And if you live large swathes of your life in public, well, people are going to consider your public persona fair game.
Germaine Greer, however,
dissents.
Which sort of goes to show that it's not just in these wired-up internetty days that things committed in youthful exuberance come back to bite the person in later life.
***
On a tangential thought inspired by thinking about her trajectory of promoting different, often wildly inconsistent, theories and sets of ideas over time (mentioned in her contemporary and compatriot Lynne Segal's Making Trouble, which I'm currently reading), I was wondering, have other people come across individuals who get infatuated not so much with people (though that may form part of the more general syndrome) but with ideas, concepts, and activities?
And while they're infatuated, go on and on about them like recent converts to a cult, which is the more annoying when, after some experience of the person in question, you know that it's going to be something else quite shortly.
The person to whom I allude as Q used to do this: be promoting some new theoretical line like a missionary, refusing to listen to anyone who tried actually to engage in discussion, introducing it in and out of season and whether or not applicable to the particular situation. And then it would completely vanish.
Or do we all tend to do this and just not notice it in ourselves?