I HAVE BEEN WRITING THIS COLUMN FOR some time without explaining its title, “The Gadfly.” Linguistically speaking, a gadfly is a fly that bites or annoys cattle and other domestic animals, and its human counterpart is “a person who persistently annoys or provokes others with criticism, schemes, ideas, demands, requests,” and the like. The full dictionary definition would therefore make the word applicable to bullies, thugs, and Internet trolls—company I’d rather not keep! In the usage I learned and intended in this title, “provokes” is the relevant verb: A gadfly bites to wake us up, to prod us out of complacent assumptions, to make us think about what we believe.
In that meaning, I’ve been bitten often myself, so I know how it stings. When I was a young social psychologist and feminist in the 1970s, I never imagined that I would be asked to testify for the defense in a rape case. Rape laws at the time still included the “marital rape exemption,” with rape commonly defined as “an act of sexual intercourse with a female, not one’s wife, against her will and consent.” Men joked about this. “If you can’t rape your wife,” California State Sen. Bob Wilson said to a group of women in 1979, “who can you rape?”