SILENCE, SPEECH, ACTION, VISION
By aurora linnea
Device to Elicit Silence: it is an iron frame like a cage enclosing her head, with a plate which, slid into the offending mouth, forces down an unruly tongue to stifle it. When she is clamorous, when her language scandalizes, when she curses authorities, when she is a bane to her husband. The tongue plate may be sharpened or spiked, so that her struggles to speak slash soft tissues, filling her mouth with blood. She drips spittle, drips blood. She is led through the town, she is tethered to the jailhouse wall, there to be “expos’d to the Scorne and Derision of the Rabble.” It is called the Scold’s Bridle. Dame’s Bridle, Gossip’s Bridle, Witch’s Bridle. In the 17th century a poor woman interrupts a church service to condemn the Archbishop for his past sexual use of her, and she is arrested, sentenced to spend Sunday after Sunday on the repentance stool, a quiet captive of the bridle.
Women do not have the right to speak. Free speech is a glorified principle in Western societies, in the United States most of all. It is written in the United States Constitution that “freedom of speech” is the right of individuals and the press, guaranteed protection from state interference. In writing it is there. But the Founding Fathers never wrote for women and they did not intend women to be included among the ranks of speakers; what those men wrote did not mean freedom for women then and it still does not. You may dismiss what I say next as pessimistic. My purpose in saying it is not to demoralize but only to disabuse us of our comforting illusions, that we might ground our efforts once and for all in reality. The reality is this: as long as men have power over women, women have no rights. The freest, most just society, if it is a society of male dominance, is neither free nor just for women. In the male-controlled, male-dominated patriarchal state, women’s rights are conditional. Compliance, deference, complicity in the reproduction of male power: these are the conditions, and men afford us privileges they politely pretend are our rights only to the extent that we fulfill them.
Women make deals with the men in power, women are allowed to say some things. We are allowed greater latitude in what we can say today than we’ve been granted in the past. Sometimes we are even listened to. It is not free speech.
In the male-controlled, male-dominated patriarchal state, men have the power to revoke the rights they pretend we have when we fail to comply, to defer, to do our part in sustaining their manmade systems. When we are disloyal. When we are clamorous and our language scandalizes and we curse male authorities for their tyranny, when in our outrage we make ourselves a bane. When we do not observe the etiquette that constrains women’s speech to a pre-fab prattle of niceties signifying nothing so much as our self-policed submission. When we stop lying for men. He demands to be revered as an honorable man. We decry him as a predator. He demands we defer to him as a woman. We know he’s not, and we say he’s a man. Then it’s “shut up, bitch,” and we’re back in the bridle, and we’re Philomela again with her tongue cut out by the King, her rapist, and we remember we have never been free.
I have observed that women speaking out today are shocked to discover themselves the victims of a terrorism designed to silence. It is a terrorism that includes deplatforming and cancellation, banishment from social media, ostracization, the loss of employment, slander, harassment, threats of rape and murder, even physical assaults by the foot soldeirs of male dominion. Women’s speech, when we speak for our sex, can be outlawed as “hate speech.” It is tempting to feel shocked by the unconcealed silencing underway, to experience it as a violation of one’s constitutional rights, and charge forth in impassioned defense of freedom of speech, supposedly ours. Feminist’s defenses of free speech are granted more weight than our defenses of women, to be sure. Rallying around free speech, we are recognized as fighting for an issue of real significance, a male ideal—something worth fighting for. Men can see the point of our struggles. What a relief, finally, to have our cause validated! But the silencing of women who denounce men’s tyranny is not, and has never been, a “free speech” problem. It is a male power problem. As Renee Gerlich writes, “Speech is not under attack, women are under attack. Speech is not being harassed and threatened, women are being harassed and threatened.” By shifting the focus of our struggle from freeing women from male domination to a defense of free speech in the abstract, I fear our ultimate recompense will be more freedoms and more rights for men. It is not men’s speech being smothered, after all. Even now the ACLU doggedly campaigns to enshrine “revenge porn” as a form of male speech protected under the First Amendment.
