The Troll Slayer - A Cambridge classicist takes on her sexist detractors - BY REBECCA MEAD
Through her television appearances, she has become an avatar
for middle-aged and older women, who appreciate her unwillingness to fend off
the visible advancement of age. Beard does not wear makeup and she doesn’t
color her abundant gray hair. She dresses casually, with minor eccentricities:
purple-rimmed spectacles, gold sneakers. She looks comfortable both in her skin
and in her shoes—much more preoccupied with what she is saying than with how
she looks as she is saying it… Beard, in her unapologetic braininess, is a role
model for women of all ages who want an intellectually satisfying life.
In February, Mary Beard, a classics professor at the
University of Cambridge, gave a lecture at the British Museum titled “Oh Do
Shut Up Dear!” With amiable indignation, she explored the many ways that men
have silenced outspoken women since the days of the ancients. Her speech, which
was filmed by the BBC, was learned but accessible—a tone that she has regularly
displayed on British television, as the host of popular documentaries about
Pompeii and Rome. She began her talk with the Odyssey, and what she referred to
as the first recorded instance of a man telling a woman that “her voice is not
to be heard in public”: Telemachus informing his mother, Penelope, that “speech
will be the business of men” and sending her upstairs to her weaving. Beard
progressed to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Tereus rapes Philomela and then
cuts out her tongue so that she cannot denounce him.
Beard alighted on Queen
Elizabeth and Sojourner Truth before arriving at Jacqui Oatley, a BBC soccer
commentator repeatedly mocked by men who were convinced that a woman couldn’t
possibly understand the sport. A columnist for The Spectator, Beard
noted, currently runs an annual competition to name the “most stupid woman” to
appear on the current-affairs show “Question Time.”
Finally, Beard arrived at the contemporary chorus of Twitter
trolls and online commenters. “The more I’ve looked at the details of the
threats and the insults that women are on the receiving end of, the more some
of them seem to fit into the old patterns of prejudice and assumption that I
have been talking about,” she said. “It doesn’t much matter what line of
argument you take as a woman. If you venture into traditional male territory,
the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it—it’s the fact
that you are saying it.” Such online interjections—“ ‘Shut up you bitch’
is a fairly common refrain”—often contain threats of violence, a “predictable
menu of rape, bombing, murder, and so forth.” She mildly reported one tweet
that had been directed at her: “I’m going to cut off your head and rape it.”
Beard belongs to a generation that came of age during the
feminist movement of the late sixties and early seventies, but as a scholar she
does not specialize in writing about women, or about gender in the classical
period. Her doctoral thesis was a study of Roman religion based on the letters
of Cicero. Her later books have included social histories of the Parthenon and
the Colosseum.
In common with other scholars of her generation, Beard often
brings a proletarian focus to the world of the ancients, one that incorporates
the experience of ordinary people. In “The Roman Triumph” (2007), Beard
considers not just the symbolic power of the empire’s lavish victory
celebrations but also their more prosaic elements: “What, for example, of those
who flogged refreshments to the crowds, who put up the seating or cleared up
the mess at the end of the day? What of the spectators who found the sun too
hot or the rain too wet, who could hardly see the wonderful extravaganza that
others applauded, or who found themselves mixed up in the outbreaks of violence
that could be prompted by the spectacle?” In “The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii
Lost and Found” (2008), she points out that the ancient city lacked zoning
regulations, which meant that a blacksmith’s noisy shop could lie on the other
side of the wall from a wealthy family’s frescoed dining room. Her deductive
observation from the presence of tartar on the teeth of skeletons—that Pompeii
was a city of bad breath—is a typical Beardian turn... read more:
