Actually, as an aside note, these days I am considering the patriarchal attacks on me (for that is what they were and are) as being of a rather special nature.
I think that my position in the world has been, in many ways, like that of someone who has grown up in a religious cult, without realising it, and has now left that cult. There are those around who do not want one to talk, lest one report certain things that they now feel ashamed of. So many, many people -- too many to count -- have taken it upon themselves to silence me, usually by using tactics that are broadly or explicitly misogynistic.
Misogyny is a good way to silence someone because it makes everybody doubt the person's ability to tell the truth -- including the person themselves. So I was told that I was effectively unschooled (despite at that time having a bachelor's degree), that I "couldn't even speak properly", and that I was in various ways and measures delusional. When I reported the abuse, this was represented as further evidence of how I didn't see reality as it in fact was.
Of course I wasn't brought up in a cult, but within a culture that had effectively seceded from the rest of the world and its views about what was right and proper, in order to pursue a particular view of Christian righteousness and civilisation. That was the ideology underpinning the state of Rhodesia, which began just before I was born. And people shed blood for that ideal. And now they can stand no criticism (however implicit) of it.
And somehow my natural intelligence has made me appear a threat to all sorts of people -- but especially the patriarchal, Christian ideologues, who still uphold the banner of the past. They have made themselves particularly noxious enemies. I guess its a fear that I'll spill the beans in some way. But the extremity of the hostile behaviour I have faced even these days strikes me as odd.
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