Rebecca Solnit: ‘Younger feminists have shifted my understanding’
As you grow older you
become an immigrant from a vanished country, a country some of your peers may
remember but the young may find unimaginable or incomprehensible. You could
call it the land of before; before some great change, before we did things this
way, before we decided that was unacceptable, before we shed new light on an
old problem. I was shaped by a world that no longer quite exists, so I can’t
imagine myself at, say, 18 in the present moment, because to do so is to
imagine someone utterly different. She does not exist, and I – as we all do –
exist as the cumulative effect of my experiences, opportunities or lack
thereof, and ideals.
So much of what shaped
and scarred my younger self, and made me a solitary feminist, and then much later
one among many, was the unspeakability of violence against women and all the
denigration, harassment and silencing that went with it. It was epidemic, and
yet every incident was supposed to be an isolated incident, and nobody was
supposed to connect the crimes to the culture that relished violence against
women as entertainment, and denied it existed in any significant way as fact,
and made sure that prevention and prosecution were as feeble as they were rare.
All those forces still exist, but something else does alongside them: a
vigorous conversation, speaking and naming and describing and defining;
rejecting the excuses and cover-ups and justifications.
That conversation is
exhilarating for me. It’s also a conundrum in that I have spent much of the past
dozen years reading horrific stories of rape, torture, murder, stalking and
domestic violence in the news, and hearing them directly from survivors. I have
been both exhilarated to see change come – although not enough – and exhausted
by this immersion in (mostly) male violence and (mostly) female annihilation.
But we have at least diagnosed the problem.....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/29/rebecca-solnit-younger-feminists-shift-understanding-give-new-tools
