This whole thing really drives home for me the fact that young writers working on the Internet today are not afforded the same right to forget their past as writers who came up before the Internet.

Back then in ye olden times, you were free to have your early mistakes and missteps consigned to the street press, or student newspaper which would really take some determined digging to unearth. It was fine to be writing embarrassing stuff, because no one of consequence would see it and was all part of the process of becoming a writer or journalist.

But now there’s lots of only partially-formed stuff that’s out there, and it will follow people around forever, meaning there is no luxury afforded to emerge kind of fully-formed in a broadsheet or magazine, and that being where your career proper begins.

So this is either absolutely terrible/mortifying, or all to the good and part of the new normal in that everyone from now on will have this history of not-so-great stuff trailing off after them. I’m unsure. But I do think that judging young people harshly for being young is both monstrously unfair, and a stubborn and awful traditional that always has been and forever will be thus.

Those twitter jokes responding to the young student’s ‘chivalry as sexism’ argument seem to me to be legitimate frustration with the occasionally (I stress very occasional) overbearing aspects of feminism.

A lot of young men feel somewhat emasculated by the constant pressure on them to double guess what a woman may be thinking for fear of offending her. Does this woman expect me to hold the door for her? Or will she be angered by what she perceives to be sexism?

It may sound trivial, but these are legitimate concerns for many men. Personally, I believe chivalry adds a layer of courtesy to our society, and after being raised to behave in such a manner, I would feel unshakeable embarrassment if I brushed past my mother to get through a door before her.

Of course, I do not mean to defend the very real atmosphere of chauvinism that exists in many newsrooms. I don’t know which journalists tweeted those jokes, so I can’t comment on whether they were being entirely dismissive of the young student’s article.

But I do know that, while I agreed with nearly every point in her article, I was angered and frustrated about the chivalry part.

Jason, It’s pretty simple. Open a door for anyone (regardless of sex) when it’s helpful for them. Don’t open it when it’s just as easy or easier for them to do it.

But leave out the overbearing feminism argument. It’s dreary, boring and evidentially lacking.

Fiona, this piece is excellent, and really articulates many of my own thoughts about the issue. While I’m not exactly ashamed of much of the work I did in student media—first as a sub-editor and contributor, then as an editor—I wouldn’t want it to be subject to the level of vicious scrutiny that the anonymous intern’s work has faced. And, as Elmo notes, there’s something to be said for the idea of a place where beginning writers can publish without fear that their early work will come back to haunt them. (I’m lucky enough that my early student media efforts disappeared down the internet’s memory hole when the paper folded and the student union disconnected its server.)

Jason: Here’s a question for you—why does the idea that a woman might be offended by your ‘chivalry’ upset you so much? A large part of this brouhaha has been a group of (mostly) men telling the anonymous intern that the newsroom has always been this way, so get used to it. This kind of sidelining of women’s feelings about the ways they are systematically discriminated against—often expressed in the reprehensible phrase “suck it up, princess"—is pretty common. But suddenly when it’s a man’s emotions we’re talking about, these emotional concerns are really valid and important. "Oh no! She called me a chauvinist for holding the door open for her! How terrible!” There are many worse things in life than someone erroneously considering you a chauvinist, and I dare say this young woman’s experiences were much worse than what is, at worst, a mild inconvenience. Yet so much of the criticism of this woman has centred around the door-holding issue. Surely basic logical consistency would dictate that the “suck it up, princess” crowd should also “suck up” their own feelings about being mistaken for a chauvinist?

The door is a distraction – it’s not the point of this the Farrago article, or this one either.

A minor point, perhaps, but it’s worth noting that there’s usually a fair distance between student newspapers that seek to emulate actual newspapers, and student magazines that don’t. When I studied journalism at UQ, journalism students wrote for The Queensland Independent, and were horrified by the unprofessional shenanigans that were going on at Semper Floreat. It was mostly media/comms and philosophy students that wrote for Semper.

Elmo Keep makes the point that young writers' young writing is harder to hide these days. Well, here’s an idea – young writers don’t have to publish on the internet every thought they ever have. Maybe more awareness of potential future embarrassment might mean less bad writing online.
Also, it’s pretty easy to find hard copies of old student magazines in libraries/archives etc. They’re not that well hidden!

Great piece and great comment Ian Syson.

I read the front page Age story yesterday on this Farrago report with interest. While the intern’s interpretation of opening doors etc as sexist struck me as a bit of an overflex – one might expect folks of a different set and age group to behave a bit differently in terms of manners – her report on the sum of a range of behaviours that overall come across as boorish and chauvinist was not. There was clearly a cultural clash at work here and the frisson and apparent feelings of shock and disappointment are quite worthy of display. Just because the military has had a culture of cadet degradation, doesn’t mean they should be allowed to. This kind of treatment is clearly a much softer ‘blooding’ but the domineering white anglo male culture evident in any byline perusal at our dailies is, in my opinion, one of the reasons that sales of papers are on the slide.

RE Elmo’s comments above: I agree. And maybe student organisations should seriously consider not publishing to the web. I’m not sure I’d have been a student writer/editor if my terrible writings were going to end up on the web for eternity. And I think that would have been a shame. It was comforting that my writing would disappear into obscurity the moment it was published.

If you spend two weeks surrounded by sexist homophobic ars*holes, then the so-called chivalry will no doubt take on a different colouring and seem as patronising as the names they used for her: being “nice” isn’t always being nice. And it’s an easy way for journos to ignore the rest of the piece.

As one of the jokers cited above, I just wanted to add that there was no malice behind the gag. To me, that particular sentence in the Farrago piece stuck out as silly, and so some gentle fun was had.

Which is not to say that everything in the article was silly. Quite the reverse. The intern author made a series of valid, important points about the toxic cultures that can flourish in a newsroom. (And not in every newsroom. The SMH newsroom – the one I’m most familiar with – is a million miles from the one described in the piece.)

Sexism of the sort the author describes is abominable – but not sexism in the shape of men allowing women to pass through a door first. In a world of gender inequality, that’s one to let slide. Well, that’s what I reckon, as a 43-year-old bloke … others might disagree.

And I agree with Fiona about being shocked by the viciousness of the attack, including the outing of the author’s identity. That was all unnecessary and out of line. She was an intern who made some valid points (plus at least one silly one) and for that she should not have been torn to shreds.

Unfortunately, Ms Burden’s case, which may have real foundation and merit, was ruined with the use of bad examples. No one really feels moved by the seedy underbelly of white male elitist workplace practices when the best you’ve got to show for it is an anti-gay marriage sentiment uttered by one person and a man who might open a door for you. It just doesn’t have me up in arms crying “get the bastards!” Yet I understand the sentiments she was getting at and the crass way certain stories were dealt with- it’s just a shame that her “evidence” for this culture was so poor. In effect, it’s given ammunition to the very people she wanted to fight, by aiding their response that any such backlash is an over-sensitivity to a few comments made in the workplace that were not dealt with through the proper channels at the time. Pity, because I think had she been a better journalist about it, she could have been onto something.