The brutality of what we examined and the exhilaration at being able to tell and at the power of telling made an odd mix, and the storytellers were both liberated and returned to their suffering as they spoke. Through each rupture poured so many stories that it seemed as though everything hidden had come out into the open, and then another rupture happened, and thousands or hundreds of thousands more women told their stories for the first time.
Violence against bodies had been made possible on an epic epidemic scale by violence against voices. The existing order rested on the right and capacity of men to be in charge—of meaning and of truth, of which stories mattered and whose got told, as well as of more tangible phenomena (money, law, government, media) that maintained the arrangement. And it rested on the silence or silencing of those whose experiences demonstrated the illegitimacies of the status quo and those atop it. But something essential had changed. The change was often seen as a beginning but I saw it as a culmination of the long, slow business of making feminist perspectives more widespread and putting more women (and men who regarded women as equal and credible) in positions of power as editors, producers, directors, journalists, judges, heads of organizations, senators.
The rise of social media and the plethora of new online forums created space for many more voices, and these amplified individual stories brought their own testimony to the conversation, and fortified the diagnosis and the need for change. This chorus created a broad river whose current carried individual voices such as mine; to the extent that the world has been changed, it was a collective project carried out by many millions.
It’s often assumed that anger drives such work, but most activism is driven by love, a life among activists has convinced me. Too, though the remedies for trauma most often proffered in our privatized society are personal, doing something for and with others, something to change the circumstances under which you were harmed, is often an experience of connection and power that overcomes that sense of isolation and powerlessness central to trauma.
Writing about sexual assault and misogyny has been the easiest writing I’ve ever done, perhaps because what drives me is a force harder to stop than to start. It requires a deep immersion in hideous crimes; for many years, over and over, I have read about rape at breakfast and beatings and stalkings at lunch and had murder for dinner, taken in many thousands of such stories, and yet because all this is coming to light in a new way, and because there is some possibility of transforming the situations and shifting the power, this ferocious drive overwhelms the horror and the terror and is perhaps the first thing that has.
At the Nevada Test Site I learned that you deal with the worst things by facing them directly. If you run away from them, they chase you; if you ignore them, they catch you unprepared; and it’s in facing them that you find allies and powers and the possibility of winning. So it was that I tried several times before to face and name gender violence in my writing and eventually found what I had so long waited for, a global movement of women facing it and creating the conversation we needed.
Storytelling was our central tool. We pointed out how often the same tropes, clichés, and excuses are used, the same assumptions are made, the same people are protected and believed, the same people are discredited and punished. We stripped away the old excuses, the victim blaming and trivializing, by making the patterns obvious, by insisting, for example, that rapists cause rape and not alcohol, outfits, or the desire of women to go places and talk to people. Finally, we talked about stalking, harassment, assault, rape, domestic violence, and femicide as different manifestations of the same misogyny. The conversation about feminism broadened and deepened knowledge of how sexual abuse takes place, why victims often don’t report it and seldom lie but are often disbelieved when they do report, why perpetrators are rarely convicted. The ways that race and gender intersect were one of the things that came into focus in new ways, and so did the analogies between the two as the ways that racial violence also are licensed by devaluing, discrediting, blaming, or ignoring the victims.
5
It took me ten years and dozens of feminist essays from that morning I wrote “Men Explain Things to Me” to realize that I was not talking and writing, after all, about violence against women, though I was reading about it incessantly. I was writing about what it means not to have a voice and making the case for a redistribution of that vital power. The crucial sentence in “Men Explain Things to Me” is “Credibility is a basic survival tool.” But I was wrong that it’s a tool. You hold a tool in your own hands, and you use it yourself. What it does is up to you.
Your credibility arises in part from how your society perceives people like you, and we have seen over and over again that no matter how credible some women are by supposedly objective standards reinforced by evidence and witnesses and well-documented patterns, they will not be believed by people committed to protecting men and their privileges. The very definition of women under patriarchy is designed to justify inequality, including inequality of credibility.
Though patriarchy often claims a monopoly on rationality and reason, those committed to it will discount the most verifiable, coherent, ordinary story told by a woman and accept any fantastical account by a man, will pretend sexual violence is rare and false accusations common, and so forth. Why tell stories if they will only bring forth a new round of punishment or disparagement? Or if they will be ignored as if they meant nothing? This is how preemptive silencing works.
To have a voice means not just the animal capacity to utter sounds but the ability to participate fully in the conversations that shape your society, your relations to others, and your own life. There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence.
