Lavinia Collins's Blog, page 12

Bard From Here: 7 Female Writers Who Were More Innovative than Shakespeare

Following from the irritating news that the designers of the new passport have decided that a fair survey of British creativity means two women to seven men, and a particularly vexing seminar in which one of the (male) students kept repeatedly interrupting another (female) student talking about a female writer to demand over and over again that she relate what she was saying back to Shakespeare, I have compiled a list of female writers (from all around the world) who were more innovative than Shakespeare.* 

Christine de Pizan 

One of the earliest examples of a professional female writer. Christine de Pizan turned to writing when she was widowed at the age of 25 and left with young children to support. Some of what she wrote challenged established male authorities and demanded the antifeminist image of women promulgated by medieval works like Jean de Meun’s  Roman de la Rose be challenged and revised. And of course, my personal hero.
Margery Kempe

Late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth century professional madwoman, bride of Christ, mystic and world’s most annoying travel companion Margery Kempe earns her place on this list by writing the first autobiography in English. Of course, Margery’s texts makes lots of references to the cleric she has (apparently) paid to write her story down, and it’s very hard to prove any of the events of Margery’s life, but her book remains the earliest example of an autobiography (fictional or no) in English.
Jane Austen

One of the great icons of British literature, Austen’s novels at the end of the eighteen century and the beginning of the nineteenth are widely credited with laying the foundations for the rise of modernism in the following centuries on account of her innovative use of free indirect discourse. Also writer of excellent tales that are basically just cover to cover witty banter and ironic side-eye. A personal favourite, of course.
Mary Shelley 

Basically invented science fiction (which is irritatingly now thought of as a ‘boy’s’ genre) when she published Frankenstein in 1818. Was the daughter of Mary Wollestonecraft who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women and emerges from the period of gothic romanticism as significantly less irritating than Byron or her husband Percy Shelley.
Emily Dickinson

Dickinson used innovative verse forms and write poems that scandalised America in their frank depiction of female experience, depression, suffering and pessimism. She also appears in Jennifer Connelly’s excellent novel A Gathering Light which was one of my favourites as a young teenager, and remains so to this day.
Virginia Woolf

Pioneer of the modernist novel, great thinker and defender of a woman’s right to intellectual and personal autonomy, Virginia Woolf changed the face of prose as we know it today. Among the ‘Bloomsbury Group‘ she still remains the most prominent and influential writer.
Alice Walker

The first African American writer to win a Pulitzer prize, Alice Walker brought African-American fiction into the national (and international) consciousness.Feel free to add your own! 

*Before you all cry, “But Lavinia, why do you hate Shakespeare?” I don’t actually. I like Shakespeare a lot, but oranges are not the only fruit. 

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Free for a short time in both the UK and the US. Grab it while you can!

“a mix of romance and legend along with rich descriptions, I was sucked in by the end of the first chapter.”

“Collins skillfully intertwines legends and magic with historical realism. The world she creates is, obviously, fictional, and yet it feels very real and vivid. It’s full of witches, intrigues, plots, knights, conquerors, love, and quite a bit of sex too! It’s just got everything that a great story should have.”

To read more reviews, click here. 

Guest Post: Jean Roberta “The Singing Past”

(A version of this post originally appeared on the ten-writer blog,“Oh Get a Grip”)

Before the invention of television, and especially before motion pictures and radio, most people created their own entertainment. This meant that music was once ubiquitous in every culture I have ever heard of. Look up a book on “folk music,” and you will find work chanties that were used to maintain rhythm among teams of men performing repetitive motions. You will find ballads of various kinds: the kind that were passed down within families, and the “broadside” versions that were quickly composed when someone was executed in public. You will find lullabies and love songs and laments and jokes in verse.

There is a reason why remarks about “playing the lute” were often double-entendres. (Wink wink, nudge nudge.)

