The Avid Reader Bookshop in Brisbane was trolled by people, when the bookshop shared a Facebook post from Australian feminist writer Clementine Ford announcing she had been contracted to write a second book. It was to be an examination of toxic masculinity entitled ‘Boys Will Be Boys’.
The trolls went berserk, with one emphatically (in upper case! I will tone it down because I don’t tend to shout at people) calling it a ‘disgusting man hating book store that promotes misandrism’. You can tell by the invention of the new word misandrism (it should have been ‘misandry’)1, that the person was not particularly literate, which makes you wonder if they had ever visited a bookshop in the first place, let alone Avid Reader.
Given that women are generally paid less than men, tend to suffer a disproportionate amount of domestic violence, and suffer a disproportionate amount of sexual assault, I don’t really understand why some men seem to think that changing some of these things, or even discussing their causes is a threat to them. Having ‘discussed’ the cancerous nature of the Trump administration with numerous ‘trumpettes’, I can attest to their inability to use grammar and punctuation effectively2. I suspect that this inability, like that shown by the Avid Reader trolls, is symptomatic of limited intellect and the inability to understand that giving someone else a fair go, is not an attack on you. The clue is in the word explaining what most normal people seek: equality.
Sources
- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/27/how-an-independent-bookstore-took-on-anti-feminist-trolls-and-won
- http://www.blotreport.com/us-politics/gullible-trumpettes/
