Feminists have slowly shifted power. There's no going back | Rebecca Solnit | Opinion |... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...r-metoo-timesup-rebecca-solnit
slow revolution power women history culture US
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The #TimesUp and #MeToo movements are a revolution that could not have taken place without decades of quiet, painstaking groundwork
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his 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.
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This #TimesUp/#MeToo moment is no different; it is a revolt for which we have been preparing for decades, or perhaps it’s the point at which a long, slow, mostly quiet process suddenly became fast and loud. Part of the work was done over the past five years, more of it over the past 50. We have had a tremendous upheaval over the past few years – at the end of 2014, I wrote in these pages: “I have been waiting all my life for what this year has brought.” What this wave brought is recognition that each act of gender violence is part of an epidemic. It’s brought a (partial) end to treating these acts as isolated incidents, as the victim’s fault, as the result of mental illness or other aberrations. It’s meant a more widespread willingness to recognise that such violence is extraordinarily common and has an enormous impact, and arises from values, privileges and attitudes built into the culture.
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But even the “we” has changed and I believe that that is central to why so much else has changed. Who determines what stories get told, who gets believed, whose words have weight, who’s in charge has changed. (Black Lives Matter was another movement to shift what is visible, whose version is heard, who matters.) We have not lost the proponents of the old worldview, in which men’s lives matter more and their words have more credibility, but we have gained people who don’t operate by those rules. Feminists have slowly, steadily gained power – and by feminists I mean everyone of whatever gender who thinks first that women deserve full equality and second that systematic misogyny remains a grave problem.
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We are going to return to a phase in which change happens slowly and subtly enough that it is invisible to most people, though not to the people who take the long view and those who drive the change or who benefit from one small change in their home or workplace or relationship. And then the slow changes will reach a point at which there will be another rupture.