I have been waiting all my life for what 2014 has brought. It has been a year of feminist insurrection against male violence: a year of mounting refusal to be silent, refusal to let our lives and torments be erased or dismissed. It has not been a harmonious time, but harmony is often purchased by suppressing those with something to say. It was loud, discordant, and maybe transformative, because important things were said – not necessarily new, but said more emphatically, by more of us, and heard as never before. It was a watershed year for women, and for feminism, as we refused to accept the pandemic of violence against women – the rape, the murder, the beatings, the harassment on the streets and the threats online. Women’s voices achieved a power that seems unprecedented, and the whole conversation changed. You can almost think of 2014 as a parody of those little calendars with the flower or the gemstone of the month. January was not for garnets; it was finally talking about online threats, and about Dylan Farrow’s testimony that her adoptive father had molested her when she was seven. The conversation in April was about kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, and a Silicon Valley multimillionaire caught on video battering his girlfriend. May wasn’t emeralds; it was the massacre of six people in Isla Vista, California, by a young misogynist and the birth of #YesAllWomen, perhaps the most catalytic in a year of powerful protests online about women and violence. September wasn’t tourmaline; it was the release of a videotape that showed the American football player Ray Rice knocking out his fiancée in a lift, and a renewed public conversation about domestic violence, accompanied by #WhyILeft and #WhyIStayed. October brought, at last, a substantive conversation about street harassment, and an overwhelming response to the claims from 15 women that Canada’s most famous radio host, Jian Ghomeshi, had assaulted them. theguardian/news/2014/dec/30/-sp-rebecca-solnit-listen-up-women-are-telling-their-story-now
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 22:47:54 +0000
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