Structured poetry and song lyrics are essentially the same thing, so musical cultures produced poetry on the page. Older novels nearly always include poems. (Does anyone remember that Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s famous horror novel, first published in 1818, includes verses by the author’s husband?) Sir Walter Scott, a novelist who was widely popular in the nineteenth century but rarely read any more, included poetry in his work. Reading his books as a teenager, I could imagine his characters singing.

My teenage years saw the rise of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings novels by J.R.R. Tolkien, who had been known (if at all) as a medieval scholar before he was discovered in the 1960s as a fantasy writer. As one reviewer of the time pointed out, nearly all his characters (elves, dwarves, hobbits, magicians) sing, sometimes at length. (The orcs, who are evil to the core, seem to be the exception. Of course, they would be philistines with no rhythm.)

Several years ago, one of my students in a first-year university English class requested that we study the Lord of the Rings poem that begins: “Earendil was a mariner/Who tarried in Arvernien.” The words almost sing on the page.

When each novel in the Lord of the Rings series was turned into a blockbuster movie, I was impressed. The plots, the characters, the cultures, the dialogue, even the terrain (filmed in New Zealand) all seemed faithful to the novels. But where was the music? It’s there in the background, as in all Hollywood movies, but the characters don’t sing. Would their sagas have seemed too anachronistic in the current age? Were singers and musicians too hard to find?

As a reader of fiction written in the past, I am usually aware of the importance of song when I write historical stories. Alice in Wonderland (first published 1865) is largely a series of parodies by “Lewis Carroll” of poems by contemporaries, such as William Wordsworth. In my tribute story, “Becoming Alice,” Alice’s cat Dinah sings the following, a popular song in the fictional world of my story:

“When your bosom’s aflame/With desire beyond shame/To be fondled, embraced and hard-pressed,

When you’re mad as a goat/’Neath a starched petticoat,/And you wish to be wholly undressed,

Then you’re simply alive./You just need a good swive,/And to satisfy others as well.

No need to tut-tut./The whole world is in rut,/And you’d find no such pleasures in Hell.”*

In my ghost story, “Authentic” (set in a local building, the official residence of the first Lieutenant-Governor of Saskatchewan and his wife in 1905), the First Lady of a newly-formed Canadian province hints at her past love affair with a girlhood friend when she sings a song of her own composition, accompanying herself on the piano. The modern-day historical consultant who sees and hears her thinks Diana is a tour guide wearing the evening gown that the real Diana wore for her full-length oil portrait. As it turns out, Diana is a ghost who is capable of exchanging emails.

(This story appears in Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories from Lethe Press, 2008.)

For writers who feel that structured verse is either too hard to write or too cheesy to read, here is a scary fact: before the rise of the novel in the 1700s and before traveller’s tales of the 1600s, written narratives not only included poetry, they were poetry. Look up The Canterbury Tales, or a faithful version in modern English, and you will find that every story is told in rhymed couplets. Look for The Song of Roland (to learn about “courtly love”) and you will find verse after verse after verse. The same is true of Beowulf, a stirring hero story in Anglo-Saxon, also called Old English. In my mother’s time, every university student who majored in English had to study Beowulf as a foundational work.

Has any modern historical writer written a novel in poetry? Or even a story-length narrative poem? That would be an interesting challenge to write, and to read.

————–

*”Becoming Alice” can be found in my single-author collection, The Princess and the Outlaw: Tales of the Torrid Past (Lethe) and in The Mammoth book of Best New Erotica 13, ed. Maxim Jakubowski (Constable & Robinson).

MY INTERVIEW WITH THE BOOK FOLKS

(This post is reblogged from my publisher, The Book Folks’, website, and can be read in the original here)

Gratuitous Shelfie

What started your passion for writing fiction?

That’s a difficult question — I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love reading or I didn’t love to write stories. My parents love to wheel out the anecdote that when I was a very young child of two or three I used to insist on taking a pen and paper to bed to ‘write stories’ (squiggles, but I’m sure they were great). But then again, I also used to insist on wearing a pink woolly hat to bed, and I didn’t become a hat-model. I wrote a bizarre and rather terrifying book when I was about 5, which I won’t relate here, as I read it again recently and the events described were far too disturbing. 

