Quando vos disserem que o feminismo não serve para nada lembrem-se disto

E já que falamos de textos que fale a pena ler, fica também a referência a ESTE que a Rebeca Solnit escreveu para o The Guardian. 

Para quem não sabe, a Rebeca Solnit é uma investigadora e activista americana, que se debruça sobre vários temas importantes, entre os quais o feminismo e a violência sobre as mulheres. Ficou muito conhecida pelo livro As Coisas que os Homens Me Explicam. 

Neste texto Rebeca Solnit recorda como há ainda poucas décadas, o mundo parecia olhar indiferente para os casos de abuso sobre as mulheres e de abuso de menores. Histórias que todos conheciam aconteciam às claras, os homens vangloriavam-se dos seus casos e a sociedade encolhia os ombros. Esta cultura patriarcal era sancionada e vangloriada por Hollywood. E se os famosos podiam, quem éramos nós para dizer que não podia ser? Foi assim até há muito pouco tempo. O #metoo aconteceu apenas em 2017. E mesmo assim ainda são muitos os que não perceberam que os tempos mudaram e que já não podem agir como antigamente. Que as mulheres já não aceitam.

 

Shocked by Epstein’s birthday book? That culture was everywhere before feminism

(...) The last Woody Allen movie I ever saw was Manhattan, in which he cast himself as more or less himself, a dweeb in his mid-40s, dating a high school student played by Mariel Hemingway. She was my age, 17, and I was only too familiar with creeps, and the movie creeped me out, even though it was only long afterward that I read that she said he was at the time pressuring her to get sexually involved with him in real life.

Manhattan came out in 1979; two years earlier Roman Polanski, on the pretext that he was taking photographs for French Vogue, got a 13-year-old girl to come alone to a house, where he drugged and raped her vaginally and anally. The probation officer assigned to him wrote: “There was some indication that circumstances were provocative, that there was some permissiveness by the mother,” and “that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing”. In her own account, the girl had said no repeatedly and even pretended to have an asthma attack to try to dissuade him, but the probation officer was of his era and only too willing to blame a drugged child. That was normal then.

Movies of the 1970s normalized all this. Jodie Foster was 12 when she played a prostitute in Taxi Driver. In Pretty Baby, an 11-year-old Brooke Shields played another prostitute in quaint New Orleans whose virginity is auctioned off, and who appears nude in some scenes, as she did in a Playboy Magazine special “sugar and spice” issue at age 10. In Milos Forman’s 1971 Taking Off, the runaway 15-year-old daughter of the protagonist reappears with a rock star boyfriend. Groupie culture included more than a few children sleeping with rock stars; Interview Magazine recounts of one prominent groupie that she “lost her virginity at age 12 to Spirit guitarist Randy California. For a time, she was involved with Iggy Pop, who glorified their relationship in his 1996 song Look Away. I slept with Sable when she was 13 / Her parents were too rich to do anything.”

It was the 70s in which the soft-focus color photographs of nude and semi-clad pubescent girls of David Hamilton were normalized as coffee table books and posters. (...)

What happened between the 1970s I’ve described and the present is feminism: feminism that insisted that women were people endowed with rights, that sex, as distinct from rape, had to be something both parties desired, that consent had to be active and conscious, that all human interactions involve power and that the vast power differential between adult men and children meant that no such consent was possible.

It was feminism that exposed the ubiquity of child abuse, rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence, that denormalized these abuses that were so much part of patriarchal society. And still are, far too much, but the dismissive, permissive attitude of the past is past, at least in mainstream culture."