It seemed at first glance to be a typical online celebration for a major life achievement. "Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone," Cambridge University scholar Ally Louks wrote last week on X to announce she'd finished her thesis to earn her PhD in English lit. But her post has since been seen nearly 118 million times, and the response to it has been far from typical, even spurring a rape threat against Louks, reports the CBC. It appears the title of her thesis—"Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose"—shown in the pic she posted is what set people off.
Louks explains that the descriptions of those smells in literature can be exploited to boost sexism, racism, and other injustices—e.g., "the attribution of a foul smell to the Black body during the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a tool of dehumanization." Although Louks tells the BBC that most of the responses she received were "incredibly nice, kind, and generous," others took on a more disturbing tone that slammed her thesis for being too "woke," per the CBC. "What a stupid f---ing thing to 'study,'" one commenter noted. Another wrote: "You would have spent your years better by getting married and having children." She even received a rape threat via email, which local police are now investigating.
On Friday, Louks posted a statement from Cambridge that congratulated her on her thesis and decried the "harassment and misogyny" hurled her way from internet "trolls." As for Louks herself, she's not letting those trolls bring her down and has kept her post up, though she's not engaging with those making hurtful comments. "I didn't want them to think that they'd chased me off or that they'd affected me in any way, because they truly haven't," she tells the CBC. "I do feel safe." She also notes that, although she believes "that misogyny is at play ... I also think there's a kind of broader arc here going on about people questioning the value of literary study and of the humanities and, indeed, of academia." (More controversy stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
