mostlysignssomeportents:

Jasmina Tesanovic:

A friend asked me to follow the flow, and write this hashtag #metoo.  
Cavafi, the Greek poet who lived all his life by the sea and wrote about
everything but the sea, before dying he said: Let me too say something
about the sea.

The sea is too big a topic for literature, just like the oceanic scale of harassment, stalking and rape.

All my life I’ve been thinking about the oppression of women,  writing
about it, acting out. I am a feminist activist: sexual harassment was
one reason I became one. Nobody is born a feminist.

But my point of view, even after many years and much female experience,
was never the view of a victim. I still forbid myself to think in that
way. Especially after bearing witness, and writing down the stories of
women raped in war-crimes in former Yugoslavia.  It was their brave
testimonies that helped make that common deed of war into a crime,
officially, in 2008.

I appreciate this recent flow of #metoo. As an activist, I can hope that
my work has done well, now that the mainstream is  picking it up.  Not
from Balkan battlegrounds, but from Hollywood and Silicon Valley, no
less. The fish stinks from the head.

My mother was a doctor, and a resistance fighter in World War Two. She
always considered uniformed soldiers, guerrillas, killers and rapists as
all part of one whirlwind of violent cruelty. I understand that every
woman has the right to feel differently and express herself thus. But to
my mind, in the everyday matter of violence against women, there is no
major difference between war and peace.

My mother survived war, and I was born in peacetime.  My mother told me
how she was harassed by the husband of a friend.  My father and she
socialized with this man and his wife on daily basis. I grew up with
their daughter, who was my own best friend.

He was a notorious womanizer, a good looking, sweet talking gentleman
with high social position. I was a grown up teenager when my mom told me
about his advances: I went to his office and denounced him to his face.
As a gentleman, he was horrified. He threatened to punish me by
damaging my career, which actually followed.

Many years later, I also learned his daughter, as a child, had been
molested by the family gardener. This gardener was no gentleman, but the
gentlemanly father hushed it all up anyway; he forbade his daughter to
ever speak of what had happened to her.

Once, as a teen, I was assaulted, in the tight closed room of the  
elevator, by the big brother of my neighbourhood  girlfriend. I told her
and her mother about it, but they stayed silent.   Big brother was the
hero of their family: handsome, dashing, bold…. So whatever he did was
right, or else my fault! Some years later, the guy ended up in prison
for fraud.

At the age of 21,  I went to the Yugoslav embassy in Rome to renew my
passport, since I enjoyed living alone in Rome. The ambassador, who was a
family friend, received me in his Roman office and assaulted me out of
blue. I told my parents. Next time he came to our home, with his wife
and son, for dinner, nobody mentioned the episode.  We all behaved as if
nothing untoward had happened.

I left Italy and went to Belgrade to renew my passport.  Then I stayed
in Belgrade, forsaking my Italian life. The ambassador eventually made a
good career. He became the last president of Yugoslavia before it
disintegrated in bloodshed.

    At a film festival in Ischia, I presented a movie script, in a
lively Italian scene full of movie celebrities.  Along came the
president of Italnoleggio, the Italian governmental film company. He
tried to seduce me by showing me pedophile pictures of  small girls
dressed in high heels. I immediately reported this to the celebrities:
they listened, and told me that Rome was a notorious center of all sorts
of weird vices, and that a newcomer like me would get used to it.  They
needed the government funds he was managing; they were the talent, but
also the great man’s hangers-on.  I later heard that he committed
suicide in a  state corruption scandal.

    Asia Argento, the Italian actress and director, is paying a hell of
a price for her coming out in Italy’s machiavellian cinema culture,
with its Catholic double standards. I especially appreciate her honesty
of not playing the violated “good girl”, which exactly what puritan
creeps don’t like about Asia Argento.

    The worst of the lot was my gynecologist.   One of those nightmares
every woman dreads when she must expose herself to a trusted male
professional. I was young, I was a foreigner, and I was in a very
special clinic, alternative politically and economically correct,  in a
Catholic country. The doctor was  handsome, famous, young and with nice
manners. And yet he did it, unexpectedly, out of sheer male  power,
without any shame or fear.

     I was so shocked and horrified that I didn’t even know how to
interpret that, and cope with it in future.  Go to the police? Refuse
all male doctors on principle?   Never have any children?  This, in a
country where Catholic nuns secretly performed abortions?  Who was in
charge of my body and the abuse of it: the doctors, the state, the
church? It certainly wasn’t me, so #metoo.

    I know a young woman, who is not a feminist,  who criticized the
#metoo coming out. She said that those women made choices to advance
their careers, that they could have bravely and forthrightly shouted no
at the moment, instead of all lamenting #metoo together, much later.

    I asked her if she ever had any similar indecent approaches
herself, being a beautiful girl with a job.  She said of course. But
then, she added, those work situations didn’t bother me. What bothered
me was  a pedophile who hit on me while I was with my parents on summer
holidays.  I never dared to tell them, or tell anybody.  Oh, and then
there was that  priest in the church, who groped me while I was with my
best friend for her christening ritual.

    I was alarmed that things hadn’t turn out much better for this
young brave friend who saw no use for feminism, “God forbid.”   There
must be a lesson here for women of all ages, colors, creeds and
financial conditions. Woman may not support, or even believe, the
coming-out women, but they should bear in mind that it can happen to
#themtoo!

     I know women who say they adore men in power, that coercive power
feels sexy… I also know women who routinely beg men for money and
favors, because of sex, or just because they are men, and men are
present in the world, and have wealth and power. I know women who
consider all men equally worthless, and cheerfully go to bed with them
anyway. But I never met any woman who liked being assaulted or raped.  
No one can protect or console those who suffer, when they live in denial
without empathy.

After the conflict, if it can end at all, can come truth and
reconciliation.  The #metoo situation is a viral social-media event,
like others of our time, but the emotional pain of the sexual abuse of
power, and the righteous joy of revenge at last, can’t last long enough
to transform gender relations.  We should open a place where the wisdom
of empathy among women is stronger than viral media.  Where we can write
about the deep and stormy sea, instead of mutely living on its shores,
until we die.

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/metoo-from-the-balkans-to-tw.html