She writes so well about the ways men humiliate women
Suzanne Moore is disgusted at the violation of Elena Ferrante’s privacy by a loathsome man and the NYRB.
It does not matter who she really is. She is not accountable to us in any way. Oh, but apparently she must be treated like a fraud or a criminal or dodgy celeb and stripped of her privacy …
An appalling, pompous private investigator claims to have found her through examining the financial and real estate records of a translator who lives in Rome. This literary doxxing by this self-appointed arbiter of “truth” is a nasty violation. Claudio Gatti has no right to unmask this author. His excuse is that because Ferrante had said she may “lie on occasion”, she has relinquished the right to disappear behind her books. He goes as far as to suggest that this woman’s husband writes her books. Who is this man with no grasp of literature, imagination or respect for privacy who says politicians should not lie and therefore he can do this to a bestselling author? He is just an idiotic bin rummager. And what is the New York Review of Books doing publishing this detritus?
What indeed? What were they thinking?
And why is it that men like Gatti (and like Trump) are so incapable of noticing how rapey it is to abuse women in this way?
Those who love Ferrante’s work are appalled, partly of course because she writes so well about the ways in which men humiliate women. “Male power, whether violently or delicately imposed, is still bent on subordinating us.” Indeed.
That. Exactly that. It’s infuriating.
Maybe they do notice. Maybe they just don’t care. After all, they’re only women.
Maybe they do notice and that’s why they do it.
Women aren’t going to stay subordinated all by themselves, y’know. Somebody’s gotta do the work.
And now we have a motive. It would hardly be the first time this ‘justification’ was applied to a doxxing. Does anyone – anyone at all – think that this won’t lead to this woman having to deal with mountains of abuse, especially given the text I quoted above?
Talk about poking an elephant’s arse with a stick and pretending not to know what would happen.
‘Who is this man with no grasp of literature, imagination or respect for privacy…?’
He’s what passes for a journalist in the post-Murdoch world.