Friday Roundup: Splitting the World Open
In the newsletter I sent out this past week, I began with this quote from the late feminist poet, Muriel Rukeyser:
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”
This week’s Roundup links to a selection of articles, each of which represents a way that women are using their “power to” by simply telling the truth, which is so often the most difficult thing of all. And we are seeing the world split open as these women challenge millennia of gender-based oppression rooted in sexual abuse, assault, harassment, and even verbal disparagement of women. Check them out and share your thoughts. I’m especially interested to know whether you feel as I do that despite the pain of seeing and knowing these horrific acts, the fact that they are coming out in the open–the truth-telling–is splitting the world open in ways that ultimately are positive.
Statement/petition from Change.org to unite people around the world in support of the alleged rape victim of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Sign on!
French feminists could care less that Strauss-Kahn is a fellow countryman, and are protesting his actions, loud enough for the entire world to hear. Please check out the great protest pictures in this Gotham article.
INTENTIONING
Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women
Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good
The new book from Gloria Feldt about the future, taking the leadership lessons learned from this disruption and creating a better world for all through the power of intention.
Join the Nobel Women’s Initiative today by going to the UN Action Stop Rape Now website and download the sample letter asking your elected official for increased action against sexual violence in conflict.
For more information on rape as a weapon of war, please read this great article by NYC writer Anna Louie Sussman.
The response of the Women’s Media Center and many feminists around the country to Ed Shultz and his sexist remarks about Laura Ingraham is right on the money: men have no right to use sexist language to keep women in their place, regardless of their political affiliation.
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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The last link is broken, but it contains the correct link, so I found the article. One clueless commenter, obviously not having read even the title of the article, said,
Unfortunately, misogynist antics by “progressive” men are all too common. I vividly remember the sexist trashing directed at Hillary Clinton by Obama supporters, as well as that bizarre incident a month after the 2008 election of the picture that appeared on the Facebook site of Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, showing him with his hand on the breast of a lifesize cardboard cutout of Clinton, while a friend put a bottle of beer to her lips. The picture can still be found at the Washington Post blog 44. Needless to say, Favreau was not fired, and Democrats such as James Carville wondered what all the fuss was about.
Sometimes people just don’t know what they don’t know because they have never experienced it, because their privileged position did not allow them to empathize with it, or because the status quo is so ingrained culturally that even those who are oppressed by it can’t see it. That’s why when someone or ones finally recognize the injustice and say something about it, it feels like it splits the world open. Because actually it does create that kind of fundamental, disorienting change.