If we relate what has happened to us and continues to happen to us, we are perfidious. informerseven though we don’t give names or talk about anyone other than ourselves, we have enough. “Go to the courts, if you have something to report,” barks the pack. If we go to court, we become stoning fodder, our lives, our privacy, our customs are reviewed, we are judged and we end up being to blame for having been raped. To those who have doubts, let them track what was published on networks about Elisa Mouliaathe complainant Errejón. Of course, if anyone else was thinking of filing a complaint, I wouldn’t be surprised if they backed out. In reality, whatever we do, the punishment will fall on us, for the simple reason that We are touching the most sacred thing in the system: silence about sexual violence constant, ubiquitous, habitual against women.
It’s been a week since Errejón presented her resignation and since then I have been a liar, an informer, a scourge of lynching, a millionaire, an abuser, taking advantage of other people’s evil to profit, capable of creating a book in three days and, above all, the culprit of all the crimes. evils of innocent men. Poor things. They make their fuss, they gasp like fish out of water, they shout, without understanding that it is a vain effort. They’re not going to silence us, not anymore. They can silence one, even a group, but once the silence is broken, through that gap we will all come out to tell each other. Because that is what we are doing: telling what they have done to us and do to us. No more no less, look how horrible it is, right? That’s what I’m accused of. To me, and to all the women who, through me, by the thousands, recount the sexual assaults they suffered.
The question is not whether we do it on social networks or in the courts, in the newspapers or the police, in chats with colleagues or in street graffiti. What bothers them is that we do it, period. May we finally tear down this entire compact, historical, universal structure of brutal, imposed concealment, this submission of fierce silence in solitude. The problem is not, as the cheap theorists say now, that “a general lynching” is being unleashed against this or that man. Because the truth is that it is not happening. What does happen is a collective story, the chorus of everyone’s voices. AND It does not seem coincidental to me that, when women have finally been able to make our voices public, the first thing we narrate is violencemore specifically the sexual one. Because it is sexual violence that is at the very heart of our silencing.
We tell ourselves and we do it how and where we want. We could go that far. They say “We have to do pedagogy so that women report,” as if we were idiots. They say “You can’t report the violence and not go to the police,” as if we don’t know exactly what we’re doing. Their mouths are filled with “teachings” and commands for us, as if they were still in a position to infantilize us, to guide us, to return us to the gag. When a woman decides to tell about the sexual violence she has received, “go to a police station and report it” is nothing more than a way of trying—they poke a bone—to cover her mouth. Because? If they are not complaints but testimonies, why should we hide them? What do you see in our stories that irritates you to the point of hatred? When you read all the rapes, harassment, sexual assaults in childhood, in adolescence, in marriage, in circles of friends, at work, when you are faced with that, simply in our history, what do you see? What are you afraid of, gentlemen?
#afraid #gentlemen
