In the era of #MeToo, many women in the United States and around the world have found their voices to speak out against a persistently misogynistic cultural, economic, political and social system. A shot heard round the world, from the United States to Bollywood. Sure, it was much worse in the past, the usual narrative goes. But now women have achieved voting rights and a degree of social mobility. Now, with #MeToo, it seems the power imbalances have been thrust into the light, and no abuser is safe. Yay, progress!? Well...not so much.
Like much else, recent history is a mixed bag, with many benefits of movements that shake the powerful and go viral on mainstream news outlets around the world not necessarily trickling down to the masses or affecting change on the underlying structural issues and social attitudes that cause the problems in the first place. This is frustrating and demoralizing for women across the world, who, silenced by the stigmas surrounding sexual violence and assault, may judge it not worth the social costs to come forward, to agitate for change. If they do, they may face scorn and even death threats (see the case of Christine Blasey Ford, who received death threats after her testimony at the hearing for now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh). One of many giving voice to this despair and rage felt by many women is author Laurie Halse Anderson, first through her 1999 novel Speak, and in her latest, Shout: A Poetry Memoir (2019).
From the get-go, Shout issues a siren call for a new wave of activism in a searing work of poetic prose that is half unflinchingly personal autobiography and half advocacy treatise. Like protagonist Melinda from Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson was sexually assaulted as a teenager, when she was thirteen years old. Of course, this assault having occurred in the 70s meant that Anderson, like other girls and women (and yes, boys and men), were counseled that to stay safe from predatory men (and women), they must dress conservatively, make themselves blend in to the wallpaper, to be seen, not heard. If they were assaulted, it was their fault for dressing provocatively, for drinking, being out at night alone. As for having candid conversations about sex, healthy relationships, consent and menstruation? Out of the question. Talking about sex was taboo, and when non-consensual intercourse happened, it was also taboo to speak up about it.
What makes it even worse is that in addition to the latter smothering cultural mores, Anderson's home life also had another toxic layer of drug and emotional abuse, as a result of her father's PTSD and her mother's powerlessness to change the family situation. After her rape, Anderson fell into a similar spiral, driven by her shame and anger at having to deal with her continuing trauma.
It wasn't until she spent 13 months in Denmark as a foreign exchange student that Anderson was able to gain the clarity she needed to begin healing, something she was unable to do living under her parents' toxic roof. Upon her return home, this clarity began to crystallize into an awareness of the pervasiveness of her situation, as she attended college at Georgetown and dealt with handsy professors, and as a reporter witnessed a defense attorney engaging in the brutal character assassination of a rape survivor. She channeled this awareness and dawning rage at the trauma she faced into fiction writing, first in Speak. When Speak broke into the mainstream, she used her newfound platform to tour schools and speak against sexual violence, empowering students to address these issues openly in their schools to everyone's benefit, while not flinching away from the hard path of recovery those who've dealt with sexual violence must take in order to heal. It is in this unflinching address to readers where Anderson's prose is at its most powerful, a dagger to pierce through layers of ignorance and trauma alike to let the light in.
While we've come a long way from the 70s, there still is much work to be done, as seen by the push back of school administrators against teaching sex-ed sans abstinence, school librarians worried about losing their jobs for ordering Speak, and even one revealing episode in which the fire alarm was pulled by a principal to stop Anderson's talk. But not talking about it will not make the problems go away. Instead, they fester, and the cycle of sexual violence and misogyny continues.
The laws may have changed so that women are able to vote and speak their minds publicly, but social and cultural norms must evolve alongside the laws for a truly lasting change to take hold, to break the cycle. Shout's brutal honesty makes this abundantly clear, and clears the way for other similar much-needed stories to be told, to remind us that the fight is not over. There's still much more work to do.
Works Cited:
Anderson, Laurie Halse. (2019). Shout: A Poetry Memoir. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.
Taub, Amanda. (2019, February 11). #MeToo Paradox: Movement Topples the Powerful, Not the Ordinary. Retrieved March 31, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/world/americas/metoo-ocar-arias.html.
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