Hello Mary,
You don't know me but I have been reading you for years.
Leaving aside your position on protesting Miss World I was disappointed by the discussion here.
I'm really disappointed that:
You repeatedly explained what metonymy means, as if the other posters not knowing was the problem. That was not the problem. The problem was that you picked Miss V to stand for the patriarchal institution of Miss World, which is like using Bambi in a discussion about hunt-sabbing to stand for hunting and saying, "Bambi is not the enemy". (I know others have explained this perfectly well already)
Your focus on the pseudonymity of this forum as some kind of problem. It is an unremarkable convention here (as on many internet forums). You can do the same if you want; if you choose not to, it is like going to a barbecue in a ballgown and spending the whole afternoon complaining that everyone else is under-dressed. Going on and on about how unsettling you found it, felt like a distraction technique, as if you were implying that the posters here are somehow being underhand in disagreeing with you. That felt like an unfair rhetorical device. (By the way I am sure that many of the posters on here are in a sense using a real name, as am I: in the sense that I am known to many mumsnetters in real life to be the person who posts as vezzie, although it is not on my passport. Not that it matters, as people have consistent and sincere identities on here anyway, whether or not they are known to map to their passport identities)
Talking about your newer piece about the euro, as if you were trying to distract a toddler by waving a fresh toy.
To be perfectly fair, you didn't have to come on here at all and I suppose by doing so, (and by what I knew of you already), you raised my expectations of you such that these things were disappointing.
I suppose what I find disappointing is that these things felt like deliberate dodges and obfuscations - talking about things that were not the things your interlocutors were challenging you on, and pretending they were the same things, and pretending (?) not to see the difference - were you? I don't know. Anyway it is a familiar technique, people cutting through you by "calling spades spades" when they are shovels (either deliberately, or sincerely not getting the difference), and it's disappointing.
I suppose you can't have been doing it deliberately because you didn't have to come here. But something tells me you weren't really listening, and that is sad, because it reminds me of how dismissive the broadsheet press are when they report our webchats with senior politicians and assume that the tough questions have been planted - by men? by women who aren't mothers? - I don't know, but everyone seems to think mothers don't really think. Of course they do, you of all people know that, so...?
Sorry to come to this with a diatribe so late, but I just wanted to explain how I felt, and I mean it in the nicest possible way