At the 2050 session yesterday about climate chaos, panellists spoke about the danger of going from denial to despair. I was thinking about that a lot as I watched author and feminist activist Tara Moss give a presentation on sexism in the media, politics and society. The statistics are unrelenting, and I was too sad to write all of them down: women comprise only 11% of protagonists in top-rating US films; worldwide, fewer than 1 in 4 people we hear from or about in the media is female; a third of women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual violence. One third. That’s literally billions of us. Christ. She encouraged us to photograph her slides but I was too depressed.
Moss herself was very calm; charming and warm. She is an Australian writer who has moved from writing crime novels to feminist non-fiction. She’s here promoting her latest book, Speaking Out: A 21st-century handbook for women and girls, which I have duly purchased and she has kindly signed for me. But in the face of stats like this – women worldwide are 27 times more likely to experience serious online abuse than men; one fifth of women worldwide have been raped – what on earth are we meant to do?
As Moss said, “everywhere you look there’s an imbalance”. Even down to the way words are defined in the dictionary: take a look at bossy, where all the examples are derogatory of women. On the plus side, I now have a new interest: feminist lexicography. On the downside … this is how we develop unconscious bias, when our cultural places of authority have sexism woven into them so deeply we can’t see it.
After she had given us her presentation, The Press editor Joanna Norris interviewed Moss. They spoke about rape. Moss herself is one of the one in five women who has experienced rape, and she acknowledged matter-of-factly that there were a lot more of us in the audience as well. It’s still an issue that triggers a huge response. She made the excellent point that “we have a toxic silence around this issue but it’s so shockingly common that it shouldn’t be shocking to talk about it” – yet it still is.
Norris asked Moss whether there’s such a thing as oversharing. “There’s no such thing as overshare when you’re talking about important issues … Toxic silence does a lot more damage than oversharing … Actually there’s no such thing [as oversharing], that’s crap … I don’t think there’s anything we should feel we can’t talk about. Silence has never solved anything.”
Her solution to addressing sexism is, as the title of her book suggests, to speak out, together. “The calling-out needs to be done collectively, none of us can do it by ourselves. The women’s movement has been done collectively over the centuries … There are so many women we need to thank … That’s how things are going to get better. We need to normalise the discussion.” Personally, I’m going to start with a stiff drink in one hand and Speaking Out in the other, and then see what I have to say.
Speaking Out: Tara Moss interviewed by Joanna Norris
Speaking Out: A 21st-century handbook for women and girls
by Tara Moss
Published by HarperCollins
ISBN 9781460751336
The Fictional Woman
by Tara Moss
Published by HarperCollins
ISBN 9781460751206