What are the main challenges you have found in creative writing?

One of the main challenges I find is getting anything else done. When I’m supposed to be doing the washing up (boring), organising my life (boring) or getting on with my academic work (not boring, but harder work), I have to fight the urge to be lazy and self-indulgent and stay in bed writing instead. I’ve got better; I now only let myself write after 6pm; if I do it in the morning, it’s on my mind all day.

When I was an undergraduate, I wrote less. I was crippled by the idea that I had to write something “literary”, and ended up writing a lot of rubbish that I didn’t enjoy and that will never see the light of day. I did a wonderful masters degree that opened up my mind to the value of popular fiction and it was like an immense freedom settled over me — I could read and write what I enjoyed, and didn’t have to participate in some snobby idea of “high fiction” that I hated reading and was terrible at attempting to write anyway. I think getting over myself and realising that it was alright to enjoy myself, and for things to be fun, was one of the main post-undergraduate-pretension challenges I had to overcome. 

Was there anything in particular that inspired you to write the Morgan Trilogy?

When I finished Guinevere, I felt that there was so much story left to be told. I think Morgan is by far one of the most intriguing characters in the whole Arthurian cast, and one with whom I identified quite strongly. On the edge, too educated to fit comfortably in a deeply patriarchal society, and causing disruption by refusing to quite fulfil any of the models set out for her.

How has your academic study of medieval literature influenced your writing?

 It’s certainly been a huge source of inspiration for me. There’s so much beneath the surface of medieval texts, and particularly if you look for women, and the ways in which they act (and don’t act) within both the confines of medieval literature and of medieval society. I wanted to show the rich life behind some of these figures that seem, in the original, to move without much emotion or motivation. It’s there if you look for it, and I felt that it was something that I could share and bring to life. Textuality as well is something that has made a deep impression on my work; people in the medieval period often deliberately emulated texts they read, and everything you read from that period is very cross-referential. I wanted to get across a sense of that both in the borrowing of tropes from medieval romance in my own writing and in characters like Morgan’s constant reference to and reliance on books and the written text. I’m fascinated by medieval books, and medieval ideas of the power of the written word and the physical object of the book; that’s why books and reading became such an important part of Morgan. 

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider as a mentor?

What a question! I was deeply inspired as a child by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, and certainly that’s stayed with me, though I would hesitate to call her a mentor for various reasons that I won’t go into here. I think it’s always complicated, the relationship we have with the heroes of our youth. I don’t think we need to put them away, but it’s important to revise that model of admiration when you get older, even as you acknowledge that someone and their work has had a great influence on you. 

If I could pick anyone in the world ever, I would have Christine de Pizan. She was a fourteenth-century French writer who supported herself and her children after her husband’s death with a prolific writing career which mainly consisted of sticking it to the patriarchy. She took on this huge antifeminist tradition of literature and culture, and she both made a success of herself on her own and made a huge impact in the way women were represented in the high medieval literary scene. I love her so much I named a character after her! 

I’ve also been lucky enough to have a real-life author mentor. The American crime-fiction writer Kenneth Abel, who has known me pretty much since I was wearing that pink woolly hat to bed, has been generous to give me invaluable advice and support along my journey to here, both on this and the other side of the pond, and I really can’t thank him enough. He’s certainly been a mentor to me on the publishing world, and on writing genre fiction alongside a career in academia. I couldn’t be more grateful for his support. 

What did you learn from writing your books?

 I actually learnt more from editing Morgan than I did from writing it. I tend to write in a frenzy of (partially wine-induced) typos, so for me working with Joe, the editor, was an eye-opening experience. (I’ve talked about it more fully in a series on my blog.) I was a little nervous to begin with, but I found that working with an editor has already made me a better writer. It’s easy when you’re writing for yourself to become self-indulgent, and also to keep everything you ever write “just in case” — working with someone who clearly ‘got’ Morgan gave me the freedom to be more self-critical of my own work, but also to make the cuts that I needed to make to make Morgan a better book. Sometimes you just need someone else, someone whose judgment you trust, to say ‘yes, this bit is better than that, and that other bit could go’. As a writer whose main foible is endlessly making more words, I’m now learning to make fewer! Wish me luck… 

What do you have in store for readers to look forward to in your next book?

