Get Back in Your Box

I want to preface this post with a few statements about Covid-19. Firstly as I have said many times on these pages the Australian experience of Covid has been significantly different from the experience in some parts of The United States and the U.K. We have had a minimal lockdown for a minimal time in response to a relatively small number of cases.

So this afternoon I responded to a comment on Twitter regarding wearing of face masks in public. I feel very conflicted when discussing this topic. All of the information I have read and certainly the official government line in Australia is that wearing of masks will help stop droplet spread if the person wearing it is infected. But wearing a mask has limited effectiveness in protecting a non-infected person who is wearing it,

Stupidly I added my comments to the thread even though the intelligent rational part of my brain told me to stay out of the discussion. The response from one of the people in the discussion was a real blindside.

Someone with the description “Sex Goddess” in their bio should stay out of comments on posts like this

Excuse me?

Apparently my postgraduate qualifications in microbiology does not qualify me to participate in a discussion on disease transmission. Neither does my profession as a high school science teacher which is dedicated to educating young people about questioning posts like the thread I was participating in.

Interestingly my Twitter bio lists teacher before it lists Sex Goddess but apparently my critic didn’t consider that one outbalances the other. It saddens me to be confronted with the opinion that being a sexual person means I can’t be intelligent. Displaying my body and being proud of my sexuality apparently takes away from my intelligence.

My Twitter account is primarily to interact with people who read my blog and a space for me to post semi nude pictures of myself. It is a place where I express my sexuality but I am not a one dimensional person. No-one is. Of course all of us are multi-dimensional. Of course everyone is entitled to have an opinion about things happening in the world around them.

Had the critic said my opinion was not valid because I don’t live in a country that has been affected as much as others I could have accepted this. Being told I am too much of a bimbo to participate in discussion is just nasty. In all honesty I think my critic was not used to being challenged by an informed, intelligent person. They were only interested in participating in “discussions” that consist of opinions that agree with theirs.

In all the time I have had a social media presence as Gemma I have had very little call for blocking people. I have always expected that I would be attacked at some point by moralists but it has never happened. This is one of the only times I felt it was prudent to distance myself from the discussion and employ the block option. It makes me sad that people who pride themselves on being intelligent don’t seem to have an open mind.