Call me crazy, but a few weeks ago, as the summer of 2019 was winding down, I’d been thinking that it had its good points.

Yes, there were tragedies. Heat waves. Mass shootings. The snap, crackle, fizzle of the Mueller testimony. Another credible allegation of rape leveled at our president.

But there were also glimpses of hope in this trash fire of a time. Some day, historians may look back and say: Hey, at least they had Lizzo.

If you don’t know who Lizzo is, I’m sorry that you have yet to experience the pure joy of a gorgeous, unapologetically plus-size black woman twerking in a bodysuit while playing the flute. Go Google her. I’ll wait.

And I will remind you that when I was a teenager, white girls like me had Carnie Wilson. In music videos, the lone plus-size member of Wilson Phillips would be draped in an oversize blazer and hidden behind her bandmates, pianos, a boulder on the beach, a convenient passing truck, whatever the directors could plausibly or implausibly find to erase her affront of a body. Message: The way she looks is unacceptable, and if you look like she does, you’re unacceptable, too.

We got that. Kids today get Lizzo, leading a raucous crowd of concertgoers in declaring, “Hey, I’m glad you’re back with your bitch/I mean, who would wanna hide this?/I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever be your side chick.”

If I could go back in time, I would inject Lizzo straight into my 14-year-old veins. I would tell my teenage self that she would grow up and see a woman like this owning the stage and not hiding behind anything. I’d tell her that there would be a thing called social media, and on it she could see ads for plus-size swimsuits being worn by actual plus-size women, posing with thinner models like it was no big deal, like having thick thighs was no different from having red hair. I’d explain how she’d be able to load up her Instagram feed with athletes and models and singers and yoga instructors whose bodies all looked, to some degree, like her own and that all of this would help her walk through the world and feel O.K. and hope that things would get better for her daughters.

This I believed, a mere matter of weeks ago.

And then the trailer for the new “Top Gun” movie dropped.

At 57, Tom Cruise still fits into his circa-1986 leather jacket, still rides his motorcycle without a helmet and looks as if there’s just got to be a portrait of his face rotting in an attic somewhere, or as if he’s sold his soul to Xenu. Even if he wasn’t so eerily well preserved, even if he’d aged the way his co-stars Tom Skerritt and Val Kilmer have, he’d probably still be leading the franchise. Men are allowed to age, to wrinkle and gain weight and still make millions starring in tentpole summer films.

Mr. Kilmer, Mr. Skerritt and Mr. Cruise are all reprising their roles. But Kelly McGillis, who played the astrophysicist/Top Gun instructor/girlfriend Charlie Blackwood in the original, wasn’t asked back.

“I’m old and I’m fat and I look age-appropriate for what my age is, and that is not what that whole scene is about,” Ms. McGillis, 62, told “Entertainment Tonight” in a phone interview. “But,” she said, “I’d much rather feel absolutely secure in my skin and who and what I am at my age as opposed to placing a value on all that other stuff.”

I read her interview on Facebook, where someone had posted the story, and then, all innocence, I clicked on the comments.

Big mistake. Huge.

“It is a Top Gun sequel not Free Willy,” I read, and “highway to the Burger King” and “she looks like his mother not his girlfriend” and “It’s completely possible to be hot at 60 … sadly usually apathy wins.”

After my dip into the toxic comment pond, I knew where I’d gone wrong. I’d seen actual cellulite on an actual thigh on my own Facebook feed and assumed that because it had been presented as normal, everyone else was O.K. with it.

I’d forgotten how social media lets us live in political silos, walled-off echo chambers where our beliefs about politics and pop culture are reinforced instead of challenged. I can use my Twitter and Facebook and Instagram feeds to make a version of the world that’s 100 percent positivity, acceptance and love. But that world isn’t real.

I’m sorry that filmmakers missed their chance to give Tom Cruise’s Maverick an age-appropriate, normal-looking girlfriend. I’m sorry that President Trump brushed off another rape accusation with a sneering “she’s not my type” and much of the world just shrugged. I’m sorry that Weight Watchers is pushing its new food-tracking app at kids as young as 8, hoping a new generation of girls will swallow the idea that their bodies are wrong. I’m sorry I can’t invite every girl in the world into my silo and tell her that all will be well.

Thankfully, we have Lizzo, whose song “Truth Hurts” is currently No. 4 on the Billboard charts and who has more than three million followers on Instagram. Which means that she’s in a lot of people’s silos, telling girls that they don’t have to hide and they don’t have to settle, telling them, as she did on stage recently, “I want you to know that if you can love me, you can love your goddamn self.”

Jennifer Weiner (@jenniferweiner) is a contributing opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “Mrs. Everything.”

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