Device to Elicit Silence: there are 33 installations in the “Gag Factor” pornographic film series. Two years running, in 2003 and again in 2004, “Gag Factor” received the AVN (Adult Video News) Award for “Best Oral-Themed Series.” Robert Jensen describes a scene from “Gag Factor #10.” A woman is berating her husband, playing the part of the classic nasty nagging wife, universally abhorred. The more she speaks, the more enraged the husband becomes. Cut to the woman on her knees, the man standing upright above her. He yells for her to SHUT THE FUCK UP, he grabs her hair, he forces his penis into her mouth. The woman is silent. “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” he mocks her, after ejaculating into her mouth. She is silent. Searching a porn site for gag-themed videos, I am directed to the “Gagged Women List,” its tagline: “Enjoy the silence!” Gagging is a pornographic genre incorporating a rich diversity of subtypes, I gather. Ball gags, tape gagging, gagged with panties, glove gagging, hand-smother, cleave gagging, hanky gagging…
Breaking silence is an established tradition in feminist activism, a response to the “women should be seen and not heard” mandates passed down through millennia of patriarchy. Women were to “learn in silence, with all subjection,” while men spoke for us. God the Father said so, and he, unlike women, had a say in these matters. At a panel entitled “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” held in 1977, Adrienne Rich inventoried the many species of silence through which women’s voices must penetrate. Namelessness, denial, secrets, omission. Lying. Our silences are legion, yet Rich told women they had only two choices: to collude with silence, or to revolt against it. Speaking on the same panel, Audre Lorde acknowledged the fear that muzzles women. Yet she made clear that silence does not alleviate fear, but merely extends it through a woman’s life like a chronic illness until death arrives to annul it; she entreated the women assembled in the audience to recognize that silence contains no promise of salvation. “[We] have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language and definition,” Lorde said, “and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will kill us.”
We are living through an age in which it is acutely frightening for women to speak when men demand we hold our tongues. The risks in speaking are very real. The consequences are real, we incur real real losses. Losing employment threatens survival. Being hated is painful, psychically as well as physically. It is understandable, then, that much of our contemporary activism revolves around speaking out and creating opportunities for other women to do the same. The objective is to make what men have sealed off as unspeakable speakable again, through the simple, agonizing act of speaking it. Men insist that women be silent about the wrongs of transgenderism, just as in the past they’ve insisted we be silent about rape, battery, incest, pornography, and every other horror symptomatic of manmade civilization—and so we speak. It is absolutely necessary that we speak. And in spite of the fear and the risks and the viciousness of the silencing dissent draws on the head of the female dissenter, women are speaking.
We are speaking. Mostly we do our speaking online. Speaking out on the Internet is the form of activism most accessible to radical feminists today, with human existence being increasingly displaced into virtual realms, and thus it has emerged as the default approach. It serves a purpose. Here I am slinging more words at the Internet so I cannot consider it pointless. But there are limitations. The Internet is a life-devouring vortex of infinite scroll constant distraction and targeted marketing trance hurtling along at manic amphetamine speeds fueled by and fueling solipsis, narcissism, and clickbait discord. On the Internet, too much of what we say splinters into noise. We are too often retweeting memes into the void. While the Internet defeats geography to allow individuals to connect around shared concerns despite the miles between them, it cannot sustain the close connections fundamental to collective organizing. Chatting with simpatico women online is no substitute for meeting with women face to face, as vital bodies sharing space. The Internet encourages a roleplay politics of posturing and spectacle, staged through conformist grandstanding engineered to reap “likes,” while paralyzing the slower, less glamorous processes of critical thinking and collaboration. The Internet is also, notably, controlled by men, such that nearly everything we do on the web puts money in men’s pockets. More dangerously, the greater our reliance on Internet channels, the greater men’s power to shut us down when they determine we’ve said enough.
