//A Cyber Manifesto on Silence //
The fear of speaking becomes the platform for tyrants and the like.
There is a saying from second wave feminists that goes something like this:
The personal is political.
I always enjoyed this quote from an aloof, objective, smash the patriarchy lens type of way. As of late, like today, it has taken on new meaning. I often think about what is a feminist life as someone who is a technologist and wanting to build feminist communities and teams where anyone can thrive in the self-actualization of their whole self. Truth be told, I at times felt the motto was a bit dated. A time of course when American women were fighting for the right to make decisions about their bodies. I was born after this right was won, so the emotional and cultural undertones were lost on me as third wave feminism began to critique the white women of the past. I began to look at figures such as Gloria Steinem as dinosaur feminists.
Today though. Today, my beloved country, America, said goodbye to a pussy grabbing tyrant. My feminist embers feel vindicated after smouldering under this unimaginable administration for the past four years. The patriarchy is being smashed with the first woman Vice President Elect. It never felt so good to walk on broken glass. Days as historical as this, I savor. Letting that somber and smoky victory roll around my chest until I feel a drunken lightness within my heart I might mistake for hope. I can’t express what it means to see the country I believe in with the brim stone fire of a bible thumping zealot, course correct towards the values I would die for: Feminism. Equality. Democracy. — “E pluribus unum”.
I never felt this imagery would overlap into my personal life and that quote from those feminists I enjoyed from a safely aloof distance, intersect in a deeply raw and personal way. As I celebrate the end of this political tyrant, I grieve the letting go of another in my personal life.
These last four years of constant political media consumption, diversity and inclusion committees, and many heated debates about what causes the rise of an economic populist would be a waste if I didn’t walk away from the circus without a lesson. The lesson is this:
Staying silent about abusers is what empowers their space
Some are easy to spot via their crass statements like “grab them by the pussy” and others, like my abuser, are strategic feminists who understand image and media, decide to develop a platform for domestic violence in their work, specifically serving a very vulnerable and marginalized group of people from the LGBTQIA+ community after being forced to leave my apartment during a pandemic because they couldn’t stop assaulting me. After, when they found a therapist and promised they wouldn’t do it again, did it again. We know this trope. Only this time I recorded the assault on video. Not to share with anyone because restorative justice isn’t about shaming but to remind myself, that yes, it really was that bad. No I didn’t make it up. It’s not lost on me, many Americans are feeling this way about these last four years. All I can say is, no you didn’t make it up and yes it was that bad.
These acts of violence committed against one’s person-hood with the motivation to have power over rather than power with, (politically or personally) are parts we don’t get back. Sometimes the whole even ceases to exist. This is the frightening nature of abuse within any system. Staying silent as those stolen pieces of your humanity become bricks for the platforms of dictators, abusers and the like to stand on. Silence enables a system that gives power to those who need your complicit silence to function. A non verbal contract of sorts.
To speak one’s truth is the fiercest and bravest thing one can do because the personal is political. As my beautiful country begins to nourish her battered heart and a new dawn rises in her horizon, I too, find myself in solidarity because the political, as it turns out — is also personal.
