Playing the brownie card
She’s still at it.
That’s a stupid way to describe Joan Smith. I don’t know if Rafia Zakaria is really stupid or not but by god she says a lot of stupid things. That’s one of them. Joan Smith is the author of the classic Misogynies. She’s a feminist thinker and columnist and activist. She’s a star. She’s not “anti-trans,” she’s skeptical of some of the claims of the ever-expanding trans ideology.
To be the subject of a book review by Joan Smith is a high honor and a massive thrill. I don’t like to brag, or at least I don’t like to be too obvious about it, but I’ll brag about this: Joan Smith reviewed Does God Hate Women? and to me that was a very big deal.
Of course, it’s less pleasing if she thinks the book is crap, as she did Zakaria’s book, but then that’s the problem with writing a crap book. Zakaria’s bone-headed description of Joan as “committed to the status quo” just gives us all the more reason to think she (Zakaria) is uninformed as well as abusive. Women committed to the status quo don’t tell the Mayor of London why he should not have removed her from her position as co-chair of the violence against women and girls board. Women committed to the status quo don’t have such positions in the first place, because the status quo is that violence against women and girls is just part of life, not worth objecting to, not all that serious.
Joan Smith is totally badass and absolutely will not accept idea or circumstance because it happens to be the status quo. She’s known for helping to change the way people think about things.
This is just nonsense.
To be fair, it is easier to address problems with the existing state of affairs if you just want to f*ck with the status quo of language and framing.
Methinks there’s two ways to respond to a bad review from a respected authority:
a) If the bad review was deserved, take your lumps and vow to better in the future. Apply the lessons from the criticisms to future work.
b) If the bad review was not deserved, point out the reviewer’s errors in a respectable, scholarly way.
Don’t go on twitter acting like a high school student whining about how the teacher didn’t like you and using any cheap cards you can think of to portray yourself as beyond criticism.