand), I thought I knew what I would say. But the process turned out to be a learning experience that caused me to rethink some of my own assumptions about the right way forward.
One of the final interviews I conducted for the book was with Dave Willner, one of the early policy architects at Facebook. Sitting at a café in San Francisco just a few months before the pandemic hit, he told me: “Social media empowers previously marginal people, and some of those previously marginal people are trans teenagers and some are neo-Nazis. The empowerment sense is the same, and some of it we think is good and some of it we think is not good. The coming together of people with rare problems or views is agnostic.”
That framing guided me in the final months of writing. My instinct, based on those early experiences with social media as a democratizing force, has always been to think about the unintended consequences of any policy for the world’s most vulnerable users, and it is that lens that guides my passion for protecting free expression. But I also see now that it is imperative never to forget a crucial fact—that the very same tools which have empowered historically marginalized communities can also enable their oppressors.
[post_title] => Between Nazis and democracy activists: Social media and the free speech dilemma
[post_excerpt] => The content moderation policies employed by social media platforms disproportionately affect marginalized communities and exacerbate power imbalances. Offline repression is replicated online.
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[post_modified] => 2026-08-06 22:43:16
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A fire broke out in January at one of the barracks at the Napier facility.[/caption]
