Writer and committed citizen, the author taught literature at college, she is president of the governing board of an elementary school and member of the editorial board of Quebec letters. She co-edited and co-wrote the collective work Shock treatments and tarts. Critical assessment of the management of COVID-19 in Quebec (All in all).
When she received the Oscar for Best Adaptation for Women Talking (This what they say), on March 12, Sarah Polley uttered these words: “I thank the Academy for not being mortally offended by a film that puts the words ‘women’ and ‘speak’ so close together. other. Why, today, are we still so afraid of women who speak out? Why are we still trying to silence them?
Women who speak out in the media are regularly dragged through the mud, even defamed, by columnists (and columnists!) who very often cry ironically cancel culture “. As soon as a woman tugs on the patriarchy’s little wool under which they are warm, they denigrate her, cry victimization, attack her, name her or organize themselves so that she is very recognizable. Worse, they unleash their dogs, who curse these women and gnaw the bone until they are more thirsty, hungrier. Even more unacceptable, the pack leaders enjoy the spectacle and congratulate themselves when the objective pursued occurs: to reduce women – brilliant, articulate and most often progressive – to silence.
Because it is often on this option that women fall back by default to recover from this surge of hatred that is inscribed in their bodies and makes them tremble when they try to take back the keyboard. They close their Twitter account, space out their speeches, fade away – temporarily or for good.
Women Talking cruelly echoes them.
Discovering that they had been drugged without their knowledge and then raped for years, the women told by Sarah Polley and Miriam Toews discuss three options in community: stay and shut up, stay and rebel, leave (with their children). Although the action is set in a Mennonite community, these physical rapes are obviously a symbolic representation of patriarchal violence of any kind. And these are obvious in certain media, which endorse this hatred rolled in powdered sugar.
Because it may well be coated in concepts that over-intellectualize it, when you scratch under bombastic terms and stylistic pirouettes, it is always and already just that, hatred. Barely watered down misogyny, racism, transphobia, xenophobia; hatred, towards women, racialized, trans, immigrant people.
Women at the crossroads of oppressions, even when they highlight concrete facts and unassailable statistics, are insulted beyond measure, especially by the right. But how could this right, which persists in discrediting them, be less “militant” than what it accuses them of? The Overton window (or discourse window) has shifted to this pole to such an extent that everything a little to the left of its very relative center is taxed with militancy, whereas there is no question, the most of the time, to defend the dignity of all humans, from missing Indigenous women to hockey players who are abused because of the toxic masculinity of their environment.
Silence and Erase
In 2021, UNESCO unveiled the results of an extensive study, conducted in 25 countries. This demonstrated that women journalists, everywhere in the world, were more than ever the prey to attacks, the intention of which was to denigrate, humiliate and frighten them; to discredit them, while undermining trust in journalism and facts; and to chill their active participation in public debates.
Five years earlier, The Guardian had carried out an exhaustive analysis of the comments left on its site since 2006. The British daily had discovered that of the ten most attacked journalists, eight were women (four white, four non-white) and two were black men. Two women and one man were gay, one woman was Muslim and one was Jewish. And who were the ten least attacked journalists? Men. All, without exception. However, they are generally the ones who shout the loudest at the crime of lèse-majesté and who multiply the personal attacks.
What is worrying is that these are not isolated facts. Guylaine Maroist and Léa Clermont-Dion, whose courage to name is inspiring, demonstrated this well in I salute you bitchthe wide distribution of which gives hope… Misogyny is organised, one need only take a look at what is happening with the right in the United States to be convinced of this.
Historically, in our southern neighbours, this political arm has used talk radio to promote its theses, Rush Limbaugh at the fore. Unfortunately, it worked out well. Here, Quebec radio stations have fueled animosities against the Muslim community, women and more, as Dominique Payette eloquently illustrates in The bullies and the bug (Lux), and we expose more and more the cogs used by certain chroniclers who rarely miss an opportunity to add a venomous log to the stove of the “anti-woke” crusade and who attack it, slyly or head-on, to some of their media colleagues.
For a less bleak future
This week in Florida, a year after enacting a law that bans abortions beyond 15 weeks of pregnancy even in cases of rape, Governor Ron DeSantis pulled a new rabbit out of his liberticidal hat: banning education on menstrual cycles at school before 11-12 years old, preventing even little girls having their period earlier from talking about it with their teachers.
This adds to a long list of bills dreamed up by Republicans in this state, ranging from requiring children in the classroom to be referred to by the pronouns that match their gender assigned at birth to removing gender studies majors, eliminating hiring diversity and inclusion policies, and extending the ban on talking about gender and sexuality to eighth grade at school. Reminds you of something?
“Where I’m from, where your mother is from, we didn’t talk about our bodies. So when something happened, we had no words to name it. And without language to name it, there was only silence, gaping”, says the protagonist in Women Talking.
To dispossess girls and women of language, to deprive them of speech, is to deprive them of their agency. It means resolving them to choose between remaining silent or fleeing, when there remains a third way: to rebel, by forming a common front.