Ooh, exciting! I’ve been working on another three-part series, this time through the eyes of Morgawse, the sister who is often (unfairly) chopped out of modern adaptations of Arthurian legend. In this series, we see both further into the past, into a pre-Arthurian Britain through Morgawse’s memories, and further into the north. The history of Arthurian adaptation (and until recently, study) has been rather Anglo-centric for my liking, and I was excited about the chance to represent a different kind of ancient British kingdom, and the politics within it. I’ll be excited to see how it’s received — there’s absolutely nothing out there written about Morgawse since she’s usually sidelined or erased, and I certainly felt this was a wonderful story waiting to be told. Readers can look forward to seeing a lot more of characters who have only been on the very distant horizons of Guinevere and Morgan, like Lot and Uther, and to see the scheming and plotting of Camelot from an entirely different perspective. So that’s (pretty much) ready to go, and I do have something else in progress as well, although I am going to keep that under my (pink woolly) hat for now…

YES JENNIFER

Jennifer Lawrence, assertive beauty and all round favoured person of mine, has written a piece on sexism in Hollywood, and it’s definitely worth a read.

Right at the start, she apologies for her life being unrelateable, because she’s talking millions and film deals, but what she goes on to describe is so damn familiar that it’s heartbreaking. She describes the pressing urge to be thought ‘nice’, to be accommodating and polite, and the sudden and unpleasant reactions of men when she speaks her mind.

The awful truth of it is that, in the society we live in now, a woman who is direct and assertive is always going to be thought of as pushy, bitchy or unpleasant, whereas the same qualities get praised in a man. It’s the same problem in Hollywood as it is where I work, on the university campus, and where I live this other life, here on the blogosphere and on twitter.

It’s the same culture that meant just this week I sat through a conversation with a male member of staff, where he told a group of us with a huge grin on his face about the time he slapped a woman across the face because she called him a cunt. The group of us he told were horrified, but he carried on laughing. When I asked him if he would have slapped a man who had done the same, he said no, and simply said, “I felt that I had the authority to do that, because of the way she had spoken to me.”

Plenty of men that I interact with on a day to day basis care about what I have to say, listen to my opinions, treat me like a human, but we still live in a culture where women are punished by men (and sometimes by other women) for the things that they say. Where women are punished, silenced, slapped, whatever – just pushed down, made to feel like they ought to be accommodating and polite.

And so what if Jennifer Lawrence is a beautiful millionaire with a superstar film career? She still faces this kind of dickishness every day. And people in her position should speak out; it’s happening to all of us, and it’s important that it gets called out. So YES Jennifer! YES YES YES!

Print Books vs Ebooks

The release this weekend of my second paper back, Morgan, the collected version of the bestselling Morgan trilogy, has got me thinking about the paper books vs ebooks debate.

Before I became a kindle convert, I couldn’t bear the thought of ebooks. All I wanted was paper, paper, paper. As a historian, I was deeply suspicious of anything that didn’t leave a physical trace in the world, and anxious about texts that would disappear if the technology suddenly vanished. I love the feel of a paper book, the smell of a paper book, the fact that I can read it in the bath, on the beach, all of that. I love the way they look on the shelf, the way that you can give them and share them and leave them in cafés for someone else to find. 

But then I moved house. I moved house and let me tell you that transporting (literally) hundreds and hundreds of books is heavy and difficult. Besides the fact that last year I had to buy a new bookcase after christmas. Now, in an ideal world, I would live in a giant house, every wall of which would be bookshelves, and I would dance around in my infinite library and never go to work. Since we live in the real world and I simply cannot afford to move to a bigger house just to buy more books, ebooks are a complete godsend. They weigh nothing, they cost 1/3 of a paperback, and I can carry my whole library in my handbag on the train and have an endless choice of reading to pass the time.

