Given my interests shown here, it’s won’t come as a surprise that I follow various church and choral music groups on Facebook. I had to give up one when my feed filled up with (rather bad) hymns with words and music by one other contributor. But I’ve now shrunk back to lurker status on others. As you are supposed to use your real name on Facebook I can’t conceal my gender, and this inevitably led to my being patronised by lay-clerks. (I can’t claim credit for the name for this phenomenon, which forms the title of this post; it was suggested by a fellow choir member.) <\/p>\n
I finally dried up after I opened a discussion about the retro nature of the music of William Harris. My main correspondent started really well, but later returned to the thread (I suspect after a session at the pub) with a contribution which was not only patronising but inaccurate in several respects. I corrected his errors, and since then have only posted very rarely.<\/p>\n
The BBC used to run an online forum for Radio 3, which spawned a separate forum for discussion of Choral Evensong broadcasts. When the BBC closed it (perhaps they were afraid of being sued) it reappeared elsewhere. I have read and contributed to this since its BBC days. As you are able to write under a pseudonym, I could get away without a gender reveal – provided that I didn’t refer to recently singing the soprano\/treble line or use a careless pronoun when I quoted what others might have said about me.<\/p>\n
However that still doesn’t remove the risk of being patronised – even by a fellow long-term contributor. When that happened recently, I quietly withdrew from posting. I notice traffic has gradually declined and was doing so before the pandemic, so maybe that is the experience of others also.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Given my interests shown here, it’s won’t come as a surprise that I follow various church and choral music groups on Facebook. I had to give up one when my feed filled up with (rather bad) hymns with words and … Continue reading