Audibility means that you can be heard, that you have not been pressed into silence or kept out of the arenas in which you can speak or write (or denied the education to do so—or, in the age of social media, harassed and threatened and driven off the platform, as so many have).
Credibility means that when you get into those arenas, people are willing to believe you, by which I don’t mean that women never lie, but that stories should be measured on their own terms and context, rather than patriarchy’s insistence that women are categorically unqualified to speak, emotional rather than rational, vindictive, incoherent, delusional, manipulative, unfit to be heeded—those things often shouted over a woman in the process of saying something challenging (though now death threats are used as a shortcut, and some of those threats are carried out, notably with women who leave their abusers, because silencing can be conversational or it can be premeditated murder).
To be a person of consequence is to matter. If you matter, you have rights, and your words serve those rights and give you the power to bear witness, make agreements, set boundaries. If you have consequence, your words possess the authority to determine what does and does not happen to you, the power that underlies the concept of consent as part of equality and self-determination.
Even legally women’s words have lacked consequence: in only a few scattered places on earth could women vote before the twentieth century, and not so many decades ago, women rarely became lawyers and judges; I met a Texas woman whose mother was among the first women in their region to serve on a jury, and I was an adult when the first woman was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Until a few decades ago, wives throughout much of the world, including the United States, lacked the right to make contracts and financial decisions or even to exercise jurisdiction over their own bodies that overrode their husbands’ ability to do so; in some parts of the world, a wife is still property under the law, and others choose her husband. To be a person of no consequence, to speak without power, is a bewilderingly awful condition, as though you were a ghost, a beast, as though words died in your mouth, as though sound no longer traveled. It is almost worse to say something and have it not matter than to be silent.
Women have been i
njured on all three fronts—as have men of color and nonwhite women doubly so. Not allowed to speak or punished for speaking or excluded from the arenas—courts, universities, legislatures, newsrooms—where decisions are made. Mocked or disbelieved or threatened if they do find a place in which to speak, and routinely categorized as inherently deceitful, spiteful, delusional, confused, or just unqualified. Or they speak up and it is no different than remaining silent; they have told their stories and nothing happens, because their rights and their capacity to bear witness don’t matter, so their voices are just sounds that blow away on the wind.
Gender violence is made possible by this lack of audibility, credibility, and consequence. We live inside an enormous contradiction: a society that by law and preening self-regard insists it is against such violence has by innumerable strategies allowed that violence to continue unchecked; better and far more frequently protected perpetrators than victims; and routinely punished, humiliated, and intimidated victims for speaking up, from workplace harassment cases to campus rape cases to domestic violence cases. The result makes crimes invisible and victims inaudible people of no consequence.
The disregard for a woman’s voice that underlies sexual violence is inseparable from the disregard afterward if a woman goes to the police, the university authorities, her family, her church, the courts, to the hospital for a rape kit, and is ignored, discredited, blamed, shamed, disbelieved. They are both assaults on the full humanity and membership of a person in her society, and the devaluation in the latter arena enables the former. Sexual assault can only thrive in situations of unequal audibility, credibility, and consequence. This, far more than any other disparity, is the precondition for epidemic gender violence.
Changing who has a voice with all its power and attributes doesn’t fix everything, but it changes the rules, notably the rules about what stories will be told and heard and who decides. One of the measures of this change is the many cases that were ignored, disbelieved, dismissed, or found in favor of the perpetrator years ago that have had a different outcome in the present, because the women or children who testified have more audibility, credibility, and consequence now than they did before. The impact of this epochal shift that will be hardest to measure will be all the crimes that won’t happen because the rules have changed.
Behind that change are transformations in whose rights matter and whose voice will be heard and who decides. Amplifying and reinforcing those voices and furthering that change was one of the tasks to which I put the voice I’d gained as a writer, and seeing that what I and others wrote and said was helping to change the world was satisfying in many ways to me as a writer and as a survivor.
Afterword: Lifelines
One day in New Orleans in late 2013 I was sitting behind a table in a narrow room signing books for a long line of people, along with my coeditor, native New Orleanian Rebecca Snedeker, when a woman took my hand in hers and began to read my palm. The book was our atlas of that city, my fifteenth or sixteenth or seventeenth book, depending on how you count them. I’d come to New Orleans six months after Hurricane Katrina, on Easter weekend of 2006, and been drawn into the untold stories of the storm and its aftermath, gotten involved in trying to expose some of the racial crimes, which I prodded investigative journalists to look at and wrote about myself in my 2009 book about disasters and the remarkable societies that arise in the wreckage, A Paradise Built in Hell.