For our activism to be effective in the real world, we have to transition our speech from online to off, and come together to speak and organize in the flesh. Real action is kindled in bodies, whole beings brought together by a common commitment. To be a movement and not a niche content market, we will have to reconceptualize the Internet’s role in our activism. As the field of action, it represents a retreat from reality. Instead, we could imagine our online spaces as sitting rooms, where women find one another, share information, amass our resources, make our plans—then we log off, and we venture out. The contemporary radical feminist movement in South Korea offers an instructive example. Though it emerged from the crucible of online communities, soon women began to meet in person, banding together in “cartels” to offset the risks associated with their activism through mutual material support, and organizing outreach to recruit new women into the movement. Hundreds of thousands of South Korean women have participated in feminist protests. Women-only rallies against misogyny and male supremacy regularly flood the city streets.
We wean ourselves off of Twitter battles and recommit to real-world direct action. We rupture silence where it counts. We place the physical obstacle of our unsilenced bodies in men’s way any and every way we can. Events like Sovereign Women Speak are crucial to this end: let’s create more of them.
Device to Elicit Silence: a teenage girl, raped by her stepfather, writes in her diary, “Told my mum about my dad and the abuse. She called me a liar and threatened to kill me if I told the police. Two days pass and then the girls’ friends receive apologetic text messages from the girl, saying that she has run away because she lied. The messages were not sent by the girl but her mother. The girl is dead, murdered by the stepfather who raped her. Another teenage girl is raped by another man. She tells the guidance counselor at her high school that she has been raped, and together they go to the police. Police arrest the rapist, a man who has choked and raped and stalked women before; that he did these things is on record, women told police that he did them. Nonetheless, the judge sets a relatively low bond. The man can afford it, he is released. The girl is scheduled to testify against the man, but she is abducted from her bus stop one morning and later she is found dead in the woods, strangled, soaked in bleach.
Women’s breaches of silence are answered with reckonings. No insubordination goes unpunished. The violence and vileness of the men who try to shut us up lends itself to a reactionary response. Consumed in shouting down the enemy, laboring to correct the warped story he tells about us, or insulting him as he insults us, the actions of the oppressor come to determine our own actions. If he is acting and we are reacting, who controls the struggle? We are right to be outraged. The men deserve all our hatred and disgust. There is rebellious pleasure in sneering at lowlifes so bloated with cocksure entitlement they inflate like roadkill. I am a believer in no-means-no politics. I want women to say NO and refuse to budge from their resolution not to quietly go down bulldozed. When women say NO I want it to be a real NO, not the no-means-yes that sighs coyly through the halls of rape culture as its chorus. I want actions that resound as an immense collective NO! thundering feral uproar, a tempest of noncompliance impossible to drown out. I have been leery of the politics of yes-means-yes, the idea that women ought to be more “positive” if we expect to be listened to. (Odd, isn’t it, how men’s ears prick up at our yes’s, while they’re deaf to the no’s?) I reject every kind of pandering, I won’t be “positive” sugarcoating my rejection of male-dominated society—but as I grow older my hunger sharpens for a dream, some brilliant vision to accompany the thousand NO’s my bones scream daily. Shouldn’t we understand what we yearn to create just as clearly as we know what it is we despise and aim to destroy? A movement nursed on rancor, venom, and renunciation will sour in time. What body could ever survive on such acid sustenance? As Susan Griffin warns, “When a movement for liberation inspires itself chiefly by a hatred for the enemy rather than from [its] vision of possibility, it begins to defeat itself.”
To balance the implacability of our resistance, we will also require actions that speak of the future we long to realize. What is the world we hope will await us, once the morbid abominations of manmade civilization have been purged from the earth? What kind of society do we desire to replace men’s failed one? What will we make of real freedom, when it is ours?
“It is our dreams that point the way to freedom,” Audre Lorde writes.
Dreams propel us forward, they are the blood-light smolder at the horizon that spurs us up out of miserable resignation to a murderous present, and when we lose sight of them, “we give up the future of our worlds.” Trite as it sounds, forgive me, I do hunger for the dreaming. For acts of vehement resistance rooted in radical vision, drenched sodden with it, by the vigor of which we might drive the future we imagine inch by inch closer to the brink of being real. Through our actions we make possible a future for women. For the living earth. The power to create a new reality is ours, if we remember even in the thick of emergency that we can do more than say no. We resurface from the depths of silence as visionaries.
Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.
Hear this essay read aloud in this beautifully produced video by April Nealt.