Now I have never exactly been a household name - except in one small area of a vast sub-continent - but I've come in for my share of public crits. and reviews. I've been called a "Ball buster" and had that fact trumpeted from every kiosk and newsagency in the land. (actually I thought that was more funny than anything else, though). I've been called "Our newest Funny Lady" and been somewhat disappointed that my serious work wasn't given much of a plug; I've been reviewed as "One of our Finest Up and Coming Writers" when in fact I'd been well and truly up for far longer than I had been coming; and, in common with most writers, I guess, had what I considered to be my finest piece of prose dismissed as "Not on a par with her other pieces".
But it wasn't until I'd submitted to an Internet publication that I was ever exposed to the power of hate. I remember first reading the comments to an article I had written on Shakespeare. It was a purely tongue-in-cheek piece of whimsy in which I had speculated that the great bard may have had the odd nut or bolt loose. In was taken from a paper I had written and submitted to one of my lecturers who, although subscribing himself to the view that William should be canonised, had ruefully conceded that I had managed to provide proof for my theory however much it went against his particular grain. We'd had a glass of wine and a giggle over it and he had asked if he could pass it on at his next meeting of the Shakesperean Society just to put the cat in amongst the pigeons.Now that particular man is an erudite and learned scholar whose views and opinions I admire and whose criticism I have been known to regard as Holy Writ.
But the opinions which were expressed by the general public in response to a precis extract of this self-same paper knocked me for six. I was accused of being ignorant, a poor scholar, someone who had no knowledge of my subject, an inadequate writer....and all by members of the public whom I had never met. I was gobsmacked. I showed these comments to one of my thesis supervisors who laughed contemptuously and told me not to be so daft as to take it to heart. But I did.
Yet that was nothing compared to the personal abuse I copped when I wrote an article on feminism.
Having, as I have explained elsewhere, come rather late to feminist theory, I gobbled up every book, pamphlet, blog, paper and debate I could lay my hands on. I spent the two years following my discovery of this theory doing an intense kind of crash course during which I devoured perhaps more literature on the subject than the average person would read up on in a life-time. I revelled in the revelation that what I had thought of as my own deepest, darkest subversive thoughts were shared by millions of others. The questions and queries I had thought my own were also keeping others awake! What I had thought others would label as disloyalty, ignorance or revolutionary were commonalities of thought amongst people all over the world. What I saw as injustice, nonsense, unfairness and plain idiocy others saw in the same light.The points of view I had never shared with another living soul were common currency amongst people of differing nations and creeds. I felt as though I was being reborn.
After that preliminary two years I settled down a little and, though I continued to digest feminist literature at a prodigious rate, I now began to include criticism, debate and rebuttal of feminism and to explore the different branches as it was applied in fields such as sociology, psychology etc. where I found as much to argue with as to agree with.
By the time I had started submitting to this online zyne, about 5 years had gone by since I first discovered the ideology and, my studies being rooted in the seventeenth century, had realised how female dissatisfaction with the state of the world, while not having had any unifying labels until relatively modern times, had existed and been expressed within the world for centuries.
This came as a huge and thought provoking surprise to me. I had always assumed that women were complicit in the way they were treated. I thought it was only we more enlightened, modern women who saw the unfairness in a society which treated women as dependent children.
It took a while before I reasoned that that was solely because I had never heard any women's voices from "the olden days". The only thing I had to go on was what men said about the state of the world. Until The Brontes and Austen, all the poetry and essays and books and pamphlets I had ever read had been written by men. And the same applied, I further reasoned, for the majority of people. Until I started ferreting about and discovered those feisty, outspoken, cunning women whose words had languished at the back of museums and in library back rooms for centuries, I had had no idea of what my foremothers thought and felt. When that famous visitor to England in the Seventeenth century made the quote about England being a "paradise" for women and horses, I was not quite silly enough to take him at face value - but I hadn't realised how far removed from paradise women felt.
So, acting on the assumption, from the gross distortions and actual rubbish that people connected with the word "feminist" ( some of which I had absorbed myself before I really knew anything about the subject) that a lot of animosity was simply because some people didn't know enough about womens' movements, I decided to share my findings. Obviously I had not been alone in my ignorance and, assuming that those who had also a dearth of knowledge on the subject would be pleased to know that they had been misinformed, I submitted and published a short essay. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5414 )
I don't know that I actually envisaged vast hordes of people yelling Hosanna and saying "Thank you Cireena Simcox, you have put my mind at ease". But what I wasn't prepared for was the fact that the majority of people who spouted all the wildest and weirdest "knowledge" of feminism and, by extension, of women, didn't want to come within a hair's breadth of anything that would change their opinions. They actually revelled in their ignorance: not the in the real sense of the word which infers nothing but a lack of knowledge - but in the sense of not WANTING to gain further knowledge. I was shaken.
