Hello,
How are you? “The best age is the one we have, the one we reach, because it is lucky to be alive.” I really liked reading your emails responding to last week’s newsletter. Between birthday congratulations – for which I thank you very much, it is truly wonderful to always find a response to this newsletter – you have given me very nice or very wise lines, also telling me things about you. Like the one I started with. Or like that of another reader who told me that she recently turned 82: “Inside I’m not old, on the outside I don’t tell you.”
You have told me about your time through different decades, about learning and enjoyment. About how wonderful it is to reach 50 and go live in the country, like you always wanted. Or managing to separate at almost 60 and knowing that there is still a lot to do. “Always, at any age, it is time to start… and also to finish,” Charo wrote to me, who said that some indigenous peoples had a very different vision of existence: instead of seeing life as rivers – our Western vision – they see it as a circle, a continuum.
Audre Lorde said in a text that I highly recommend (it is currently in the compilation ‘Sister, Another’, from the Horas y Horas publishing house) that at the origin of women’s silence are the faces of each one’s fears: the fear of being belittled, censored, judged, recognized, challenged, annihilated… If we have done anything in the last decade it is to break that silence in a way unknown until now, also because we have had tools to do it that we did not before. they existed or they were not in our hands. Since the Errejón case broke out, there have been a proliferation of profiles on networks that publish testimonies of women about harassment, sexual assault or sexist situations in general. We started doing it in Micromachismos In 2014, the blog Everyday Sexism did it, it happened with MeToo, with ‘la manada’, with Cuéntalo or with Se Acabó that the players of the soccer team started.
The premise of this phenomenon is not so much the complaint, understood as a judicial device, but the word: women are no longer as silent as before about the experiences and attacks we suffer. Talking is the way to break with guilt and also with the idea that what happens to us is exceptional. The collective breaking of the silence of the last decade has more to do with relief and visibilitywith the fight against the fear of speaking, than with the search for criminal punishments, although in the end these are the ones that take the most prominence. This coexists with concrete indications, with the need to repair the damage suffered, with the difficulty of knowing what we do with all this, and with debates about how testimonies, complaints, the channels to demand responsibilities when necessary and the guarantees for everyone.
Lorde said: “We will never stop being afraid of visibility, of the cold light of scrutiny and, perhaps, of being judged, of experiencing pain, of death. But we’ve been through all of those things, except for death, and we’ve done it in silence. At every moment I remind myself that even if I had been born mute, or had kept a lifelong oath of silence to feel safer, I would have suffered anyway and would still die.
a phrase
The gynecologists at the hospital treated me very well, they had a lot of empathy, but the way the process is it makes you feel like you are doing something horrible and you feel judged. It seems as if by not doing it at the hospital they wanted to hide it. At that moment you are so devastated by your own situation that they tell you that it can’t be here and you don’t even fight, but you feel hopeless.”
Susanna
— Doctor who could not abort in her own hospital
The new sexual and reproductive health law has been in force for one year and eight months, giving priority to public centers and regulating conscientious objection. However, figures and personal stories show that the reality is still different. My colleague Marta Borraz has written this report about women expelled from public hospitals who, finally, had to terminate their pregnancies, also for medical reasons, in private clinics.
You may be interested
- There is trouble again with the women’s soccer team. The coach Montse Tomé has not called to Jenni Hermoso, Irene Paredes and Misa Rodríguez for the next matches and some sports journalists are warning of the meaning of this decision.
- Sexual assaults are an “endemic problem” for women who walk the Camino de Santiago alone. This report collects several testimonies.
- “Shame is a very powerful driver of the patriarchal system to lock women in the feeling of their own imperfection or inadequacy. It is a way to mark them to remind them that it will never be enough.” This interview to the French philosopher Camille Froidevaux-Metterie in El País.
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I say goodbye with this song that my mother sent me today and that bears our name: ‘Ana and the birds’, by Christina Rosenvinge.
Hug, Ana
#Talking #beginning
