On the subway I’m looking through the stories from Cristina Fallarás’ new book Don’t publish my name (21st century, 2024). I read one, my heart shrinksI close the book and answer a message.
I’m talking to a girl about a photographer I’ve worked with who is being exposed on Twitter for sending intimate videos and photos without consentboth from his models and from girls he has had sex with.
I think back to our photo shoot, which was as professional as I expected. Although I know that doesn’t mean anything about him or me. Bullet dodgedbut only this once.
This Russian roulette forgives you today: your privacy does not belong to its photographic archive – like that of others – but it doesn’t matter. Tomorrow will surely be something else: perhaps someone who touches your ass on the subwaya client who goes overboard with his insinuations, a follower who takes advantage of feminism debates to send you a photo of his genitals…
This is the sexual violence that women suffer, completely random. We are unable to prevent what factors will make the next experience happen, because it is a melting pot of experiences, times of day and places with only one thing in common: they are our aggressors.
That randomness is the same as Cristina Fallarás, Andrea Aldana and the Siglo XXI publishing house have continued to decide which stories were part of a book that, as a collective memory, seeks to become a tool that raises awareness that this is a systematic behavior that runs through the entire society.
The journalist’s profile was the funnel through which a story has been channeled where, even myself, I have found myself recounting a dark moment that I cannot imagine, today, sharing out loud with my partner or my friends.
This is how anonymity works, it gives you that security that you can let go, vent and feel that another woman, on the other side, helps you carry that heavy load. Because Cristina always welcomes: listen and respond.
She realized how, unlike stories in public hashtags like #cuéntalo, anonymity allowed, given the protection of identity, more women to dare to talk about their husbands, their bosses or even the sexual abuse they had suffered in childhood.
A figure that, in fact, is very far from the official one according to the journalist: “As soon as the identity disappears, they have gone from being twenty-something percent to more than 70%. If institutionally we manage a twenty-something percent and an autonomous collective narrative, the rises to such a point, we have to consider that The figures we use are not real figures.“.
In this exercise of defining sexual violence “among all of them,” as Cristina says, she has claimed that we can focus not on the perpetrators, but on the abuse: “We are creating an archive of sexist violence, a common archive of What do we consider sexist violence? whether punishable or not. “I publish testimonies, not complaints, I don’t care about the next path.”
His stories give goosebumps, they grip the pit of the stomach and they provoke horror due to the crudeness not only of the words, but of the human being himself. Some texts that, in any other way, Instagram would have covered up, however, thanks to the fact that Cristina shared the screenshot deleting the photo and name of the person writing it, Meta does not identify the words and therefore does not eliminate the post.
“I have published each woman with her own story and her own words. Spelling and some grammatical errors were touched upon. I wanted women’s phrases to be women’s phrases. “That portrays an enormous range of geographical, social, economic, cultural differences…”
Andrea Aldanajournalist and responsible for editing the stories, tells us how while he was advancing in his task, the vicarious trauma -which is a secondary trauma due to the impact of another person’s negative experience-, made an appearance during the process.
“Editing this book was hell. I started dreaming about the testimonies I read. In my dreams, faces of women I had seen on the street appeared. It is an extremely respectful, but stark work,” he commented at the presentation of the book.
Curiously, after the press conference and the photographer’s story, Today I dreamed that they accidentally filmed me naked and the video was leaked. I don’t know which of the two has been the cause, but such is the power of the subconscious. I can’t imagine what it has been like for Andrea.
She reiterates that Don’t publish my name “It’s not about monsters and villains, it’s a structure. It’s cultural and it can happen to all of us. Nowhere are women safe. of sexual violence”.
The bravery of Spanish #MeToo
Perhaps, in comparison to what happened in Hollywood with the #MeToo movement, as well as the impact internationally, it seems that within our borders there has been a decaffeinated version.
Regarding this criticism “that in Spain we were doing a soft #Metoo, we need our rhythms. To denounce something you have to know what to report“, explains Fallarás. Hence the importance of this solid and common story of what we call sexual violence.
Furthermore, as you remember Zinnia Quirós, from Acción Comadres“We each have our times, moments and spaces. Let’s respect the times of the victimswhat we want to say and how we want to say it.
And he adds: “There is no obligation for women to report in the pertinent legal instances. “No one has the power to decide what each woman wants or doesn’t want to do.”
Although, according to the activist, the controversy over women’s testimonies has a deeper explanation: “What is bothering is not that we suffer sexual violence, is that we tell it. The problem is when we make it public. The focus is on them. “This is a turning point and that’s why there is so much fear.”
What is bothering is not that we suffer sexual violence, it is that we tell about it
The existence of an archive of these characteristics is essential for two reasons that Cristina explains: “The first generates identification mechanismson the other hand, modifies our way of narrating ourselves and teaches us to narrate ourselves. We women have never had the necessary tools to tell our lives. It is in characters told by men where we have looked at ourselves. Now we can see ourselves in the stories of otherssomething effective and irrefutable”.
“It is no coincidence that when we have channels to tell stories, the first thing we want to tell is the violence received. And it is even less coincidental that the first wave, which was about violence in general and with our name and face, does not generate the horror of generating an archive of violence sexual. There is an attempt to reconstruct the silence denying the validity of everything that until now was valid, the hashtagthe networks, the publication of a book…”, concludes the journalist.
Currently, Cristina Fallarás has thousands of unread stories in your Instagram inbox. every five minutes receives a new story of sexual violence.
the book Don’t publish my name (Siglo XXI, 2024) is on sale in bookstores and the profits from Authors’ Rights will be allocated entirely to the creation of spaces and programs that allow women to give a voice against sexual violence through non-spirited association. profit Comadres Action.
#importance #story #sexual #violence
