There’s a garden outside my window, and it’s had a
weird summer. The cosmos has grown into great
hulking brutes of foliage, the dahlias long spindly stems with a few leaves,
the begonias tiny hirsute curls close to the ground. The only sign of colour, the brilliantly pink
phlox, usually part of the chorus, now the soloist.
Whatever balance is needed to do their job, the
plants didn’t get it this year. If you’re
a gardener, you may understand what’s happened, but I find it extraordinary. I’ve watched the Butler incessantly water,
feed and weed these ingrates, so what more could they want? Their picture on a ten pound note?
Ah yes, that’s where I’m going this week. You see, I really can’t grasp why anyone would
bust a gasket over a woman’s picture on the ten pound note. Whose quality of life is worsened by Jane
Austen’s face giving them a fleeting glance as she’s pulled from a wallet and
handed over the counter? Can you imagine
women getting their knickers in a twist every time a man’s face appeared on a
banknote?
No. Women
don’t often have the luxury of behaving like trolls, although admittedly,
trolldom isn’t exclusively male. Not
perhaps because we’re a less aggressive gender but because we’re used to not
being top dog. Society has long been
structured to keep women from getting what they need to bloom on their own. Like the garden in front of me, we have the
periodic pink phlox, the anonymously published Jane Austen, the male pen name
producing Middlemarch so that the
myth of the lesser gender prevails. And
when some woman has the audacity to say, let’s honour our pink phlox, all hell
breaks loose.
I could turn to gender theories and sociological
essays and psychological explanations for trolls getting stuck in early
developmental stages, which would give me an intellectual understanding for
what’s happened the last few weeks. In
its bare bone analysis though, somewhere along the way, someone hasn’t been
taught to share. Or learned that it’s
wonderful watching someone else open their birthday presents. Or if my face is on the ten pound note, it
doesn’t mean your face isn’t worth looking at.
I don’t confine that lack of learning to trolls. Our male politicians don’t blush at the sexist
remarks they make to subdue their female counterparts. Our sportscasters openly call women’s games
boring. Our children are raised on Legos
for boys, princess slippers for girls.
Male leisure activities are a sublimation of natural aggression waiting
in the wings to keep the species alive.
Female leisure activities are well, stupid.
The practical part of my brain imagines a mother
overseeing a play date between pre-schoolers.
Her child doesn’t want to share, doesn’t want to play the other child’s
game, and if things get too equal, may even give the kid a swat. The mother intervenes, tells her child to
play nice. Yet every day, that same
woman walks through a world that treats her the way she has taught her own
child not to behave. Somehow, that
immature egocentricity survives preschool and is directed towards women, people
of colour, the disabled, the LGBTQ community.
That’s where my confusion comes in. I don’t understand why that behaviour isn’t immediately
seen as wrong. Why do advertisers have
to be pressured into withdrawing their money from social media sites before
rape jokes and bullying are dealt with?
How can a thirteen year old sexual abuse victim be considered a
predator? Who in their right mind thinks
it’s okay to drive the Racist Van through British streets?
I understand that some people are so badly
damaged, they’ll grow up to become trolls.
What I don’t understand is why the supposed non-trolls sometimes don’t
act any differently. What I really don’t
understand is why, when the supposed non-trolls don’t act any
differently, they aren’t carted offstage to where those of us who know how to
share, won’t be swatted by them anymore.
If you’ve got answers for me, I’d love to hear
them.
