Why so sensitive?
We are bombarded by hurt feelings and instant rage, a byproduct of a culture obsessed with self
It seems that, as a society, we are losing our ability to engage in debate, slough off the insignificant and handle disappointment, argues Shelley Fralic.
Areader is unhappy with me. This, in and of itself, is nothing new. I’ve been doing this columnist thing for a few decades now, and in that time have been routinely hammered for offering opinions that might differ from those of the people reading them.
Once, when I suggested that Paul McCartney should consider retiring his vocal cords and bask in the glow of his considerable musical legacy, given his singing voice isn’t what it once was, I received hundreds of irate emails from readers, who called me, among other things “a fat ugly cow” who doesn’t deserve to draw breath on the same planet as their beloved Beatle.
Over the years, I have received death threats, been told I’m an illiterate nincompoop whose work is not fit for human consumption and, oh yes, a shameful discredit to my profession who should have been aborted before birth. I have opened so many emails screaming unprintable profanities at me that my eyeballs should be blistered. But I’m OK with it. Not only is reader indignation an occupational hazard for a newspaper columnist, for which one quickly develops a thick skin, but it’s mostly a welcome one. Feedback — whether it’s the complimentary phone call or scribbled letter of yesteryear, or the modern- day instant text missive full of misspellings and f- bombs — is the columnist’s most immediate and, arguably, most accurate form of gauging interest. If your opinion strikes a nerve, for better or for worse, it’s all good news. At least someone is reading it.
So when a woman chided me this week for using the term spinster ( I referenced a tropical cockroach as being “the size of the average spinster’s brooch”), I wasn’t surprised.
“Hey there,” she wrote. “What era are you living in? Spinster? ... Welcome to Jane Austen land! Give me a break. And what cliché do you use to define yourself? Can’t believe a female who grew up in the time you are talking about would use those terms.”
I replied that I rather like the word spinster, and that I used it intentionally for the visual it evoked, that of a great aunt whose love of costume jewelry included giant gold scarabs pinned to a scarf.
“Yes,” the reader sniffed back. “Evocative of another time of condescension and discrimination. Possibly also your intention.”
To which I could only muse: For goodness sakes, get over yourself. Not everything is a slight against your personal credo, not every phrase is an insidious arrow in the quiver of feminist indignation.
And not everyone has to agree. With me. Or anyone else. And, by the way, when did we all become so sensitive?
These days, we are bombarded with a daily lineup of hurt feelings and instant rage against the machine, a mind- numbing and astonishing byproduct of a culture obsessed with self. Everything upsets us. A federal minister tells a high school student that she’s a great cook and will “make a wonderful wife for somebody” and the Twittersphere blows up, calling the remark “disrespectful” and indicative of a Tory conspiracy encouraging “young women to get married as part of their economic plan.”
A child in a schoolyard is picked last for the hopscotch team, or is told by a teacher that he needs to stop talking in class, or is teased by a schoolmate for wearing the wrong brand of hoodie and what once used to be a normal day at school — the kind of everyday exchange our grandparents would say helped build character — becomes an international incident: parents are outraged, psychologists are summoned, educators are muted, classmates are instantly labelled as bullies and no one, it seems, is able to take a step back and say, hey, life is full of people and things you won’t like and won’t agree with and might even hurt your feelings.
Have we lost the ability to make the distinction between a bully and a tease? Are we no longer able to handle disappointment and criticism, or slough off the insignificant, or fight our own battles, or engage in debate instead of vitriol when someone does or says something we don’t agree with? Seems we’re not. It doesn’t help that social media has turned us, anthropologically at least, into a generation of online whiners and bullies who, when we’re not whimpering from the sting of backlash, are giving as good as we get.
We think nothing of dispatching hate mail, of calling out anyone who isn’t on our bandwagon, of pointing out the mistakes of others faster than we admit our own.
It may have something to do with the technological addiction to document our every move, and mood, bolstering our superficial self- importance with every keystroke and, in turn, eroding our innate ability to go with the flow, turn the other cheek, live and let live and all those other old saws that speak to civil harmony.
We have, increasingly, become a society of self- appointed, uninformed critics, a clutch of clueless narcissists.
Spinster is a word. A good one. I might even use it again.