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A British journalist, Laurie Penny, a reporter for the New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, and The Nation, had just begun to cross 6th Avenue and was looking the other way, blissfully unaware that an oncoming taxi was headed her way. Ryan Gosling, Hollywood heartthrob, happened to be there and sensing the impending danger, screamed, “Hey, watch out!” before grabbing her and taking her out of harm’s way.
Doubly excited at having narrowly escaped danger and actually being saved by a darling of millions, she tweeted to boast about the incident. Her tweets, which later included anti-American ranting, caused a media uproar from which she is finding it hard to recover. She wrote, “I literally, LITERALLY just got saved from a car by Ryan Gosling. Literally. That actually just happened.”
Penny received many responses for her tweet, but she was a little insensitive to the Americans reaction to her ‘brush with stardom’ and rather immaturely criticized the Americans for being ‘insane’ and ‘losing all sense of perspective.’
So frustrated was she with barrage of criticism, she quit Twitter declaring, ‘I’m leaving Twitter until all this bloody fuss dies down. Honestly, it would have been less trouble to get run over.’ She has requested people to stop ‘over-reacting’ to her tweets about being rescued by Gosling.
Critics have derided her for her sanctimonious and haughty tone and the title she chose for her essay, ‘Ryan Gosling saved me from a Speeding Car But There’s War In the Middle East so Everyone Calm Down’, further added fuel to fire. Critics berated her leaving her with no doubts of what they thought of her.
Penny wrote in her article, ‘It was a curious thing that happened to me on the way to somewhere else. I had just bought a nice pink wig to wear to a friend’s party. I was thinking about an article I’m writing about birth control and the importance of reproductive freedom to women’s rights, and I didn’t remember to look the right way. ‘An actor happened to be passing and stopped me from getting run over by a car. I said “thank you.” And that was that.
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People reacted very vociferously and called her ‘smug’, ‘self-righteous’ and ‘sanctimonious’ and accused her of having double standards.
Her article continued to raise hackles and rub Americans the wrong way saying “Americans are very strange. They can and do hyperventilate about the most everyday happenings as if they are the most important thing in the world, and then they act completely normal when public conversations are had about war on Iran and war on women’s bodies and when Rick Santorum is considered a serious presidential candidate.”
She had also suggested in an article in the Independent, that the reaction to her Tweets proved that Americans had ‘lost all sense of perspective’.
So outraged were they by her misguided outpourings that a fellow journalist suggested that instead of saving her, Gosling should have shoved her in front of the car and donated her organs to terminally ill children in Bangladesh.
Penny concluded her article writing, “ I really do object to being framed as the ditzy damsel in distress in this story… as a feminist, a writer, and a gentlewoman of fortune, I refuse to be cast in any sort of boring supporting female role.”
The indignation and frenzied barrage literally forced her to cajole her critics, “everybody needs to calm down about Ryan Gosling now. “This whole experience is teaching me a great deal about American cultural production. This place is insane.” She then updated her Twitter profile to read: Author, journalist, feminist, reprobate. Please do not talk to me about Ryan Gosling, thanks.”
For all her bravado and audacity, she confessed to keeling over the “teeniest tiniest bit” when it sank in that it was Gosling who had saved her.
