Margaret Cho: You Criticize a Woman’s Body, You Murder Us All Inside

Jan 13, 2012

On Wednesday, Korean-American comedian Margaret Cho went to her blog to explain why she "blew a fucking gasket" on Twitter.

Shortly after posting images of her new butt tattoo [NSFW] on Twitter she received two negative comments that she just wasn’t going to take silently.

"I screamed out loud and tracked the perps down and blocked them, but not before really ramming it to them in the strongest language I could use," Cho explained.

Cho wrote an intimate letter to her fans after one of them took to her Facebook page to say Cho had over reacted, that she was too harsh. Cho acknowledges having been angry but goes on to explain it’s because she’s protecting herself after having suffered years of emotional and physical abuse. An excerpt below:

If you were raised lovingly and told you were perfect and beautiful and loved and the best at all things, I am just jealous. You had it much better, and so you really should spread that love around as opposed to judging those like me who never had that, never knew what it was like and never could even imagine it. I could learn from you instead of feeling judged by you. Give the less loved and less cared for and less treasured a chance. If I had that opportunity, then my language and attitude might not be so offensive. If I had been told once when I was a little girl that I was pretty (other than when I was being sexually molested – that doesn’t count) it might have made me nicer. It just didn’t happen. So I had to make do and make up for it myself. And that made me a bit on the edgy side. It made me a bit of a bitch.

When someone says something negative about my face or body I will always and forever just completely lose my shit, because I have so much hatred in me, a violence that lies just beneath the surface of my delightfully illustrated skin. Being called ugly and fat and disgusting to look at from the time I could barely understand what the words meant has scarred me so deep inside that I have learned to hunt, stalk, claim, own and defend my own loveliness and my image of myself as stunningly gorgeous with a ruthlessness and a defensiveness that I fear for anyone who casually or jokingly questions it, as my anger and rage combined with my intense and fearsome command of words create insults meant to maim, kill and destroy.

Cho was in her mid twenties when the ABC sitcom "All American Girl" premiered. It was the second American television show centered around a lead character of Asian descent but after just one season the show was cancelled with Cho being very open about what she physically had to go through before the pilot episode could be shot. (Side note: Cho’s show launched with criticism from Korean-American leaders.)

ABC execs told Cho she was too fat and that her face was too round for television, Cho has explained in the DVD series of the show and in her standup.

Cho lost 30 pounds in two weeks so that ABC execs would happy and allow her to start shooting the first episode of the show. She has permanent kidney failure because of that experience.

So when Cho says she will "always and forever just completely lose" her shit if someone criticizes her appearance there’s a long history there of her finally being strong enough to speak up and challenge her attackers.

And rightfully so.