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My So-Called 'Post-Feminist' Life in Arts and Letters
So. Let's rewind and take a look at my so-called post-feminist life in arts and letters.
Born in 1966, I came of age at the dawn of a revolution. The past was gone; we would move on and get over it! Except getting over it, as it turns out, takes more than an ashcan full of bras and access to the pill. It takes years—decades even. My whole life, in fact, and still counting. Nixon signed Title IX in 1972, when I was 6, but only the girls born many years after me got to reap its rewards. Who knows? Instead of a novelist, I might have become a really short, nebbishy soccer player.
Fast-forward to 1988: I am raped by an acquaintance the night before my graduation from college. The next morning, before donning cap and gown, I stumble into the University Health Services building to report the crime. I'm advised not to press charges. "They'll smear you," I'm told by the female psychologist assigned to my case. I don't want to be smeared. I've got a life to live. Twenty-five years later, while watching CNN lament the effects of the Steubenville rape on two promising lives—the rapists', not the victim's—I'll hold two competing thoughts: nothing has changed; I wish I'd been braver. I decide to Google my rapist's name, something I've never done in the quarter-century since the crime. His promise, I note, has been duly fulfilled. He's successful. He's married—to a woman who recently spoke on a "Lean In" panel with Sheryl Sandberg.
Because life's like that.
Let's head on over to 1989. I'm a 23-year-old war photographer, on the eve of my first professional exhibit at the inaugural Visa Pour l'Image Perpignan photo festival. I share this honor with photojournalism heavyweights Sebastião Salgado and Jim Nachtwey. They and all the other men—except the identical Turnley twins, who are paired for obvious reasons—are given solo exhibits. I share mine with another female on the slate that year, Alexandra Avakian. Ours is called "Les Deux Femmes Sur le Front," which translates as "The Two Women on the Front Lines." Of the twenty-six photographers featured in that first festival, we are the sole women.
<snip>
The past is not gone. Or as Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Until it is, we should not be expected to get over it.
http://www.thenation.com/article/173743/my-so-called-post-feminist-life-arts-and-letters?page=0,0
12 replies
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http://www.today.com/news/gabby-reece-women-being-submissive-sign-strength-1C9322181
oh brother... I guess Gabby needs money.
ETA: The story was prominently displayed on the main pages. It has already disappeared.
oh brother... I guess Gabby needs money.
ETA: The story was prominently displayed on the main pages. It has already disappeared.
I have been telling friends for years, when they are just SURE that THEIR marriage to their philandering jerk will be different. I don't understand why that one is so hard to accept.
(forget the movie (suposedly a comedy), back in the 60's probably, where a woman is talking to her friends about her upcoming divorce, on grounds of adultery. the question was, "how did you find out". she describes a hang-up phone call in the middle of the night, and says that was when she knew. when asked how, she said, "because that's how I got him from his first wife"
