Shy by Sian Prior

Author:Sian Prior
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, SEL031000
ISBN: 9781925095258
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2014-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

An Apology

Actually I tell a lie. Shock jocks in Australia had been foaming at the mouth about the threat to the civil order from deviant shy folk. From one shy woman, anyway.

On my computer desktop there was a newspaper photo I had downloaded from the web. In the background of the photo was a higgledy-piggedly line of hand-painted banners and placards. On one of the banners a black cartoon witch was perched on a black cartoon broomstick and surrounded by black stencilled words in aggressive caps: DITCH THE WITCH. Beside this placard there was a poster with more black text, this time in curly lettering hand-drawn over the top of leaping orange flames that looked like they’d used up a big box of someone’s Derwents: JULIAR… BOB BROWN’S BITCH. The signs were being held aloft by a smiling crowd of my fellow Australians and their target was the nation’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard.

After Ms Gillard took over her party’s leadership about a year before this photo was taken, a small clutch of male shock-jocks began a campaign of unprecedented public vitriol against the PM. Their listeners responded by holding a series of public rallies at which the banners had become progressively more lurid. The leader of the opposition attended a few of these rallies, and in the photo saved to my computer his white business shirt and shiny orange tie were perfectly colour-matched to the leaping flames of hell on the banner behind him.

In the midst of this flurry of protests the then prime minister gave a speech at a Press Club luncheon during which, it was reported, she described herself as having been a ‘shy girl’ when she was young. Not just described, but ‘tearfully confessed’, according to some journalists. Reading the prurient, patronising headlines, I found myself squirming with a mixture of empathy and disapproval. Why did you let them see you cry? Why admit this publicly? What good could possibly come of it?

I knew a bit about politics. I had an honours degree in the stuff. And now I knew quite a lot about shyness. My hand was waving hard from the front row of the classroom. I would have my say.

So I sat down and wrote a cool, clinical opinion piece for the newspapers, arguing that the PM’s admission of shyness had been a political mistake. Public perceptions of shyness are linked with a Rubik’s cube of negative stereotypes, I argued, including self-consciousness, self-pity, emotional withdrawal, social awkwardness and a lack of assertiveness. Publicly ascribing these qualities to one’s own personality is no way to win friends or influence people. After all, who wants to vote for an unassertive leader?

Confessing to shyness can often provoke bullying rather than sympathy, I added, and besides, the fact that the prime minister didn’t behave in public like a stereotypical shy person meant she risked confirming the shock jocks’ assertions that she wasn’t an honest person—that she was ‘Ju-liar’.

Perhaps the biggest problem for our shy prime minister, I continued, was her gender.

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