Good morning,
How are you doing? “The best age is the one you have, the one you reach, because it’s a chance to be alive.” I really enjoyed reading your emails in response to last week’s newsletter. Between the birthday congratulations – for which I thank you very much, it’s really wonderful to always find a response to this newsletter – you addressed me with very kind or very wise lines, also telling me things about yourself. Like the one I started with. Or like that of another reader who told me that she had recently turned 82: “On the inside, I’m not old, on the outside, I won’t tell you.
You told me about your time across different decades, learning and fun. How wonderful it is to turn 50 and move to the countryside, as you always wanted. Or managing to separate at almost 60 and knowing that there is still much to do. “Always, at any age, it is time to begin…and also to end,” Charo wrote to me, who said that some indigenous peoples had a very different vision of existence: instead of seeing life as rivers, our Western view – they see it as a circle, a continuum.
Audre Lorde said in a text that I highly recommend (it is currently in the compilation ‘Sister, Another’, published by Horas y Horas) that at the origin of women’s silence are the faces of each person’s fears: the fear of being belittled, censored, judged, recognized, challenged, annihilated… If we have done anything in the last decade, it is to break this silence in a way unknown until now, also because that we have to do it with tools that we didn’t have before. . they existed or they were not in our hands. Since the outbreak of the Errejón affair, we have witnessed a multiplication of profiles on networks that publish testimonies of women concerning harassment, sexual assault or sexist situations in general. We started doing this in Micromachisms In 2014, the blog Everyday Sexism did it, it happened with MeToo, with ‘la manada’, with Cuéntalo or with Se Acabó that the players of the football team launched.
The premise of this phenomenon is not so much the complaint, understood as a judicial system, as the word: women are no longer as silent as before about the experiences and attacks they suffer. Talking is the way to break with guilt and also with the idea that what is happening to us is exceptional. The collective breaking of silence over the last decade has more to do with with relief and visibilitywith the fight against the fear of speaking, as well as with the search for criminal sanctions, even if it is ultimately these which take on the most importance. This coexists with concrete indications, with the need to repair the damage suffered, with the difficulty of knowing what we do with all this, and with debates on the way in which testimonies, complaints, channels for demanding responsibilities when necessary and guarantees for all.
Lorde said: “We will never stop being afraid of visibility, of the cold light of scrutiny and, perhaps, of being judged, of feeling pain, of death. But we have been through all these things except death, and we have done it in silence. Every moment I remind myself that even if I had been born mute or had kept a lifelong oath of silence to feel safer, I would have suffered anyway and still died.
a sentence
The gynecologists at the hospital treated me very well, they were very empathetic, but the way the process goes makes you feel like you’re doing something horrible and you feel judged. It seems that by not doing it at the hospital they wanted to hide it. At that point you are so devastated by your own situation that they tell you it can’t be here and you don’t even fight, but you feel hopeless. »
Suzanne
— Doctor who couldn’t perform an abortion in his own hospital
The new law on sexual and reproductive health has been in force for a year and eight months, prioritizing public centers and regulating conscientious objection. However, figures and personal testimonies show that the reality is still different. My colleague Marta Borraz wrote this report on women expelled from public hospitals who ultimately had to terminate their pregnancies, also for medical reasons, in private clinics.
You might be interested
- There are still problems with the women’s soccer team. Coach Montse Tomé didn’t call to Jenni Hermoso, Irene Paredes and Misa Rodríguez for the next matches and some sports journalists warn against the meaning of this decision.
- Sexual assault is an “endemic problem” for women who walk the Camino de Santiago alone. This report collects several testimonies.
- “Shame is a very powerful driver of the patriarchal system which locks women into the feeling of their own imperfection or inadequacy. It’s a way of marking them, of reminding them that it will never be enough. This interview to the French philosopher Camille Froidevaux-Metterie in El País.
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I say goodbye with this song that my mother sent me today and which bears our name: ‘Ana and the birds’, by Christine Rosenvinge.
Hug, Ana
