Women’s struggle for equality is constant, current, and finally at the forefront. And properly representing women in images is essential.
In May 2018, I came forward with my story of having been abused by the former attorney-general of New York State, Eric Schneiderman. I had participated in an investigative article by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker, which resulted in Eric’s resignation a few hours after their piece ran. Due to the allegations against him, his license to practice law was recently suspended for one year.
In speaking out, I was determined to present my own behavior, as humiliating as the details were. I was making myself vulnerable in a way I didn’t want to. It would have been far easier to move on and do nothing. But I knew that despite being terrified, I had to participate on the record to give it weight. I also knew deep down that I was doing the right thing, and I had clear objectives: to warn other women about him and to highlight the hypocrisy of men who claim to be champions of women publicly, but abuse them privately. Furthermore, I wanted to shift the perception of what a victim looks like. A victim looks like all of us.
With my book, Assume Nothing: A Story of Intimate Violence, I wanted to take the reader through my journey from victim to survivor to thriver. I also wanted to give the reader resources to spot, stop, and prevent intimate partner violence in their own lives and in the lives of their loved ones. Terry Tempest Williams, in her book When Women Were Birds, wrote: “To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.” What we share might be difficult, but it can change the world by opening up conversations about our real experiences and authentic selves.
From the time we are born, men are conditioned to dominate, and women are conditioned to accept male domination and to be silent. This conditioning has been mostly reinforced by popular culture and images. The cultural critic Elizabeth Méndez Berry told me, “So many people have been silent about their experiences for so long. Now that they’re talking, it’s an avalanche. I do believe in the power of telling our stories, but I also think that without profound changes in how people view women, and what they believe we deserve, we won’t transform this society. We need to shift people’s worldviews, and particularly those of young men and women, so they can have the beautiful, healthy, pleasurable relationships they deserve.”
And, the energy is shifting! The pandemic highlighted the many ways in which the systems we’ve inherited don’t work for all of us. Those systems are inherently racist and misogynist. They are designed to exclude people of color and women, or at least to prevent their rising. But, women and girls have been rising up and calling for change.
Vice President Kamala Harris, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post, said the mass exodus of women from the workforce during the pandemic “is a national emergency, and it demands a national solution.” Our whole ecosystem is in desperate need of an overhaul. This would include changing the ways in which girls and boys are raised and improving sex education to include healthy manhood and female empowerment programs. Boys have to go through training about how to treat women, and other men, with respect and kindness. Girls have to go through training about how to stand up for themselves and how to navigate situations where they might be harassed, abused, and endangered. These situations begin on the playground. As a friend said, “We are taught that if a boy hits you, it means he likes you. If he teases you, he likes you. It starts right there.”
The overhaul would also include transforming what we project and see. We are not less than. We are enough. And, we all belong. When Sana Amanat co-created the Ms. Marvel character (now being turned into a feature film), she transformed the ideal of what a superhero looks like. A superhero can be Kamala Khan, a Muslim Pakistani-American teenager. When I see the image of the Black girl wearing a superhero costume with a heart on the front, I feel joy. She is a warrior for love. The fight for a safer, fairer world for all of us will be brutal. It’s precisely love and joy and community that will help alleviate some of the struggle.
We can focus on letting go of the old ways of power that have oppressed and silenced women. Those in power won’t easily cede power. We have to build our power together from the ground up so that we supersede and subsume those who would hold us back. In this regard, Stacey Abrams, and so many Black and Brown women, are today’s superheroes. Along those lines, Vice President Harris has shown us that a Black and Indian child of immigrants can be in the White House. What power looks like is in the process of being redefined.
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Cover image via Eugenio Marongiu.
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