I hear a lot of people (colleagues mainly – perhaps a particularly historianesque disease) who don’t read ebooks complaining about how they’re awful, but I imagine that when the printing press was invented there were a lot of people who only read from manuscripts complaining that they, too, were awful.  I love ebooks, I love print books – I just want all the books. Anything that means more books and more reading can only be a wonderful thing, in my opinion!

*NEWS* MORGAN Trilogy now available in Paperback! *NEWS*

Morgan is now available in a beautiful paperback edition of the trilogy.

Read all three parts of the trilogy in one gorgeous paperback edition (perfect for reading in the bath!)

“[C]omplex, intriguing characters, and a vivid world that makes you forget the Arthurian legends are just that, legends…. Here, Morgan comes forward to tell her own story. And it’s a very compelling one.”

Read more reviews here. 

Guest Post: Josh Brown “The Journey to King of Ages”

I can’t really say how it came to me, it just did. Like many story ideas, it just sort of appeared in my head (surely I am not the only writer this happens to, am I?). The idea was for a short story about King Arthur, with all the familiar Arthurian themes and characters, but in a different time and place.

I can’t really say how it came to me, it just did. Like many story ideas, it just sort of appeared in my head (surely I am not the only writer this happens to, am I?). The idea was for a short story about King Arthur, with all the familiar Arthurian themes and characters, but in a different time and place.

“Buccaneer of the Caribbean” is a painting by Howard Pyle, and served as inspiration for my story in King of Ages. Pyle was an American illustrator and author, and was well-known for his illustrations and novels about King Arthur.

Thus the thought popped in my head: “What if King Arthur was a pirate, sailing the seas of the Caribbean?” and so I set about to writing a story based on that simple concept. I re-wrote the story more times than I can remember and revised the ending at least half a dozen times until I was (mostly) satisfied with it. But then I didn’t really know what to do with the story. I wasn’t aware of any markets seeking alternate-history Arthurian short fiction, so it basically just sat on the hard drive of my computer.

I revisited the story several months later, and as I was re-reading (and again revising, I can never pass on an opportunity to revise!) another thought popped into my head: What if King Arthur was a samurai warlord in Sengoku period Japan? Then another: What if Arthur was king of Sparta in 650 BC? Then more: What if King Arthur was a Norse Viking explorer circa 900 AD? What is King Arthur was a Native American chief uniting several tribes to fight off European settlers in the early 1700s? What if King Arthur was living is a dystopian future? What if King Arthur was living in another galaxy, the very far-off future? The possibilities seemed endless, but the thought of writing all these stories myself seemed overly daunting.

This N.C. Wyeth illustration also served as inspiration for my story, and was originally featured in Sidney Lanier’s classic book, The Boy’s King Arthur. N. C. Wyeth is also well-known for his art featuring King Arthur, and was actually a student of Howard Pyle.

So, under the banner of Uffda Press, I put out a general call for submissions for my anthology concept called “King of Ages.” I didn’t ask for full story submissions (the thought of someone putting time and effort into writing an entire story specifically for this anthology only for me to reject it did not sit well with me), but rather for proposals on the time/place/setting of an Arthurian story. The response was somewhat overwhelming, and I received so many outstanding idea proposals. I had to narrow it down to thirteen stories, and while sending out the rejections was tough, I knew that the proposals chosen for the book would be fantastic stories.

Once I started receiving the final submissions I got the feeling that we had something really special on our hands. King of Ages features a wide range of diverse and absolutely stellar short fiction. We have a few different types of futuristic/sci-fi stories. We have a post-apocalyptic tale. We have a couple stories set in modern times, including one hilariously funny story that takes place at a Star Trek convention. “She Who Makes Us Free” is an absolutely brilliant story that is loosely based on the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, MA. We have a story set in 17th century Easter Island, another that reimagines King Arthur as a Viking explorer. We have stories that feature Arthur as a man, as a woman, and a couple that poignantly address sexual identity.

