First I read this (in the U.K. Guardian):

"It was July 2014, Nashville Tennessee. I was walking into a gas station for a bottle of water when the man behind me stepped up to open the door for me."

Then, sure enough, the other shoe dropped:

"With that act of kindness, something inside me snapped and I flew into a blind rage. I began screaming at him at the top of my lungs."

This is apparently what feminists do when some well-meaning guy dares to perform an act of old-fashioned chivalry. They never simply smile and say, "Thank you."

But our author, Stacie Huckeba, is no ordinary feminist. She launched her screamathon, she says, not because the gesture was implying she wasn't able to open her own door, but because she assumed he was engaging in fat-shaming.

Fat-shaming?, you may ask? How is that fat-shaming? But you don't occupy the complicated head-space of Stacie Huckeba:

"Two years before this, in July 2012, I weighed 365lb, which roughly translates into 26 stone. I was enormous, and had been my entire life. I grew up an obese kid, was an obese teenager, an obese young adult, and by my mid-40s I had ballooned into a hugely obese adult.

"But that summer I started a massive journey to lose 220lb, or almost 16 stone, over the course of four and a half years. As I sit here today, I’m literally a third of the body mass I used to be. I am an average-sized woman who wears a size medium pretty much across the board….

"I had been disregarded, overlooked and ignored because of my size for so long that I didn’t even realise it until people started being nice to me – until, in other words, I was “normal sized”. No one had ever done those things for me before.

"He opened that door for me because I wasn’t physically offensive to him, and I knew. And it was in that moment that I realised how terrible we are as a society to people, based solely on their appearance. This realisation broke me. It broke me in a way that I’ve never been broken before. He certainly didn’t deserve my outburst, but in that moment I couldn’t help myself. The idea that the size of my trousers had had anything to do with simple politeness was heartbreaking to me."

 

 

Hmm, let's unpack this: People are polite only to those they deem sufficiently good-looking. Really? That's not what my my mother taught me.

But just as to a hammer everything is a nail, to a feminist everything is an occasion for grievance-mongering.