I bit my tongue earlier this week when Laurie Penny, aka @PennyRed, aka “author, journalist, feminist, reprobate,” wrote a piece on Gawker. In it, she whined about being portrayed as a damsel in distress in media accounts of Ryan Gosling having apparently prevented stupid her from ambling in front of a speeding vehicle in NYC.
This, because though she came off as moronic, it was her right to react however she wanted. And when you use this as your Twitter avatar …
… you probably need a longer leash than most special people.
But then today, I read a piece in the NY Times which refers to this Thursday Tweet:
Would have been less trouble to get run over?
Oh yes, Laurie Penny, I can imagine what you mean.
Christ, the horrors of a one- or two-day gossip story in which you a) admit to being a pedestrian moron and b) get stopped from walking in the street by a movie star.
How EVER can one be expected to grapple with such demands? Fuck all the praise for Mother Teresa. YOU have stared down the evils of a cold misogynistic world and prevailed, sunshine. (All without even having to lay eyes on a leper!)
I mean, holy shit, that’s so much more difficult than getting run over by a car after which, in no particular order, you could:
• Spend more than a week in a coma, unrecognizable to your loved ones since your head is so swollen the only identifiable thing about you are the freckles on your arms,
• Have your trauma-surgeon cousin admit later that she only gave you about a 10-percent chance of survival,
• Get two slabs of skull cut out so the swelling on your brain recedes (see top picture) … hopefully,
• Spend a month with half of your body paralyzed, so they zip a net around your bed so you don’t fall out,
• Have to relearn how to talk, write, think, walk and exist,
• Deal with the confusion of not knowing what the hell happened to you,
• Face that fearful sensation when you hear cars approaching, even if you’re safely on the sidewalk,
• Have to wear a helmet for five months so you don’t fall on your exposed brain,
• Wear a Jewett back brace for a few more months than that so your broken vertebrae hopefully fuse back into place,
• And after it all, when you defy your neurologist’s expectations and get relatively back to normal, have to deal with the rage that arises some stupid fucking broad poo-poos someone having saved her from such hassles because it contradicts her whole idea of feminist strength and forces you to write a blog-post title which might lead some to believe you think someone should have gotten hit by a car when you really don’t.
Don’t comment on things you don’t understand, Laurie Penny, because when you did so this time, you came off as ungrateful, uneducated and unworthy of the least bit of respect. And, that undercuts the whole persona you’ve apparently tried to cultivate even more than sending out 11 Tweets in the short time since you posted it does.