If I can be so humble for a moment, my own story, the one that started it all with King Arthur re-cast as a swashbuckling pirate, pales in comparison to the stories from the other contributors. These authors should be very proud of the stories they wrote, and the book they helped create.

King of Ages: A King Arthur Anthology is available now at Amazon.

The Strong Silent Type Isn’t Just for Men

Here in Sir W. Russell Flint’s famous painting, Morgan scandalises a nun with her magic.

I’m doing something I don’t usually do today – I’m reblogging someone else’s post because it really inspired me to think of my own writing process, and the way that I think about characters and what makes them engaging.

That person is the lovely Karen Gordon, and in her post on The Quiet Ones, copied in below (in which she same some rather nice things about me, though that’s not (wholly) why I am reblogging this here) she talks about the quiet strength of the nuns she grew up with having inspired her.

Weirdly enough, I also spend a lot of time thinking about nuns. Hear me out, here – in the medieval world, many women who were strong, independent and wanted an education would turn to the abbeys in order to find that. If you didn’t want to be married off or to be passed around as a player in a political game (which some women certainly did want to do, and which they harnessed to their own advantage) the abbeys were another sphere in which a bright, ambitious woman could attain some small degree of power, and a potentially larger degree of influence.

But nuns were also held in ambiguous regard in the middle ages; not quite as detached from the world as monks, because the female body was always somewhat a site of worldly sin. Also, they embodied the danger of the educated woman. Malory’s Morgan le Fay is explicitly made into a witch by the over-abundance of education – he says “And the third sister Morgan le Fay was put to school in a nunnery, and there she learned so much that she was a great clerk of necromancy”. A woman who knows too much is, by definition, a witch, and a nun shades dangerously close to that. The closeness of abbey life, education, reading and empowerment to the dangers of black magic was something that I was keen to convey in my own Morgan series and the potential for power in a quiet, reflective character something that Karen’s wonderful post made me reflect on more fully.

Now I’m off to read some more – it’s too late for me. I’m already a witch.

***

Read Karen’s full post here:

I’ve always admired quiet strength–people who wield power in a way that is so subtle the source can go undetected or overlooked. It helps if these power players can hide behind a blustery front man, someone who draws all the attention, usually because they believe they’re in charge (must be yelled, while pounding on a table).

For me it all started with the nuns. In the early 1970’s I went to an all-girl, Catholic school that was run entirely by an order of nuns. Women’s lib was all over the news at the time–images of women protesting, burning their bras, joining the work force (and showing up in pants suits! gasp) The nuns didn’t protest loudly, some opted out of wearing habits, but they did so with little fanfare. On the surface they seemed almost cloistered from the changing times, but I can tell you they were revolutionaries, making huge strides for the cause of equality for women. They had a school full of females, potential future leaders in their eyes and they led by example. They ran the place, with no priest or male influence in sight. Our principal, Sr. Steppe, was a pillar of a woman who could intimidate at the Leona Helmsley level but also possessed a wicked sense of humor and a truly kind heart, which she shared with me more than once when I was (insert terror soundtrack) sent to the principal’s office for failing grades.

In general, worldwide, nuns have kept a low profile. So low that the ruling Church patriarchy ignored them, figuring them meek and weak. Ha!

For decades they used the fact that they were on the front lines for the Church, much more involved with the communities they lived and worked in than the priests, to build up the parishioners and students. They not only promoted equality to the millions of Catholic girls they taught, they also promoted acceptance for gays. In 2012 the Vatican finally paid them some attention–the angry kind, accusing them of radical feminism and undermining the Church’s teaching on the priesthood and homosexuality (AP, May 6, 2014). I’m proud to say that these women who gave me my first taste of the power of quiet strength haven’t backed down. (You go girls!!!)

