With the Epstein files putting misogyny in the news daily, some thoughts on feminism and three novels on the violence young women face.
Misogyny, sometimes, feels like an atmosphere; it is a taken for granted and largely accepted social dynamic. Even when I moved in vaguely progressive union circles, sexism and misogyny were rarely addressed in interpersonal relationships, even if we had a shiny new anti-sexual harassment training program. (A program I worked for.) This misogyny is not only what drove much of the violence detailed in the Epstein files; it is also the reason there has been little punishment or accountability and certainly not mass protests. After all, the men in these pages are billionaires, intelligentsia, elected officials, all getting rich while the rest of us are immiserated in the zero-sum game of capital. Misogyny is part and parcel of their entitlement, part of the class domination we are witnessing in the files and their handling.
Young women are particularly targeted, their age and class status making them vulnerable and desirable targets. After all, who will believe them? Thinking about young women and their experiences of misogyny is the inspiration behind my first issue of women with issues.
My newsletter's title comes from one of my most treasured books, Milkman by Anna Burns (2018). Milkman is about an eighteen year old young woman named middle sister (no one has real names in this book, really). Middle sister is being stalked by someone called Milkman, not to be confused with the real milkman, because this Milkman is (probably) a paramilitary man fond of using violence and coercion. Milkman slowly reduces middle sister’s life, taking away her ability to run, to go to class, and to live a normal life, controlling her for his own pleasure and objectives. He is everywhere and nowhere, and eventually she feels she has no choice to go with him, as a young woman who cannot challenge the status quo and survive. No one believes her when she tries to talk about what he's doing to her. She is entirely to blame; she is entirely unbelievable.
While almost everyone talks about Milkman in the context of the The Troubles, or the (largely male) conflict between a movement for Irish reunification and the colonial occupation by the British crown, very few people write about the novel’s feminist politics, at the level of form or content. In fact, most people overlook the role of feminism entirely for a nationalist framework. Feminism is not a national project, however, but an international one, something middle sister herself notices when she reports the women with issues are connected to an international movement.
Anyway, there are actual feminists in the book and these women are called:
women with issues
In middle sister’s world, in the mid 1970s, in the middle of extreme violence, being a feminist is a bad thing. These women with issues are spoken of poorly, their nickname obscuring the nature of their complaint, and are captured by the paramilitary men who can't decide whether to kill them or tar and feather them. “Issue” is a general word that covers many things: it could mean sexism, misogyny, or particular forms of violence like stalking or rape. It can also mean: housework, child rearing, emotional labor, movement work. But they crucially give middle sister a language for understanding that the battle being waged in their streets and their home isn't just colonial violence and that the violence middle sister experiences has an equal claim to reality. Their feminism is essential to her later being able to tell this story: otherwise, there would have been nothing remarkable about Milkman's campaign of terror. It would have simply been a natural expression of dominance. But the women with issues help middle sister understand that there is nothing natural her subordination.
The women with issues finally get driven out of town because they upset the paramilitaries and the so-called “traditional women” can’t be bothered to keep saving them. Though these women are ridiculed and not taken seriously, middle sister understands the loss. For when they leave, “that spelled the end of any outside issue woman with expansive worldviews coming to visit our totalitarian enclave.” That the town cannot accommodate feminist critique is not a commentary on the critique itself but on the failures of middle sister’s town.
Communicating feminist ideas so young women have the language to talk about the issues they face is more important than ever, especially as our world comes to resemble middle sister's totalitarian enclave. Equally important is creating a context in which young women are believed when they come forward. Failing to treat a young woman's testimony as valid is a form of epistemic violence that Kristie Dotson calls "testimonial quieting," when a speaker is not treated as a knower by her audience. This is something girls and women face across their entire lives. Especially for girls, it is a common experience to have an adult tell you that the boy isn't being mean; he just likes you. Another variation: it wasn't rape, it was just a misunderstanding. Constructions like these, that take away our ability to name our reality, follow us through our lives: our testimony is always a misapprehension of a different reality, a reality defined by men's access and entitlement to our subjectivity and body.
Here are three books that can help lend shape and meaning to experiences of misogyny, epistemic violence, and male privilege as I've discussed them above. All of the books revolve around the problem of testimony and its truth, thematizing different ways in which women struggle over the meaning of their experience in a social context that asks them to bury what they've experienced.
three books
The first is obviously Milkman. If you haven’t read it before, I hope my summary entices you. Middle sister is very funny but she is also very astute in her observations. I think Burns pulls off an amazing literary tactic that literary scholar Alan Palmer calls “intermental thought” where middle sister is often narrating how her town thinks. Eliot uses this often in Middlemarch. This approach helps us understand the power of common sense, its relationship to violence, and its ability to deprive individuals of a much needed voice.
kim jiyoung, born 1982 by cho-nam joo
My next recommendation is Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by South Korean author Cho Nam-Joo. This book devastated me the first time I read it. The book is composed of Kim Jiyoung's story of her life, as told to a male therapist. In its form, it raises the question of where women have the ability to tell their stories and what audiences are available to them. Through the privacy of a therapy session, Kim Jiyoung's story is contained. Her therapist is thoroughly unmoved by her story of sexual harassment, an incompetent husband who pushes her out of the work force to have children, and, finally, a mental breakdown when the demands of being a woman in a sexist society finally become too much.
Finally, A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux. Despite its sometimes harrowing content, this book is a masterpiece in accounting for the violence experienced by Ernaux’s younger self. A camp counselor seduces younger Annie and she bears the consequences. While Ernaux shies away from calling the experience sexual assault, I have no problem doing so, especially given the power dynamics and her experiences of dissociation. The central problem of the book is older, feminist Ernaux writing about her younger self in a different time and place. How can she tell the story now?
to conclude
All of these books feature young women who experience violence in their particular place and time. They all point to an important feminist insight: though these young women have experienced violence, each of them, as older women, turns to writing to make something of that experience. Writing is treated as a form of empowerment and, out of this wound, a self emerges. I make this observation because these books take the misogyny of their culture and turn it around, accusing their environments and cultivating a sense of self that stands apart from the violence. This is an achieved perspective, not an inherent one. And it is hard-earned.
till next time
women with issues, issue 2 will come out on International Women's Day! It'll be all about international strikes and solidarity in the feminist movement, with some literature to dig into.
#withyou,
kaelie
