A man told Peta Emery to kill herself in the comments of a lifting video last week.
She found it funny.
“It makes me laugh because these men are clearly going out of their way to find something to be angry about,” she said.
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Emery is 4ft 8in. She is also a national-level powerlifter who can deadlift 155kg, which is roughly three times what she weighs.
The trolls do not seem to enjoy this.
The numbers that wind people up
She squats 137.5kg. Benches 82.5kg. Pulls 155kg off the floor.
“Pound-for-pound, I’m stronger than a lot of men,” she said, and the men online appear to have heard her.
She started in 2020 and was good almost immediately.
“I love competing, it’s so much fun and it turns out that I’m pretty good at it.”
Her body does not make it easy. “For someone so short, I have weird proportions. I have quite long femurs for a squat, which isn’t very useful, and I’m not very flexible.”
The deadlift is the one bright spot in her proportions.
“I don’t have to lift it up as far.”
The mansplaining problem
Men keep trying to coach her. Men who, on inspection, cannot lift what she lifts.
“I get quite a few comments from men trying to ‘mansplain’ my lifting to me,” she said.
“My favourite thing is when I go on to their page and I see that pound-for-pound they’re much weaker than me.”
The reactions split. Some men ignore the rest of her work, like the lifting, and support her.
Others fixate on the fact that she also runs an OnlyFans, and decide that cancels out four years of competing.
“I really spent four years becoming a national-level powerlifter to promote my OnlyFans,”
she said, of the accusation. “I can be a multi-dimensional human being. I have hobbies and interests outside of being an adult content creator.”
She is unbothered by the faceless accounts doing the shouting.
“You can’t lift yourself off the f**king sofa, let alone get yourself to the gym.”
Why being small made her strong
Emery, from the UK, has more than 460,000 Instagram followers under the handle @power_midget.
The height is part of the appeal and she knows it.
“I’ve always liked being shorter, it’s a conversation starter and everyone loves a short female.”
It also lit something. “I never wanted anyone to underestimate me because of my tiny size, so I always wanted to be strong.”
Women, she said, respond completely differently to the men.
“Women who follow and comment are generally just really impressed, because I think they have more of an appreciation of how hard it is as a woman to reach the kind of weights that I am doing.”
Why It Matters
This is the creator economy’s recurring tax.
A woman builds genuine expertise, then has it dismissed the moment a second income stream involves her body.
Emery’s mistake, in the eyes of the angry men, was being good at two things at once.
Plenty of female creators will recognise the pattern.
The OnlyFans-plus-anything-else combination keeps producing this exact friction, whether the something else is fitness, gaming or cooking.
The audience that arrives for one rarely lets you be the other.
Emery competes again in June and wants bigger numbers.
“Taking up space, being sturdy, fuelling our bodies, it’s really, really important.”
The men weaker than her will presumably keep offering tips.
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