Housekeeping: Heavy Editing

Yesterday, as previously discussed, my pal Stef was hit pretty hard in a LeMons race. When one of her more faithful orbiters, a fellow named Bradley, decided to use the occasion as an opportunity to simultaneously suck up to me and take a weak shot at, of all things, my commitment to driver safety, I made him the intro subject of this week's Roundup post. The photo that I used was one of his Facebook profile photos, a professional shot of him and his wife from his wedding last year.

At this time, I thought this was more than fair. Not only was it the most flattering photo I could find of the two of them, I thought the gentle reminder that he was newly married might back him off Stef a bit and let him save some dignity before he got his heart broken and/or his ass kicked.

You, as they say on Upworthy, won't believe what happened next... and the implications of it are both troubling and widespread.

He and his friends went on a Twitter crusade complaining that I'd called his wife fat. You can read the original post, the text of which is unchanged, and see that I specifically did not call his wife fat. When I refer to him as Captain Ahab hunting the white whale, I was careful to note that I was the Moby-Dick in question. To Bradley, however, the simple public posting of a photo of him and his wife together was "offensive" and "hateful fat-shaming", making me "human garbage" for posting it. He repeatedly referred to it as a "fat" photo of his wife, as if I'd taken a long-lens shot of her sitting alone on a bench with a double scoop of ice cream in each hand.

I remind you that this was not the case. It was a photo of both of them, with him standing closer to the camera. It was also a professionally taken photo that he had used as his Facebook profile shot. In other words, this is the face he wants to show to the world. Typically, when people put a picture of themselves up in public, that's an indicator of how they want you to see them. I'm not on Facebook any more, but here are some of my profile shots from 2007-2013:

If, at any point, somebody had used one of these photos in an article they had written about me, would I have any reason to complain? I don't think so, even though I look pretty goofy in most of them.

This morning, I got an email from Bradley in which he stated that

But it is absolutely not acceptable to use this photograph.... if your lines "has his hands full" and "white whale" are in reference to what I think they are in reference to, then you sir, should go fuck yourself.

I'd like to say that I TOOK A RIDE ON THE LOLLERCOASTER but, in truth, it made me sad. I guess that all he sees when he looks a photo of his wife is... a fat woman. Listen, let's be honest here. She's not thin. Neither is he. For that matter, neither am I. Two years and eleven broken bones ago, I was 221 pounds and feeling pretty decent about myself. Right now I'm 242 and I've been as heavy as 260 in the past year. It's not a good feeling, to be fat. I'm sure there are people out there who take the Dove Real Beauty approach to it and say "I'M BEAUTIFUL AT ANY SIZE" but that sure as hell isn't true of me. I'm better-looking at 210 than I am at 260.

(This section edited at the request of the lady involved.)

The human, the decent thing for me to do at this point is to take the photo of which he's ashamed off my website. So I've done that. And I did it even though he was part of the crowd at the "LeMons Racer Lounge" that couldn't stop yucking it up about a car crash in which my son was nearly killed and my passenger was critically injured. That's the most hilarious joke they've ever heard. But to put somebody's Facebook profile photo up? TOO FUCKING FAR, PAL.

In short, Bradley's what they call a "Cry-Bully". It's totally fine for him to say anything he wants about me, up to and including a Twitter post in which he suggests that I molest my brother's children, but the minute I put his Facebook profile photo up on this "shitty site", he gets triggered and has a fit.

The real problem here is that the Internet in general, and the autojourno world in particular, is full of people who like to dish it out as hard as they can but who piss themselves when they think that they're under the microscope. Bradley has worked hard to create an image of himself as a "Porsche guru" and "racing expert" and all-around cool guy. The problem is that his wedding photo undermines that image. So he doesn't want it out there. The fake Bradley can't occupy the same space as the real Bradley, like matter and anti-matter.

I've always treated my critics a lot better than they've treated me. I do, however, reserve the right to change that at any moment. Since I started writing about cars, I've been the target of every kind of retribution you can imagine, from legal threats to people calling my employers to exhaustive "doxxing" to threats against my child. My response has always been to contact the people responsible and ask them to back off. But that's not to say that I'll always feel that way.

Do we have time for one more video? Yes we do.