I can’t hear myself: a feminist’s perspective
I can’t even recall the number of times I’ve spoken my truth. Countless times in which uncontrollable tears streamed down my face when I reached the same moments in the story. Lawyers, judges, social services, policemen, any Tom, Dick and Harry have asked me to talk about it. I’ve talked and talked and talked hoping that one day someone would have listened, but everyone has always just heard.
Hear and listen, such similar words but with a huge difference that lies in their core, care.
I won’t talk about the abuse but I will talk about the aftermath of an androcratic society that chose to listen to a monster, a men who robbed me of my childhood. Against any odds, whom should have been the most vulnerable piece of society was disregarded as a brute. Why does society have such a hard time believing victims, specially women? Victims of verbal, mental, physical, sexual abuse, we’re all united by a characteristic, a muffled voice refracted by rumours.
“rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis!” (and the rumors of the strict old consider them all worth a penny)
- carme 5, Catullo
Vivamus! Let’s live! but how can we live in a society in which my opinion is valued less that my male counterpart’s. A society that has come so far but is still too far from rightness, for which I’m small, fragile, a cracked bottle ready to shatter.
“Handle with care”
Why can I cry and why can’t he do so? The ancient Greeks were so far ahead of us in this. The society of shame, in which even the most valiant of soldiers wasn’t afraid to cry. The weeping was liberating, an expression of humanity and true fortitude, not of supposed weakness.
Growing up I never truly knew why blue was meant for boys and pink for girls. Why I could wear intricate gowns whereas my brothers had to wear pants. When at the toy store I unexpectedly found myself in the department of the small chemist and the blue boxes commanded me to change lane, to “run away” towards the reassuring pink shades of dolls and packs of make-up for girls. When the salesmen looked at me as an alien and led me back to the safe haven of stereotype, forcing me for the yarn that had helped Teseo get out of the labyrinth of the Minotaur unharmed, to kill the monster, exorcising the fear of the different, abandoning in Naxos “the beloved” Ariadne.
Men make up 95% of all inmates in Italy, they’re more likely to die before women, their suicide rate is higher than women’s, they compose the majority of the workers in high risk jobs as in policing.
Many of whom don’t understand that feminists stand for equality between genders keep advocating that men have it worse than women, but wait. Who created this system?
Certainly not the suffragists who fought for our rights as women, nor the ladies that during the Victorian Age tied their corsets as tight to cause deformation in their rib cages in the chance to attract wealthy men. Certainly not the women of Ancient Greece who were represented by mythological figures as whom was responsible for bringing perdition to mankind, oh Pandora, incarnation of divine punishment.
Are women really worse off than men just because they’re women or is it just blue-haired women’s delusional madness? Let’s have a look at some statistics!
Shall we consider education? 2/3 of the 771 million adults without basic literacy skills are women, in over 2/3 of countries globally young women make up only 25% of students in engineering or ICT, less than 2/5 of senior academics (professors, deans, chairs and senior university leaders) and less than 1/3 of authors in research papers are women.
And whar about abuse? 77% of women under the age of 34 have experienced street harassment, 16.2% of women in the US have been a victim of stalking at some point during their lifetime, 91% of sexual assaults are perpetuated on women, 1 in 10 women have been raped by an intimate partner,
Don’t you ever think that abuse is as far away as you wish to immagine. Don’t you dare think that women’s rights have been reached thorougly in every Eastern country. Abuse may be at your doorstep, it might hide behind a bush, pop up on a screen, fetch you in the night, deceive you by day.
Until the day in which every woman will feel safe to step out their homes dressing as they please, when no girl will have to hear “donna schiava zitta e lava” (=woman slave, hush and clean), the day in which my work will be considered equal to that of a man, when a woman won’t have to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights to have recognized that what she went through is not only the result of normal discord between spouses, until that day I will have no peace and you shouldn’t too.
Until that moment I won’t stop fighting, only that day, perhaps, I’ll stop telling my story. Perhaps, because we men make it all too easy to forget the past and repeat its mistakes.
For now this is only the beginning, fight for those who don’t have the voice to do so. Fight in the small and in the daily, in the big challenges and in the world. Stand up for yourselves, always. Be fierce and never let misoginistic comments pass by. Don’t be afraid of colours and don’t teach children difference, teach them equality. We are the same, it’s time to put an end to a secular division that has only created hatred. The witch hunt has ceased.
I’m not your trophy. I’m not your property. I’m not someone’s something. I am me. I am voice. We are going to be listened to.
“Women are very slow to rouse, but once they are aroused, once they are determined, nothing on earth and nothing in heaven will make women give way; it is impossible. … So here am I. I come in the intervals of prison appearance. I come after having been four times imprisoned under the “Cat and Mouse Act”, probably going back to be rearrested as soon as I set my foot on British soil. I come to ask you to help to win this fight. If we win it, this hardest of all fights, then, to be sure, in the future it is going to be made easier for women all over the world to win their fight when their time comes.”
- Emmeline Pankhurst’s speech held in Hartford, Connecticut on November 13, 1913
