She Said: Feminism Persists, Part 1

This is part one of a two-part series. Over January and February, I read two feminist-centered books: What She Said by Elizabeth Renzetti (2024) and

Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit (2014). I also watched the 2022 film She Said.

Below are the words that poured from me immediately after.

Photo by Ono Kosuki from Pexels

Just in Case

A rape escape tutorial video came across my Tumblr feed several years ago with over 100,000 likes, comments, and reblogs. Many of the commenters expressed that they had wished they’d seen the video sooner: last month, last week, yesterday.

Tumblr is a social media site with an algorithm that can be turned off. It is not Facebook or Instagram or TikTok with their highly moderated For You pages. No, this video was merely making its rounds across dozens of blogs and inevitably found its way onto my feed. I committed the self-defensive moves to memory.

In twelfth grade, I wrote a paper and presentation on the sexualization of women and girls in the media. During the question period, a male student asked about the sexualization of men and boys in the media. I said something about it being more pervasive for women. After years of consideration, of ruminating back on that moment, I discovered a better answer; the issue does not have to involve you, a man, to be important, to be worthy of discussion. I shouldn’t have said women and girls face more sexualization in the media compared to men and boys. I should have said that’s not what we’re talking about.

In tenth grade, I started researching and watching martial arts and self-defense videos. I claimed it was for writing purposes, and it was. But it was also more than that. Like the Tumblr video, I committed these movements to memory too. Just in case, I thought, just in case. I was fifteen.

At eleven I received my first house key. I already knew how to hold it between my knuckles. How I, a child, came across this information I’m not certain. I don’t remember anyone talking about it with me and I don’t remember seeing it in any movies. I had only recently been allowed a Facebook account.

I was even younger, maybe eight or nine when my parents—in an offhand kind of way—told my sister and I that when we were older and we went to bars or started drinking we were to keep our hand over our drink at all times. If at any point we set that drink down and looked away from it, we were to order a new one. I didn’t understand this lesson at the time, yet somehow I knew it was important. I too committed this to memory. It is one of the key reasons I don’t drink and never have.

Over the years I’ve heard and read about all kinds of stories. True stories. Women getting run over, and ultimately killed, by a self-proclaimed ‘incel.’ Ex-boyfriends following through on Donald Trump’s aggressive suggestion to “grab em’ by the pussy,” and a woman needing to sleep with a pillow between her legs for a week. The city I live in has the highest rates of reported assaults in the country. A fact I have to feel grateful for because, at least, survivors are reporting.

All of this before I turned eighteen.

Rape culture, assault, harassment; it doesn’t only affect adult women. It affects girls. Children. All of the things a woman does to try to protect herself—crossing the street when a man is around, checking the back seat of a car, double checking the locks, holding keys between her fingers, not walking alone at night, or covering her drink with her hand—we learn not as women, but as girls.

All Around The World

I am Canadian. I’m not American. To see the election of a racist, misogynistic, hateful man as President, not once, but twice now; to see the overturning of Roe v. Wade; to see a doctor charged for performing an abortion on a ten-year-old rape victim; or how about the woman who recorded walking in New York and being catcalled a hundred times?; or the female reporter also being catcalled while reporting on the pervasiveness of sexual harassment on the street.

All this and more and we haven’t even left the continent. There are 197 countries on this planet and I don’t believe I’d be 100% safe in any of them.

A 2022 report from the United Nations concluded that “At the current rate of progress, it may take close to 300 years to achieve full gender equality,” (Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals).

In Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit references a 2000 Department of Justice report on sexual assault. She cites 322,230 annual rapes, 55,424 reports to the police, 26,271 arrests, and 7,007 convictions. Essentially, 12% of reports resulted in jail sentences.

In What She Said, Elizabeth Renzetti spoke to a Crown Attorney who shared she’d never successfully prosecuted an assault trial. I'm sure we all remember the Brock Turner case, wherein Turner received a six-month jail sentence and then was released after three months on “good behaviour.” Even when a conviction is served, it doesn’t guarantee justice.

A Reason To Hope

However, books and films, such as She Said, provide hope. They tell us that in the face of backlash and adversity there are women willing to stand up and speak up. They tell us that our stories matter, our words matter. She Said covers the story of the two female reporters (Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor) from the New York Times that exposed Harvey Weinstein’s extensive ledger of sexual harassment and assault against women over decades; from assistants to A-List actresses.

In my history books, this is a win. Progress toward equality may be slow (and even going backwards in some cases), but it is still progress. If time has taught us anything, it is that we, as women, will never give up or in. The people in power, world leaders, corporations…men…they can wipe our accomplishments, our contributions, our very existence from the face of the planet. Lucky for us, we see what’s not there, we see who is missing. We exist in the blank pages and in the white spaces between the lines. We need to keep sharing our stories. They cannot erase us all.