Not My Battle (In the Gothamist)

I am naïve sometimes. Each time I guilelessly believe something only to be jolted with the truth, I feel like a simple-minded child.  Here’s my latest experience:

This morning I read a short piece in the Gothamist about Rabbis plastering the Williamsburg streets with posters telling women to dress modestly. Although the piece was a mere three paragraphs short and featured a single quote by Baruch Herzfeld who said, “These men think they are doing God’s work, but they are fanatics — everyone in Williamsburg hates them,” it managed to garner 145 comments (at the time I’m writing this), with a fair share poking fun of Hasidim. Nothing unexpected (and some comments were actually hilarious). Nothing unexpected, either, that half the people who wrote seemed to have no clue about the Orthodox Jewish or Hasidic construct.

Anyhow, I perused the thread, promising myself that I would not join the discussion. “The battle is not yours to fight” and all that.

Protesting Naipul's Sexist Statements

Nobel laureate, Sir V. S. Naipul, made news last week when he unabashedly opined that no female author was equal to him, and that female writers, collectively, wrote badly. “Women writers are different,” he claimed, because of their “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world.”

I envisioned, the moment I read this, indignation—palpable and manic like a hemmed in frog—bouncing off countless women’s skins. I saw these women pounding their keyboards, writing irascible comments on blogs, web sites, twitter, facebook, or anywhere else they could spew their outrage against the revolting statements made by this “abominable” man.

Indeed, nearly every online newspaper that covered this story was inundated with furious, passionate comments, mostly from women. To these women, it didn’t matter that they themselves weren’t writers; they felt personally insulted, regardless. And added to the pain of the insult itself was the anger that the criticism was unjustified. One only had to read the work of Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Deborah Eisenberg, Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood (to name just a smattering of modern day female fiction writers) to know how absurdly baseless Naipul’s remarks are.