Gender Notions: "What She Said"
By Dalia Gonzalez
By Dalia Gonzalez
Recently I was reading a magazine profile on Mia Farrow and halfway through the article, it delved into the Woody Allen situation with Farrow's daughters. It was jarring at first that the article switched focus in the middle of this amazing article on this intelligent activist who is doing things separate from this event in her own life. It was borderline sad that this author felt he needed to bring up the past. And these weren't even the brightest moments of this family's past.
The focus on Dylan Farrow's numerous testimony and conversations over the years about what happened made me think of how America, as a society, doesn't take what women say at face value. A few days before the Academy Awards this year, when Woody Allen was receiving a lifetime achievement award, the media was again talking about the allegations and court time. And immediately, people on social networks everywhere were quick to come to Allen's side, saying they hoped it wasn't true and how sad and shocking it was to hear about this all over again.
I wrote recently about my hair and how people always wanted to know when I was going to let it grow out. And that's so low on the problematic scale. Like when a woman says she doesn't plan for children or marriage, the first response is usually "you'll change your mind." A friend of mine was told by her mother that just having a job wasn't good enough for women anymore. That instead, they must also want a family of their own and a partner through it all to be considered a true adult woman. Women everywhere have their emotions dismissed as her "time of the month" and her decisions as a "change of her mind." Never mind that the male body also goes through a hormone cycle as well. Never mind that the woman has probably been agonizing over her decision for days if not months or years. Whatever she just said isn't a real answer. This becomes problematic when the extremes are taken: when "no" cannot mean "no" as long as a woman is saying it. People raised to believe women are flighty and forgetful of very serious matters will slowly begin to ignore every example of a woman making a decision and override it.
In Dylan Farrow's case, she was forced to re-live moments she would have preferred to forget, because the doctors and lawyers examining her and her case were slow to believe that her story had any foundation to it. This is a ridiculous example, if only because this case pitted Farrow's word against Allen's, and if the professionals were going to be so quick to ignore a complete side of the case, a fair trial and examination of events would never occur.
But this sort of thing happens to women every day. More than half of sexual assault cases go unreported every year, and at least a third of those that are reported come forward despite the fact that our society is so quick to blame the victim for the crime instead of the perpetrator. Our society's "rape culture" as it has been coined, is systematically silencing our women and robbing them of their authority and their words of its power; forcing these secrets into the closet, where they don't help anyone, and for some women, eat away at their confidence later in life.
We like to pretend that the world we live in is brimming with equality and that anyone who doesn't realize how good they have it is otherwise ungrateful. The discussion on privilege that is exploding from Princeton student Tal Fortgang's essay/rant on people telling him to check his privilege prove that.
We need to channel our penchant to dismiss women as flighty into actively trusting in them. It's a vicious circle when a woman fears speaking up because people will lash out, dismiss her, or blame her instead of helping. Less women will be inclined to step forward in the future. And we move further from the equality that we really need to move forward as humanity. Let's second guess ourselves next time we hear about a woman stepping forward with something that might be ugly to hear, or that affects solely her life as decided by her. Because the reverse leads to less justice for the world at large, not just half our population.
