Does a body of information meet the journalistic standard of public good, of elevating social consciousness, and not merely the oft conflated curiosity or clickbait? If not, let’s mind our own business.
George Eliot, Isak Dinesen, Ellis Bell, Currer Bell, and George Sand were the androgynous pen names chosen by women to grant (even temporary) artistic freedom and privacy without the punishment and confines of their given gender identity. These names also encouraged a larger readership than their “feminine” counterparts. According to NPR and the organization VIDA, in 2011, the same New York Review of Books that doxxed Elena Ferrante reviewed books by 293 men and only 71 women. That year, The New York Times reviewed books by 520 men and 273 women. Nearly 150 years after the publication of Eliot’s Middlemarch, often regarded as one of the greatest works of English literature, the reclusiveness and privacy of Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy have been far more respected and protected than those of Ferrante and Robert Galbraith.
We have a right to be left alone, particularly if the very fruition of our life’s work is contingent upon concentration and quiet. We also have a right to choose what we disclose on social media and in interviews, to speak up and cultivate a following or nurture a respectful dialogue. These disclosures and transparencies are not invitations to be violated.
There is a deeper lesson here about respect and kindness, about our curiosity and “right” to know eclipsing our collective dignity. The erosion of privacy and reverence for boundaries costs us not just future artists and art but extraordinary women in all fields who stifle their voices and talents out of fear of being publicly threatened, violated, or humiliated for having the audacity to be brilliant or vulnerable or assertive, for failing to cleave to social demands of conventional aesthetic perfection, for having a lamentable but non-nefarious past, for excelling in male-dominated fields; for breathing.
You do not know someone else’s story. You do not know the private traumas and triggers, phantoms and furies existing inside the author whose book resides on your bedside table, the actress whose television show you stream, the person who works down the hall from you. A woman living under an assumed name may be hiding from an abusive ex. A writer with a pseudonym may only be able to work if her neighbors believe she is an accountant. A woman experiencing an involuntary paroxysm of grief on a subway or in an Apple store deserves not to have a terrible moment become viral and impact her life forever. A trans-woman has no obligation to “come out”. She is a woman. Period. No one, not a high school classmate with a Facebook account, nor a family member, nor an internet troll, nor a journalist, has the right to expose what has not been made public by the woman herself, no matter what her profession, private or public. Because while advocacy and activism are heroic and necessary, they must also be chosen.
The decay of privacy and boundaries is inextricably bound to a rise in gleeful schadenfreude, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism. When we expose the private information and identities of people who are causing harm to no one, breaking no laws, existing peacefully, we further extinguish our awe at the experience of art beyond the persona of the artist, our empathy, our creativity, our individual and cultural potential. We become immune to dignity, courage, and enchantment.
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