I have a friend who regularly tells me I am naive. I laugh like a drain at this because my life experience is extremely broad. But, reading the comments that thread attracted I realised that, for all the "broadness" of my knowledge of people, I really am naive in many ways.
Word limits in an article such as I wrote constrain, and I was also well aware of the fact that I was writing for a very diverse readership so, yes, the article was neither in-depth or erudite. I had hoped that a broad outline, a quick foray into the reasons (or so I, in my naivete assumed) feminism was misunderstood by many to-day, and a reassurances that no evil conspiracies or coven-like activities were taking place, might lay some peoples hackles back down and perhaps inspire those who had been misguided to find out a bit more for themselves. Any criticisms of my actual writing would have been well-deserved on many counts and I was well prepared to bite the bullet and suck 'em up.
But what nothing had prepared me for was the fact that not everybody seeks the truth. That there are people who adopt a belief, regardless of its veracity, and, in the face of proof to the contrary, will not only cling steadfastly to it, and defend it, but revile those who do not adopt the same stance.
I am not, I hope, being disingenuous here. In my time I have swallowed hook, line and sinker the odd urban legend, public opinion "eye-witness" accounts and even information from the friend of a friend. And I'm not some George Washington type who will stand up tall with a pink and shiny face and accept I am wrong without feeling like a complete pratt. But being wrong, while embarrassing, is nothing actually to be ashamed of, is it? Surely one would, ultimately, feel worse knowing one was full of deliberate bull-shit, than mumbling to ones steel toe-caps that "Woops. Aren't I the wanker? I honestly did think that. " And surely people who choose the bullshit option do find it bad for their digestion, for it seems that the more off-the-wall the vision of feminism is, the more strident, angry and vitriolic the comments are. The following, I thought, was rather a beauty: repeating my title "What is a Feminist?" this good ole boy stated:
"A political idiot.A sexist supremacist.A paranoid and self fulfilling victim.A dork.A fool.A danger to themselves, their children and all of society.The enemy of all good men, women and children around the world.So to put it bluntly, in my opinion you understand, a feminist is simply, a human disgrace.
Posted by Maximus, Tuesday, 13 February 2007 8:10:53 PM"
Just a tad over-stated, perhaps?
So for the very first time in my wide-ranging and peripatetic life I came face to face with a truly scary proposition: what if there are men around who truly, and honestly, just don't like women? Once again I'm not being disingenuous. In the course of that wide-ranging and peripatetic life I have been raped, attacked, beaten, sodomised and had cigarettes extinguished on my bare belly and vagina. I've been made to do unspeakable things and been abused, reviled and slapped around while doing them. But I always reasoned that the persons who did these things to me were very sick puppies: one had been brought up in a war zone which had done his head in. Another had been abandoned by his mother while another actually was in the Military and we all know what that does to people. I considered these men were aberrations;the one in a million who are the exception. And I reasoned that to a person who, like me, has lived on several different continents, gone to fifteen different schools, lived in some of the worlds trouble spots, travelled around quite a bit and, as a journalist, got into many weird situations, it was just not so exceptional that I had managed to meet quite a few of the world's weird people.
But, perusing the comments that article engendered proved a milestone for me and certainly chipped away at that Pollyanna-type glad, glad, gladness. I knew, on a detached level, that men had treated women shockingly through the ages. I figured it was social constructs, and outside influences and childhood traumas that were to blame. Even witch hunts I put down to mass hysteria and religious over-zealousness. I had never, seriously considered that anyone would wish an entire gender ill. That's a conspiracist's delusion...isn't it? I mean, we, as a gender, are not culpable, are we?
Yet for the first time, despite all my academic knowledge and learned experiences I have at last been forced to consider seriously a question I had never even thought about before. Is it possible that a misogynist is not simply a curmudgeonly bloke-with-a-heart-of-gold like Professor Higgins? Or are there really men out there who actually do hate, despise or loathe women - not because of their mothers, or wars or for any other reason than that we are, well....women? And how does one ever, definitively, find out?