I’d shown up in New Orleans to look at what was ugliest about the city: poverty and racism and how more than 1,500 people had died of those things in the flooded city as they were first abandoned and then attacked and prevented from evacuating and from receiving relief, died of stories that demonized and dehumanized them. And I’d fallen in love with what was most beautiful about New Orleans, including the way that its inhabitants were good at being in the here and now, at being out in public and knowing where they were and celebrating in the streets and connecting with the people around them and at remembering the past that shaped this present. They had a talent for valuing other things more than productivity and efficiency, the miserable virtues that hustle people past each other and everyday attentiveness and pleasure.
That unhurriedness might be why a woman was confident she could hold up the long line to read my palm; I knew New Orleanians could take the delay in stride, and I let her take charge of my hand and override my own sense of obligation to keep things moving. I don’t believe in palmistry or any other form of divination, but I believe in stories that come by any means, and in capacities strangers have to be messengers and mirrors in which you see new possibilities. Her parting words as she released my hand were, “Despite everything, you are who you were meant to be,” and I kept them like a talisman.
Despite everything, she said, which I heard as the obstacles and injuries ordinary in billions of lives. I know how profoundly things have changed for the better, and how many people are nevertheless not who they were meant to be because the distorting mirror of gender gives them damaged senses of self, or because their rights and capacities or even conditions of survival are undermined. I cannot imagine a wholly undamaged human being or that that’s a useful thing to imagine, though I can readily imagine that some of the kinds of damage inflicted on my gender can be reduced and delegitimized. I also think the process is under way, and that even being told that you deserve to be safe and free and equal can fortify you. If I’m both feminist and hopeful it’s because I know how profoundly women’s rights and status have changed, in many ways, in many places, since my birth.
Sylvia Plath at nineteen had mourned that “I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night” but she felt unable to because of her gender. I was born thirty years later and I and we have been more fortunate. I had roamed the West, slept in mountain meadows, in deserts, at the bottoms of canyons, on the banks of great rivers in the Southwest and the Arctic, driven vast distances alone, wandered many cities and some rural places at night, had organized with rebels, had blockaded streets, met heroes, written books, encouraged activists, had the friendships and conversations I yearned for when I was younger, had occasionally stood up for what I believed in, had stuck around long enough to see the arc of change across time in ways that were terrifying when it came to climate change and sometimes exhilarating when it came to cultural politics. Also it seems safe to say I’m damaged and a member of a society that damages us all and damages women in particular ways.
There are so many stories that can be told about damage. I ran across one in an essay on photographs of environmental destruction recently. The photographs showed the Carlin Trend, the belt of microscopic gold that runs through the Western Shoshone lands, including Carrie and Mary Dann’s ranchlands, and that would have made Nevada, had it been an independent nation, the fourth or fifth biggest gold-producing country on earth. I’d visited the mines myself, enormous pits that could swallow cities, wounds out of which the water was pumped so that the gigantic equipment could keep going deeper, as whole mountains were pulverized and other heavy metals released, and cyanide-laced water poured through the dust to leach out the gold so that foreign corporations could reap a profit and people far away could ornament their bodies. The precious water of the desert was squandered, poisoned, then dumped into man-made lakes that killed the birds who landed in them. Knowing those mines made me hate gold.
The photographs came with an essay quoting another writer who’d worked for eight seasons in Antarctica. Jason C. Anthony wrote about the nutritional deficiencies common among sailors and polar explorers in the past and of their cause: “Without vitamin C, we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy, old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”
You can read that as an insi
stence that we never get over anything, though it might make more sense as a reminder that though damage is not necessarily permanent, neither is repair. What is won or changed or fixed has to be maintained and protected or it can be lost. What goes forward can go backward. Efficiency says that grief should follow a road map and things should be gotten over and that then there should be that word that applies to wounds and minds both: closure. But time and pain are a more fluid, unpredictable business, expanding and contracting, closing and opening and changing.
You move toward or away from or around something that harmed you, or something or someone brings you back; that slippage in time, as though the stairs you exit on have become a waterfall, is the disorderliness of trauma and of trauma’s sense of time. But sometimes you revisit the past, as I have in this book, to map the distance covered. There is closure and reopening and sometimes something reopens because you can bring something new to it, repair it in a new way, by understanding it a new way. Sometimes the meaning of the beginning of the story has changed as new chapters are added.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 18