March, 2020 Newsletter

Let’s celebrate our successes. I want to stay positive this month. The Coronavirus is enough of a downer and there have been successes for women, not enough to change the world but small baby steps toward a better world for all women.

Duffy’s Story

Duffy

Duffy, the Welsh singer/songwriter who appeared on the scene in 2008 with Mercy, a song of lost love and longing, her most famous song to date had a little trouble handling her sudden fame, not an uncommon problem for performers, but then she just plumb dropped off the face of the earth. She disappeared –  became a ghost for 9 years. She had this to share recently on Instagram.

“The truth is, and please trust me I am OK and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days. Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There’s no light way to say it. But I can tell you in the last decade, the thousands and thousands of days I committed to wanting to feel the sunshine in my heart again, the sun does now shine.”

It’s kind of a blatant way for her to share the reason behind her disappearance but sometimes it’s like that. I’ve seen women suddenly blurt out that they were raped in the middle of a meeting. It’s not at all an unusual occurrence. I’ve done it. I’ll want to share with people I think are my friends. I’ll want them to be quiet a minute, to listen to me because the story of the rape is swelling in my brain, a pot ready to boil over. If I don’t tell, I’ll explode. People seem to be  chattering about nothing at such times and I want to tell them to Shut up. This event is part of who I am. I want to trust – to confide – to be honest – and the only way I can get it out is to just to blurt it out in any way I can. I need, more than anything, to know how people will react. It’s make it or break it time. Why must I live with the secret? Who made that rule?

She returns with Something Beautiful, another song of love from her soon to be out album. In the song she asks her man to understand why she’s scared and hesitant, why she finds it hard to take the first steps to his love and why she is left only dreaming of the possibility of something good between them.

I hope she can make lemonade out of the lemons given her by life. She’s trying. Read the lyrics of Something Beautiful. She’s telling us how she feels. She needs for us to know. Thank you, Duffy, for your courage. Thanks for returning and for sharing your beauty, your talent, and your hard-won wisdom. We missed you. Welcome back.

Victim Statements from Harvey Weinstein’s Sentencing

Jessica Mann and Miriam Haley

One of the few ways a victim has of impressing the court and ultimately the public with the gravity and intensity of the crime committed against her is the victim’s impact statement given usually at a sentencing hearing. The defense has ways of not allowing this information to be exposed during the trial proper. Centuries of thought have gone into protecting the accused of anything that would be prejudicial to his case. If equal thought had gone into protecting the rape victim, or the accuser as the defense wants her to be seen, we wouldn’t have the problem we have today.

That’s why both Jessica Mann and Miriam Haley are to be congratulated on their moving statements at the sentencing trial of the infamous Harvey Weinstein. You can read their statements here. I’m particularly happy that Jessica Mann’s statement reads almost like a thesis on Tonic Immobility. Many women, maybe as many 75% of women1See Tonic Immobility during sexual assault-a common reaction predicting post-traumatic stress disorder and social depression in the post on Tonic Immobility. go into tonic immobility without realizing what happens. Learning about it can relieve the guilt and shame carried for decades. It’s like magic when the victim realizes that it’s not true that she must have secretly enjoyed it because, if she didn’t want to be raped, she would have fought. This is the logic many rapists and rape apologists use as a defense. The defense is simply and clearly wrong-headed. The word desperately needs to get out there so thank you Jessica for your statement. You will help numerous women in their recovery. Congratulations to both Jessica Mann and Miriam Haley.

Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein

by Kat Jayne from Pexels

Rebecca Solnit, my favorite essayist, has always been concerned with stories, meaning the way an event is interpreted. There’s a deep divide now in America in how an event is perceived and it’s never been more apparent. Look at the difference in the ways Fox news interprets President Trump’s pronouncements and the way The New York Times, The Guardian and the Washington Post interprets them. Where’s the truth. We in America find our truth in party loyalty.

A review of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, Recollections of My Nonexistence, notes that “her work has become increasingly concerned with stories: who gets to tell theirs, whose are given airtime, whose discredited, or erased so comprehensively that we do not even notice they are missing.” Solnit and I appear to be obsessing about the same phenomenon. I’d say she’s influencing me but it’s more than that. She speaks for me in beautiful, well-honed prose.

An essay in in Lit Hub explored this notion of who tells the story using Weinstein as a theme. She writes:

“He sat like a malevolent god, deciding whose voice and vision would live and whose would die, or like a king with courtiers to produce this story in a shower of money and networking and to kill this other story with nondisclosure agreements that also required showers of money, sometimes directly out of his business-partner brother’s pocket to keep them off the company records, or he spent political capital to persecute and discredit the women who had stories of what he had done, and to drive them out of their profession, their vocation, and their living, to push them over a cliff at the bottom of which was isolation and inaudibility.”

Weinstein, the male god, writes the history, tells the story he wants to tell, spins it to suit his own ego, and, if there is no one saying anything else, it stands. Did you know that NDA’s, [Non-Disclosure Agreements], even prohibit the woman from telling a therapist or her family what happened? I’m appalled that this is true. The story is a forced story and it ends up being Weinstein’s story.

I’ve often struggled with this and I fear now for our country, not just for women who have no voice. News seems to be propaganda of one side or another and news today will become the history our children learn tomorrow. Despair is ready to grab me and I have to fight it.

I’m trying to concentrate on what is good and where we have won. The Weinstein battle was a win on many counts and I’m grateful. First and foremost, he actually went to jail, to rich people’s jail but jail none-the-less. His accusers weren’t perfect victims. They were human but they still were able to make themselves believed. That’s the second victory. Weinstein’s case is now case law and will be considered next time there is a similar case. That’s the third win. This is a move forward and we have to move forward. There’s no going back.