But it wasn't until I'd submitted to an Internet publication that I was ever exposed to the power of hate. I remember first reading the comments to an article I had written on Shakespeare. It was a purely tongue-in-cheek piece of whimsy in which I had speculated that the great bard may have had the odd nut or bolt loose. In was taken from a paper I had written and submitted to one of my lecturers who, although subscribing himself to the view that William should be canonised, had ruefully conceded that I had managed to provide proof for my theory however much it went against his particular grain. We'd had a glass of wine and a giggle over it and he had asked if he could pass it on at his next meeting of the Shakesperean Society just to put the cat in amongst the pigeons.Now that particular man is an erudite and learned scholar whose views and opinions I admire and whose criticism I have been known to regard as Holy Writ.
But the opinions which were expressed by the general public in response to a precis extract of this self-same paper knocked me for six. I was accused of being ignorant, a poor scholar, someone who had no knowledge of my subject, an inadequate writer....and all by members of the public whom I had never met. I was gobsmacked. I showed these comments to one of my thesis supervisors who laughed contemptuously and told me not to be so daft as to take it to heart. But I did.
Yet that was nothing compared to the personal abuse I copped when I wrote an article on feminism.
Having, as I have explained elsewhere, come rather late to feminist theory, I gobbled up every book, pamphlet, blog, paper and debate I could lay my hands on. I spent the two years following my discovery of this theory doing an intense kind of crash course during which I devoured perhaps more literature on the subject than the average person would read up on in a life-time. I revelled in the revelation that what I had thought of as my own deepest, darkest subversive thoughts were shared by millions of others. The questions and queries I had thought my own were also keeping others awake! What I had thought others would label as disloyalty, ignorance or revolutionary were commonalities of thought amongst people all over the world. What I saw as injustice, nonsense, unfairness and plain idiocy others saw in the same light.The points of view I had never shared with another living soul were common currency amongst people of differing nations and creeds. I felt as though I was being reborn.
After that preliminary two years I settled down a little and, though I continued to digest feminist literature at a prodigious rate, I now began to include criticism, debate and rebuttal of feminism and to explore the different branches as it was applied in fields such as sociology, psychology etc. where I found as much to argue with as to agree with.
By the time I had started submitting to this online zyne, about 5 years had gone by since I first discovered the ideology and, my studies being rooted in the seventeenth century, had realised how female dissatisfaction with the state of the world, while not having had any unifying labels until relatively modern times, had existed and been expressed within the world for centuries.
This came as a huge and thought provoking surprise to me. I had always assumed that women were complicit in the way they were treated. I thought it was only we more enlightened, modern women who saw the unfairness in a society which treated women as dependent children.
It took a while before I reasoned that that was solely because I had never heard any women's voices from "the olden days". The only thing I had to go on was what men said about the state of the world. Until The Brontes and Austen, all the poetry and essays and books and pamphlets I had ever read had been written by men. And the same applied, I further reasoned, for the majority of people. Until I started ferreting about and discovered those feisty, outspoken, cunning women whose words had languished at the back of museums and in library back rooms for centuries, I had had no idea of what my foremothers thought and felt. When that famous visitor to England in the Seventeenth century made the quote about England being a "paradise" for women and horses, I was not quite silly enough to take him at face value - but I hadn't realised how far removed from paradise women felt.
So, acting on the assumption, from the gross distortions and actual rubbish that people connected with the word "feminist" ( some of which I had absorbed myself before I really knew anything about the subject) that a lot of animosity was simply because some people didn't know enough about womens' movements, I decided to share my findings. Obviously I had not been alone in my ignorance and, assuming that those who had also a dearth of knowledge on the subject would be pleased to know that they had been misinformed, I submitted and published a short essay. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5414 )
I don't know that I actually envisaged vast hordes of people yelling Hosanna and saying "Thank you Cireena Simcox, you have put my mind at ease". But what I wasn't prepared for was the fact that the majority of people who spouted all the wildest and weirdest "knowledge" of feminism and, by extension, of women, didn't want to come within a hair's breadth of anything that would change their opinions. They actually revelled in their ignorance: not the in the real sense of the word which infers nothing but a lack of knowledge - but in the sense of not WANTING to gain further knowledge. I was shaken.
I have a friend who regularly tells me I am naive. I laugh like a drain at this because my life experience is extremely broad. But, reading the comments that thread attracted I realised that, for all the "broadness" of my knowledge of people, I really am naive in many ways.
