Dear Gossips,   

We have the honour today to be the first to reveal the cover of Elizabeth Renzetti’s upcoming book, What She Said: Conversations About Equality. 

 

Elizabeth is one of the most respected journalists working in Canada, a two-time Landsberg Award winner for her reporting on gender equality. She spent decades at the Globe and Mail and much of her work was focused on women’s rights, writing about “intimate partner violence and pay gaps, the harms done to Indigenous and racialized women by colonial mindsets, childcare and emotional labour, femicide and the underreporting of sexual assault, the MeToo movement and the backlash to it, incel killers, health discrepancies facing women, menopause stigma, period stigma” and so much more, exhaustingly more. Because, of course, as we all f-cking know, the systems of oppression that uphold inequities remain in place. As Elizabeth notes in her book, researchers have determined that at the current rate of progress (if you can even call it that), we’re still something like 300 years away from gender equality – so, basically, people could be living on Mars before women can expect equal pay and body autonomy on planet Earth. 

 

But determined activists like Elizabeth refuse to stop pushing. And you can’t push without dialogue. What She Said is a nuanced conversation about the challenges impeding our path to a just society, particularly in Canada, in an effort to overcome the misinformation and the misogyny that divides us. So that we can fully unite and, together, claim the human rights that women, the 2SLGBTQ+, and racialised communities are denied. 

 

As you can imagine, Elizabeth's determination has been met with resistance. Opponents of her reporting have called her a “man-hating c-nt”. It is, obviously, ignorant to assume that feminism is not also a man’s concern, so the first part of the description is stupid and wrong. But in these times, the c-nts are the heroes. 

We stan the relentless c-nts like Elizabeth who are out here actively calling out the status quo, even if it means calling out her former place of employment. 

 

To go back to the book cover, and one of the reasons I love it so much – the lips, all these lips in various shapes and colours, to me it’s a visual representation of what it looks like to gossip, productively. It is human nature to gossip, but only women are vilified for it. The gossip can protect us though. The gossip can inform us. The gossip might even save us. As Natalie Portman once said, “Gossip well”. And gossip about Elizabeth’s book, What She Said, when it comes out on October 8. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey 

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