I have a friend, let’s call him Steve because that’s not his name. Steve carries a wrench on a lanyard so he can reprimand cars that come too close to him when he’s riding his bike.
I’ve always thought this was a tad extreme, but after a few close calls recently (including an especially hairy one involving a crane that would have killed me in a manner that could not be described as "doing what she loved"), I’ve come round to Steve’s way of thinking. Cycling around Dunedin is fury-provoking. Here you are saving the planet, and people are trying to murder you.
I used to move apologetically over as far left as possible, but this would launch me into potholes, and mean weaving around all the orange cones - with the least swerve threatening to throw me under a log truck. So, I’ve learnt to hold my line.
Such was my advice at a hui with Māori wāhine considering becoming columnists for the Otago Daily Times.
The benefit of my experience can be summed up thus:
Don’t use people’s real names or they will sue you.
There is such a thing as too many adjectives.
And historical fact: hate mail used to arrive in your actual letterbox. Red ink, capital letters, complete with a dick drawn on your face. Back in the day haters put some effort in; they didn’t just diddle about savaging people from a distance after a couple of pinots, wattles lurid in the laptop light.
Much has changed in the 13 years that I have been writing for the paper, especially in attitudes to female columnists. I vividly remember my first column - it was about white pants - and like all my early attempts had a mawkish flavour, like the smell of warm beer. One of the camera guys at Channel 9 went to the trouble of cutting it out and pinning it above my desk in the sales room after scrawling "yuck" across it.
Back then, male staff used to all but shrink against the walls when I went into the building, not knowing where to look, afraid I might start talking about menstruation.
Those were salad days. The tide of misogynistic hate that now flows towards female columnists is astonishing - UK research shows the majority of female journalists have been the targets of online violence - a few hundred years ago these people would have burnt us at the stake, now it’s rape threats.
It’s a world female columnists keep to ourselves, says Rosemary McLeod. To speak of it would be a sign of weakness in a working world that’s still male-driven and unlikely to care very much. It’s the reason, too, why female journalists so often gravitate towards food, fashion, decorating, health and wry humour. Traditional, domestic zones where we are safe.
Sorry, I’m not doing a great job of bigging it up as a profession.
My mother was a trailblazer in New Zealand broadcasting, being one of the first female breakfast voices back when everyone spoke BBC English. Mike Hoskings was a weird 17-year-old in a suit, and producers believed people didn’t want to hear a woman on the radio in the morning because it put them off their cornflakes.
I wasn’t a trailblazer, just deaf to unsolicited feedback. My work was more an amusement, like a piano-playing dog. "I never read your column but my wife does," drunk husbands would say at parties. "I just happened to see it and it was quite good ..." I simply possessed enough self-confidence to believe what I had to say was relevant.
"It must be a strange life," writes Reni Eddo-Lodge in his book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, "always having permission to speak and feeling indignant when you’re finally asked to listen. It stems from white peoples’ never-questioned entitlement, I suppose."
University-educated, able-bodied and speaking and writing in ways similar to those who discriminate based on race, there are factors about me that bolster my voice above others.
I came away from the hui checking my privilege, and relevance. What can a 52-year-old, middle-class, white woman have to talk about? Menopause?
Despite tā moko being worn by breakfast TV presenters and te reo being commonplace on radio, Mani Dunlop, presenter of RNZ’s Midday Report Te Pūrongo o te Poututanga, sent out an astonished tweet last year, "It’s a record whanau - no racist messages or texts on the show ... is this what progress looks like!?"
Here in the South there are people incensed by the word Aotearoa - "it’s New Zealand FFS! Stop ramming Māori down our throats!" - and mainstream print media still lacks diversity.
Sometimes, if people won’t make a path for you, you have to bash one for yourself.
Change is always a wrench.
