The H word
Another man sighs wearily as he opens the laptop to explain why Elena Ferrante has no right to anonymity or privacy, this time in Prospect.
The hysterical reaction in some quarters to Ferrante’s so-called “doxxing” is producing more heat than light. Books are largely read by a culturally elite group, the same people who commission think pieces, invest their cultural capital with importance. Journalists writing about this phenomenon fuel it, and to be honest, as we condemn the article that caused this mess, we are also profiting from it.
The “hysterical” reaction. Wouldn’t you think men who write words as a profession could learn to stop calling women “hysterical”? Ok he’s calling the reaction “hysterical,” not Ferrante herself…but that’s on the literal level, and in fact he’s associating her with “hysteria” and that’s what readers will get from his use of the word. It’s a casual, deniable sexist slur, right at the beginning of his piece dismissing Ferrante’s stated wishes. I’m getting tired of men dismissing women’s stated wishes.
Ferrante has a right to privacy, as enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. There is no doubt that Claudio Gatti’s article was an intrusion, but other articles have strayed into similar territory. Ferrante, we now strongly suspect, is a public figure making millions from marketing an invented identity, and it is naive to think she would escape scrutiny.
That’s a really extraordinarily entitled thing to say. It’s a sublimated “you can grab her pussy.” Her books have sold well, and he calls that “making millions from marketing an invented identity.” She made whatever money she made from writing novels! How is it his business to claim she made it from “marketing an invented identity” and that that justifies trying to expose her identity without her consent?
Rob Sharp wrote this article for Prospect. Does that mean we all get to break down his door and camp out in his living room?
One of my many day jobs is privacy. I write about it, I try to understand it, I advise companies about it. So when I read things concerning privacy, certain things light up in neon. For example:
Yeah, thing is that’s not the be and end all of privacy. People also have the right to be left alone as enshrined in decent fucking human behaviour.
Then there’s:
Right, so the cat’s out of the bag so it’s totally OK to beat it with a cricket bat? You know what you could do? Not mention it. You could stop pretending that it’s a story and in the public interest and just not mention it.
This is one of the the biggest problems we have with this variety of privacy: our being complicit, tacitly or explicitly in cat-out-of-the-bag and smoke-without-fire stories. Don’t click. Don’t read. Send a message about this bullshit.
To paraphrase another recent misogynist: When I see an anonymous lady, I just grab her by her identity. I don’t even ask. You can do that when you’re a journalist, they’ll let you get away with it.
Oh, hell, I just caught that you’d already drawn that parallel in the second to the last paragraph. Shame on me for skipping ahead to post my reaction to the main quote.
Would it be OK to call a similar reaction by a man “prostatical”?
The number of readers who know a great deal about their authors–that is to say, beyond what can be gleaned from a dust-jacket–is incredibly small. This is largely true even of their favorites. The author isn’t the point of interest, the work is. An author who invites us to see inside their life is playing gracious host–and it behooves us as guests to not rummage through the medicine chest and check under the bed for dust-bunnies. Of course, in this case, he wasn’t even invited into the parlor; the creepy little fuck was peering through the windows and crawling under the floorboards.