Fast forward to 2014. I read a fantastic series about the King Arthur legend as told from the perspective of Guinevere. Not only did the author, Lavinia Collins, create a wonderfully-complex queen in Guinevere, she introduced me to Nimue. I love Nimue, the quiet, sweet young woman who tricks the master magician, Merlin and plays puppet master to knights and a king. Her quiet power reminded me of the nuns, of women who are overlooked and written off as having no chance of being a threat. Women who are smart enough use this to their advantage.

I’ve distilled this energy and poured the nuns and Guinevere and Nimue into the heroine of my work-in-progress, Vivienne. I’m currently writing the second book in the series where she meets her first blustery men in charge and figures out how to gain power then wield it. She’s still young at this point and like a sorcerer’s apprentice she is discovering her powers; powers she will hone and refine to create the life she wants.

Do you know of a Quiet One, someone who wields stealth power? Comment below and share their (or your) story. If you would like to support Catholic nuns in their stand against the Vatican, you can find information on The Nun Justice Project here. If you do follow up on their story, get ready to be wowed by some very wise, very strong little old ladies.

Source: The Quiet Ones

Inside the “Feminazi”

Now I know that I’ve posted about this before – and certainly in the comments on this very blog I’ve been called a “feminazi” more than once for expressing the controversial opinion that women are people, too – but there’s recently been a couple of stories in the papers in which the word has been bandied about again.

The first and most prominent is that of a lawyer on LinkedIn who has been branded a feminazi for scolding an older man via email for commenting that her profile picture was very attractive. Here’s the thing; I don’t actually think that his action in itself was offensive. And before you cry, how can you have betrayed the sisterhood like this, Lavinia? what I want to point out is that the context makes it offensive. I don’t necessarily mean LinkedIn, although I think perhaps a work networking site is not really the best place to catch people in an amenable mood for that kind of compliment, no matter how benignly intended.

No, I mean the context of our society’s gendered power relations. Women are so used to comments of that kind – focussing on appearance rather than competence or merit – being used in a dismissive fashion that (certainly for my part) it calls up a whole package of upsetting and frustrating material. I still remember very clearly (though it is back through the mists of time now) one of my early tutorials at Oxford in which the tutor made a (positive) comment about my appearance when I came into the tutorial. I have no doubt that it was kindly meant, but it made me feel immensely uncomfortable; I was alone in a room with someone who was in so much more of a position of power than me, and I just wanted to be dealt with intellectually. I didn’t know what to say. And whatever people may think, I would argue that men are usually – in our society – enjoying the superior position in that power dynamic.

So to call a woman who has become upset, perhaps apparently irrationally, a feminazi – aside from the hideously inappropriate comparison between someone telling someone they are offended and the holocaust in a very juvenile manner typical of the internet forum’s trump-card attitude towards nazism –  is to completely misunderstand how complex and upsetting things can be within a wider context.

Likewise, the Telegraph’s Daisy Buchanan (how I am loathe to link to the telegraph, but it really is the most direct link) has been widely ridiculed as a “feminazi” for saying she doesn’t feel safe on the train. The one thing that has been picked up and made a mountain of was some comment she made about a man chatting her up while she was trying to read her book. Aside from the fact that I think ANYONE attempting to talk to ANYONE who is clearly busy reading ought to be punishable by a night in jail, I think those who criticise fail to see the context that motivates that upset.

For me, anyway, ultimately it’s the frustration that someone has ignored either what you are saying (how was my essay? what work connections can we make? etc.) in order to relate to you in a way that reduces you to your looks (the way women often are in the media) or the signals you are giving out that you’d like to be left to your own devices (reading a book). It’s obviously not a horrible crime to tell someone they look attractive, but neither is it a horrible crime to express that you find something inappropriate or upsetting.

Sure, it’s easy to make fun of isolated examples, but we shouldn’t ignore the wider trend, nor should we allow people expressing indignation to be silenced by the childish accusation of being a ‘feminazi’ – it’s a stupid word used predominantly by unthinking people, and in the dialogue about love, sex, and gender politics, we can all do a lot better.