Rebecca Solnit - Feminists have slowly shifted power. There’s no going back
This International
Women’s Day comes five months after the revelations about Harvey
Weinstein’s long campaign of misogynist punishments of women first broke,
and with them more things broke. Excuses broke. Silence was broken. The
respectable appearance of a lot of institutions broke. You could say a dam
broke, and a wall of women’s stories came spilling forth – which has happened
before, but never the way that this round has. This time around, women didn’t
just tell the stories of being attacked and abused; they named names, and
abusers and attackers lost jobs and reputations and businesses and careers.
They named names, and it mattered; people listened; their testimony had
consequences. Because there’s a big difference between being able to say
something and having it heard and respected. Consequences are often the
difference.
Something had shifted.
What’s often overlooked is that it had shifted beforehand so that this could
happen. Something invisible had made it possible for these highly visible
upheavals and transformations. People often position revolution and
incrementalism as opposites, but if a revolution is something that changes
things suddenly, incrementalism often lays the groundwork that makes it
possible. Something happens suddenly, and that’s mistaken for something
happening out of the blue. But out of the blue usually means out of the things
that most people were not paying attention to, out of the slow work done by
somebody or many somebodies out of the limelight for months or years or decades…
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/feminists-power-metoo-timesup-rebecca-solnit