Word limits in an article such as I wrote constrain, and I was also well aware of the fact that I was writing for a very diverse readership so, yes, the article was neither in-depth or erudite. I had hoped that a broad outline, a quick foray into the reasons (or so I, in my naivete assumed) feminism was misunderstood by many to-day, and a reassurances that no evil conspiracies or coven-like activities were taking place, might lay some peoples hackles back down and perhaps inspire those who had been misguided to find out a bit more for themselves. Any criticisms of my actual writing would have been well-deserved on many counts and I was well prepared to bite the bullet and suck 'em up.
But what nothing had prepared me for was the fact that not everybody seeks the truth. That there are people who adopt a belief, regardless of its veracity, and, in the face of proof to the contrary, will not only cling steadfastly to it, and defend it, but revile those who do not adopt the same stance.
I am not, I hope, being disingenuous here. In my time I have swallowed hook, line and sinker the odd urban legend, public opinion "eye-witness" accounts and even information from the friend of a friend. And I'm not some George Washington type who will stand up tall with a pink and shiny face and accept I am wrong without feeling like a complete pratt. But being wrong, while embarrassing, is nothing actually to be ashamed of, is it? Surely one would, ultimately, feel worse knowing one was full of deliberate bull-shit, than mumbling to ones steel toe-caps that "Woops. Aren't I the wanker? I honestly did think that. " And surely people who choose the bullshit option do find it bad for their digestion, for it seems that the more off-the-wall the vision of feminism is, the more strident, angry and vitriolic the comments are. The following, I thought, was rather a beauty: repeating my title "What is a Feminist?" this good ole boy stated:
"A political idiot.A sexist supremacist.A paranoid and self fulfilling victim.A dork.A fool.A danger to themselves, their children and all of society.The enemy of all good men, women and children around the world.So to put it bluntly, in my opinion you understand, a feminist is simply, a human disgrace.
Posted by Maximus, Tuesday, 13 February 2007 8:10:53 PM"
Just a tad over-stated, perhaps?
So for the very first time in my wide-ranging and peripatetic life I came face to face with a truly scary proposition: what if there are men around who truly, and honestly, just don't like women? Once again I'm not being disingenuous. In the course of that wide-ranging and peripatetic life I have been raped, attacked, beaten, sodomised and had cigarettes extinguished on my bare belly and vagina. I've been made to do unspeakable things and been abused, reviled and slapped around while doing them. But I always reasoned that the persons who did these things to me were very sick puppies: one had been brought up in a war zone which had done his head in. Another had been abandoned by his mother while another actually was in the Military and we all know what that does to people. I considered these men were aberrations;the one in a million who are the exception. And I reasoned that to a person who, like me, has lived on several different continents, gone to fifteen different schools, lived in some of the worlds trouble spots, travelled around quite a bit and, as a journalist, got into many weird situations, it was just not so exceptional that I had managed to meet quite a few of the world's weird people.
But, perusing the comments that article engendered proved a milestone for me and certainly chipped away at that Pollyanna-type glad, glad, gladness. I knew, on a detached level, that men had treated women shockingly through the ages. I figured it was social constructs, and outside influences and childhood traumas that were to blame. Even witch hunts I put down to mass hysteria and religious over-zealousness. I had never, seriously considered that anyone would wish an entire gender ill. That's a conspiracist's delusion...isn't it? I mean, we, as a gender, are not culpable, are we?
Yet for the first time, despite all my academic knowledge and learned experiences I have at last been forced to consider seriously a question I had never even thought about before. Is it possible that a misogynist is not simply a curmudgeonly bloke-with-a-heart-of-gold like Professor Higgins? Or are there really men out there who actually do hate, despise or loathe women - not because of their mothers, or wars or for any other reason than that we are, well....women? And how does one ever, definitively, find out?
1 comment:
Wow, Cireena, what a beautifully, well thought out piece of writing this is. I felt totally absorbed in it and envy you for your use of language.
Like you, I have, not so long ago, come to the conclusion that "not everybody seeks the truth."
I once asked a close friend why she wasn't interested in finding out the truth (about some issue we were talking about), and she replied,
"I'm happy with parts of the truth. The parts that I find easy to accept."
Whether there are true misogynists- I don't know. At times I think so, but I have the habit of telling myself that I'm just being negative when I think I've met one.
Is this a form of denial?
I don't know!
You are a very well-read writer and will look out for your OLO articles in the future.
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