Claws for thought

"I BEG you to give up that poor dog, you stupid, ignorant, awful woman you. Are you nuts, YES your are, and just plain wicked. Please surrender that poor poor baby you wicked awful nasty woman. You have to be so dumb how have you ever got a job on this magazine. Oh just grow up and get a brain transplant for you dont have one that works. Don't ever own a pet, you are to nasty."

A missive received after my recent column on acquiring a puppy from a pet shop. And this, after an appearance on the Today show:

"After seeing you on tv the other morning I asked myself if you are for real. Do you realise how ridiculous your voice is I have never seen anyone as pretentious and this morning I stumbled across your column and I still don't get it. I can't imagine anything worse than having you for a mother I can only imagine how much damage you've done to them. Poor kids there's no way they don't freak when you open your mouth. Come down to earth, one last thing I know without a doubt your voice is cultivated nobody sounds like you do you think you sound posh? NOT A FAN!"

What do these letters have in common? (Apart from poor grammar, and an extraordinarily vivid voice I can only admire as a novelist - so much character conveyed, with such economy!) They're both by women. Oh, I get a few. Usually not read, because from the first words the vitriol, sourness and sadness can be gauged. It's a survival instinct to ignore them: not knowing keeps me buoyant. But they say so much about where we are today.

Female cruelty. Such a flinched, dark, raging little world. Given spectacular life by the Pandora's Box of social media, with its Machiavellian delights and delicious anonymity; our brave new world so embracing of sneer, jealousy, abuse. Out spews a new mode of discourse: things that, in the past, women may have thought but never voiced. Civility, for the most part, used to prevent us from spitting such demeaning bile so openly.

American neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine theorises about the way women cohere. In The Female Brain she explains that it's programmed into us to connect intensely in the childbearing years, because we need the support and protection of other women when the males are often away (hunting in the old days, working in the modern age). The flip side of this urgent need for bonding is the way women control one another - if everyone acts and thinks

the same way, the group will stay intact; everyone will be protected. If we can't control someone - if an individual acts differently, in a way not expected - the women turn. Viciously, brutally, insidiously, attempting to destroy the rebel's confidence; to make her change, conform.

These emails want to destroy my equilibrium, silence me, make me stop. Women can be so vicious to each other in a way utterly different to a man's brutality because the female radar knows, by instinct, the Achilles heel of another woman - because we often have those vulnerabilities ourselves. So, a blazing E.E. Cummings quote for any female under siege by another - whether she's six, a teenager or a grown woman: "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

My bullying missives from female readers are telling documents of who, exactly, the senders are: women who aren't happy with their lives. If they were they wouldn't be writing. They go to the heart of a particularly female bitterness. My trolls need to feel their life choices, whatever they are, are "right" - as opposed to my world with all its differences. If they hate me this much, they only hate themselves a lot more.

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