Offending your fan base

Offending your fan base presupposes fans.  Once you’ve got them, don’t let them go.

In Adelaide, there was a well-known journalist on a leading daily paper. This is a long time ago.  He had his own column where he commented on all sorts of things.  He could do what he liked.  He’d been popular for decades, especially with middle-aged women.  To tell the truth, what he wrote seemed pretty bland to me.  Maybe that was why he was popular.   

His admirers tended to be the old girls along the foothills, where the polite people lived.  In their letters to the paper, they regularly agreed that he wrote beautiful prose.  Whether he did or not is beside the point.  They said he did.  Most of what he wrote had some resonance with the older generation.  This was natural.  He was getting on himself.  He wasn’t just courting the older reader.  He wasn’t 19, flirting with Aunt. 

Still, I’m not sure why the old girls liked him so much.  Perhaps he reassured them.  They thought someone understood them.  Perhaps they just liked him because everyone else did.  He was very easy to read.  Anyway, his articles were the main reason they opened their newspaper in the morning.

For me, the most interesting thing about him was the manner in which he folded.  It was a kind of literary suicide, if not a conscious one.  He may have been complacent.  He didn’t see it coming. 

The old girls of Adelaide were picking up their paper, as they usually did, from the driveway or the garden, where the lad had thrown it; they were looking at the headlines, as they usually did, before turning to their favourite column.  What was it about today?  The shape of women’s bodies.  

He hadn’t done that before.  Something didn’t feel right.  Again, it all seemed pretty bland to me.  He had just set down, in his beautiful prose, the opinion that women of a certain age should not wear jeans, in particular the tight sort that teenagers wear.  They should show a bit of leg.  The naked leg, or even one in stockings, was better for an older woman.  He himself preferred the actual leg.

We will never know what triggered that article.  He probably saw an old girl in tight jeans on the bus into town or just popping around to the shops, and then wished he hadn’t.  We’ve all done that.  It’s not something you would imagine, is it, like a poet?  His mistake was to put his thoughts down in print.  He never said that middle-aged women have lumpy bodies.  He didn’t need to.  And now ladies knew that he looked at their legs.  He was suddenly a kind of pervert or at least someone who had grown a bit senile, a writer who had gone on writing too long.  None of his old fans were flattered that he noticed what they wore, at least not the ones who wrote in to complain.  No one defended him.

He retired, or the paper pushed him.