They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal.
They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. “Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.” This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost.
It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. “The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experiĮnce that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval.
0 kommentar(er)
