I went to see the film Women Talking last night and while I agree with the tweet that said it could be a play, not a film, the truth is I am more likely to see it if it is a film and therefore I am glad it was made.
The screenplay and direction truly captured the spirit and the voices of the novel. It refused to screen the violence, just its emotional aftermath, and sometimes its physical – the blood on the sheets, the teeth falling out of a broken mouth, the starting of a miscarriage. It was pared back and looked stunning.
And the pain of the women, the rage and the grief and the trauma was so raw, so hard to watch. At one point I really thought I was going to breakdown in the cinema, and start sobbing if not howling, because it was so visceral and so true. It was also a film about sisterhood. That was powerful, too.
When I left the cinema, sniffling and weeping, my mind was a jumble of thoughts about the power of women’s speech and the assault on women’s speech. So I am going to try and get that jumble down. I can’t promise coherence.
I can’t remember if I learnt about the rapes of the Mennonite women in Bolivia when it *happened*, or if I read about it afterwards. What I do remember (and this was when I first started crying in the cinema) was the how the women did not know the names of their body parts – they had never been told the words for vulva or vagina, and so they could not speak what had been done to them. In that silence, more silencing was allowed to happen – the women were told they were being attacked by ghosts or Satan, or that they had imagined the assaults.
That absence of language tells us something so important about the necessity of women to have our own words, to be entitled to language and speech.
Women need the words to talk about our experiences. We need to be able to speak the violence and oppression that is done to us. But all too often, the language is taken away. Our words are considered obscene – remember the US lawmaker who tried to ban the word ‘vagina’ during a debate? Our words are upsetting, no one wants to talk about the ugliness of rape and domestic abuse, no one wants to admit the misogyny and the attitudes that lie beneath the acts of violence. And our words are dangerous – look at the efforts made to try and prevent women’s political organising, the rage with which women-only spaces are met with.
Along with our words, women’s voices are dismissed and mocked, or treated as violent. I wrote last year about how women of colour in particular are told to ‘watch their tone’ in the UK Parliament, with their passion and determination seen as threatening or angry. Women’s voices are ‘shrill’ or ‘screechy’, our words are ‘nagging’.
To try and diminish our experiences of male violence, the language used to describe women’s oppression is often sanitised. We talk about ‘gender-based violence’ as opposed to ‘men’s violence against women and girls’. Such a phrase makes the perpetrator invisible, as if the violence is based on ‘gender’, not on men’s entitlement to women’s bodies, voices, spaces.
We say ‘pro choice’ as opposed to ‘pro abortion’, as if the need for, and right to, abortion care is too taboo to say out loud.
Women’s body parts are labelled with either cutesy words (foo-foo or vajayjay) or euphemisms (down there or bits) or violent words (cunt and pussy). I mean, it’s a VULVA VULVA VULVA VULVA VULVA! I remember it feeling like such a victory when ‘female circumcision’ started to be spoken of as ‘female genital mutilation’. Let’s call the violence what it is.
And then of course there is a the ultimate silencing of women – via men’s violence. It’s often been discussed how men’s online abuse against women focuses on women’s mouths and throats. The frighteningly high rates of strangulation is another attack on women’s throats. When women are choked, our voices are choked off. These are violent acts focused on women’s ability to speak, to vocalise, to express ourselves. The threats and acts of violence against women’s mouths and throats are a demand that we shut. the. fuck. up.
When women do speak up about what happens to us, when we raise our voices, the response is often violent. This can be emotional violence: being excluded, shunned, shut up. And it can be physical violence – the men who respond with aggression when a woman says ‘no’, for example, or the acts of abuse to a woman who has spoken up, tried to defend herself, from a violent partner.
These attacks on women’s speech and women’s language is one of the reasons I find it so hard, so intensely painful, when I feel like I am being silenced. When I am forbidden from speaking out, speaking up, expressing my own rage and pain and truth. Because whenever that happens, it hurts in two ways. The first is how it forces me to be complicit with patriarchy – to bow my head and accept their terms. The second is how it reminds me and forces me to confront all the ways in which my sisters are endlessly silenced – how our throats and mouths are stopped shut.
Those were my thoughts anyway.
There is something we can all do, however, to promote women’s language. We can start to use the words. We can replace foo-foo with vulva. We can say pro-abortion as a firm indication that we believe abortion is healthcare. We can call it men’s violence against women and girls. We don’t have to accept patriarchy’s framing.
Obligatory book plug
Look at that proof, out in the world, getting read by real people. Scared? Yes. Excited? Yes. Relieved that I may never have to read through the draft again? Well, every time I think that’s going to happen, I have to read it again so I won’t say…
And events are happening too! I’ll be launching the book in Bristol in June, along with two other events to support the launch. Booking links will be online soon so more details then… In the meantime, you can pre-order the book from Verso.
What I’ve been writing
On Monday the world woke up the horrifying news from Turkey and Syria that a devastating earthquake had killed thousands of people and left many more homeless. I spoke to the White Helmets about the situation in Syria, and to ShelterBox about the longer term dangers to children caught up in the disaster. Next week I am looking at the impact of disasters on girls.
My coverage of the cost of living crisis continues, this time looking at barriers to work for single parents and parents in poverty.
This has been a long time in the making, but I spoke to people who were victims of banking bad behaviour and who feel let down by the services designed to help them.
And I was proud of this one: I wrote about the impact of the Helms Amendment on women in Ukraine who end up pregnant following rape by Russian soldiers.
What I loved
The Independent and Liberty Investigates produced an urgent piece of journalism about the use of force against migrant people in Manston. Huge props to Aaron Walawalkar, Eleanor Rose, and Lizzie Dearden for some fearless investigative journalism. I know how hard it was to get this data out of the Home Office.
What I’m reading
Everything I am reading is for work. Everything! I’m still on Victory City by Salman Rushdie, and Taking Sides by Sherine Tadros.
I am still starting Red Famine by Anne Appelbaum but I haven’t got very far into it.
Honestly, I need some time off to sit down and indulge in my proof copy of August Blue by Deborah Levy. Also as ever, I have a Heyer on the go.
My ‘waiting for the coffee to be ready’ book in the mornings was Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s Life on the Golden Horn which was really special. Now I am trying to read a bit of Katherine Mansfield every morning. I would recommend.
What I’m watching
Well, you know now that I went to see Women Talking.
This week I also went to see the Dead Poet’s Society performance of Sylvia Plath’s works at Wilton’s Music Hall. It was wonderful, both the chance to enjoy the sounds of the poems, but also the accompanying close reading of her poetry. It made me want to revisit the work. I wrote about Plath as a student but hearing the poems again I felt so aware of everything I had missed in her writing. It’s the anniversary of her death today and it makes me feel so so sad to think of all the poems she never got to write.
That’s it for this week! I have a FULL DAY’S WORTH OF WORK to do today. Me and the builders outside who are also working hard.
Please share, subscribe, tell your friends to subscribe… I’ll be back next weekend with more of my thoughts about feminism, more book plugs, more recommendations and, well, that’s it really.
Ciao!