by Fine Art Photograph Mathilde Oscar, Le Cri
"Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty. I’m grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless."
Your credibility arises in part from how your society perceives people like you, and we have seen over and over again that no matter how credible some women are by supposedly objective standards reinforced by evidence and witnesses and well-documented patterns, they will not be believed by people committed to protecting men and their privileges. The very definition of women under patriarchy is designed to justify inequality, including inequality of credibility.
To have a voice means not just the animal capacity to utter sounds but the ability to participate fully in the conversations that shape your society, your relations to others, and your own life. There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence.
Audibility means that you can be heard, that you have not been pressed into silence or kept out of the arenas in which you can speak or write (or denied the education to do so—or, in the age of social media, harassed and threatened and driven off the platform, as so many have).
Credibility means that when you get into those arenas, people are willing to believe you, by which I don’t mean that women never lie, but that stories should be measured on their own terms and context, rather than patriarchy’s insistence that women are categorically unqualified to speak, emotional rather than rational, vindictive, incoherent, delusional, manipulative, unfit to be heeded—those things often shouted over a woman in the process of saying something challenging (though now death threats are used as a shortcut, and some of those threats are carried out, notably with women who leave their abusers, because silencing can be conversational or it can be premeditated murder).
To be a person of consequence is to matter. If you matter, you have rights, and your words serve those rights and give you the power to bear witness, make agreements, set boundaries. If you have consequence, your words possess the authority to determine what does and does not happen to you, the power that underlies the concept of consent as part of equality and self-determination.
Sexual assault can only thrive in situations of unequal audibility, credibility, and consequence. This, far more than any other disparity, is the precondition for epidemic gender violence.
Excerpts from Meditations in an Emergency by Rebecca Solnit
"Americans are coming together over a shared fear. We know people living in fear. A higher percentage of people know the fear around what will happen to their children, their parents, their friends. We live in fear of being hurt while helping others. We live in fear of having more rights taken away. We live in fear of billionaires dictating our lives thinking they have our backs when what they do well is acquire money, sometimes ours, to do with what they will.
Those that feel powerless are watching the powerful. The powerful listen to each other. The tide will continue to turn as the powerless feel more disconnected and less in control of what their lives could be like.
The powerful won’t listen until they feel powerless.
Keith Kron
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