Multidimensional Feminism
Multidimensional Feminism
Ilana Reimer
On a Path Toward New Conversations
This essay is featured in Ekstasis Issue 10 Print Edition
I imagine for the first time in my adult life not feeling the need to be smaller, to speak less, to walk on eggshells, to pretend to have no ambition or drive. —E
This spring, I was with a group of friends in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and the lines outside bars had begun to form before noon. Crowds of students surged past us, decked in green and whooping with alcohol-fueled enthusiasm. I spotted a quiet restaurant, its entryway small in a way that reminded me of TARDIS, the time machine from Doctor Who, but which opened up into a large, light-strung space with a triangular glass roof. As we ordered drinks and snacks, someone brought up feminism. One friend reacted with frustration; he’d been on too many dates with women whose brand of feminism generated rage against men and self-loathing toward themselves.
“When you say feminism, what do you mean?” I asked.
Before long, everyone at the table began to share their opinions: feminism that empowers; feminism that disempowers; man-hating feminism; a feminist case for marriage; a feminist case against marriage; how men can help; why women might not want their help. We defined the various waves using shorthand: first wave—vote and legal equality; second wave—workplace equality and reproductive rights. We come from different churches, cities, and countries. Our political views converge and diverge, texturing the conversation the way the many threads of a literary novel spiral round and build off each other.
I feel the buzz of my drink combining with the angst of accumulating stories. My grandmother earned less than her male counterparts working as a salesclerk at Eaton’s in Toronto, and that was only in the mid-1960s. Yet as we talk, leaning in to hear each other down the long, candlelit table, my throat catches. I realize I’m not softening my opinions about “women’s issues” or struggling to come up with shared language. I don’t trail off as interest wanes or nod silently to avoid the argument bound to start if I speak up.
And for the first time, I notice there are more men around the table than women. Something in me stirs as I watch them. Some are husbands, fathers, and brothers—all are sons and friends. They are paying attention. They are contributing.
*
I imagine men listening to women, seeing us as whole persons, not stereotypes, and looking out for our safety. —A
Tables like this one can seem like an anomaly. In a culture where the term “debate” calls Facebook comment wars to mind rather than a genuine conversation in pursuit of truth, it is difficult to talk about the complex issues over which different strands of feminism have fought and fractured.
Once, in a creative writing workshop, a female classmate shared a short story about a date rape, threading the controversial song lyrics eerily throughout: I simply must go. The answer is no. But, baby, it’s cold outside. A male student raised his hand. He began articulating his thought, but the words deflated, punctured by the gazes of the women students in the room. The fluorescent lights were surgically bright. He started apologizing almost at once. His limbs folded in on themselves and he ducked his head, speaking to the table.
My professor, seeing he wasn’t trying to provoke, stopped students from interrupting him. Perhaps she also sensed his downright terror. The way he hunched, eyes scanning the room for predators, suggested things hadn’t gone well for him in past attempts to speak about this topic. His fear was more memorable than whatever point he was trying to make.
I worried that one day, he would give up and keep his mouth shut. I worry because male silence, in particular, is often what allows abuse and discrimination to fester unchecked. I worry because distrust and dismissal of different perspectives eventually leads to the flattening of narratives. These partial stories help fuel the denigration of women and other marginalized groups.
In her classic A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf describes the dichotomy between the real lives of women and the idealized ways they appear in fiction and art. In real life, even in Woolf’s time, women had few educational opportunities and limited legal rights. In fiction, woman “dominates the lives of kings and conquerors. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history,” Woolf writes. She is being hyperbolic, perhaps, but she is right in saying that the words and portrayals of women throughout history have been shaped by the men who wrote them down.
Our internet age has challenged the caricatures and half-truths erected by these one-dimensional perspectives. We now have a multiverse of platforms we can use to reach each other. Many voices who have long been cast aside are rising to speak in their own words—and it’s not only women. But the platforms are crowded. We have yet to learn how to share our stages instead of fighting to control them.
*
I imagine feminism being synonymous with friendship, peacekeeping, and promoting partnerships between women and men. —M
For a photography assignment in journalism school, I snapped a photo of an image nearly as old as human history. A man and a woman sat together, looking out over water. Their shoulders touched. Their hair was white and cut short; their bodies bore the sloping and shrinking of age. Their backs were facing me, and I was too far away to know if they were talking.
I watched them for a moment, imagining the stories that stretched out behind them, the story they might have made together. I was 18 and knew little about love, or of how fraught and beautiful love stories really are. (Almost ten years and a marriage later, I’m only beginning to learn.)
The tender, complicated, alike-but-not-alikeness of men and women is a source of fascination and alienation. Profound pain and magical synergy. We yearn for one another, not just in a romantic or biologically-driven sense, but also for the enlivening (and jarring) perspective shift the other brings to our own. These differences and the tensions can feel like a burden. But there’s creative potential too; our distinctions make our relationships richer and more interesting.
Here we can learn something from the collaborative mindset of early feminist thinkers. Mary Wolstonecraft was one of the first women’s rights advocates in England. Writing in the late 1700s, she saw the purpose of rights as freeing individuals to fulfill their responsibilities within their communities. In this view, individual autonomy and flourishing are not distinct from familial and community contexts, but part of an interconnected whole.
Early American suffragettes like Frances Willard agreed with Wollstonecraft that women’s and men’s companionship and mutual responsibility in areas like home life reinforce their partnership in societal leadership. By calling on men to participate in improving conditions for women, they both recognize that equality and justice are collective efforts.
*
I imagine a future of laughter, where the night does not herald fear. —T
I watched the film adaptation of Women Talking with my sister Leah in a small indie theater on Rideau Street in Ottawa. For the entire hour and 44 minutes of the production, the story engulfed me. I was in the warm hayloft of the film’s setting even while my body remained in the red-cushioned seat with a too-short back. My tears mirrored the tears of the women on screen. My throat was raw. As soon as we left the theater, Leah and I agreed we wanted to see it again.
The film, based on the book by Canadian writer Miriam Toews, masterfully demonstrates the capability of flawed, hurting people to disagree and yet each contribute to a resolution. The story is set in a closed Mennonite colony where ongoing abuses have been uncovered. Rather than only focusing on the horrific events, Women Talking moves to imagine what happens next. What happens after a series of rapes are discovered? What do the women decide they need in order to move forward? What does moving forward look like for them?
“This story ends before you were born.” The narrator is a teenage girl, Autje, who speaks to the unborn child of another of the women, a child whose life was generated through violation. These first words in the film are a promise that echoes throughout the entire movie. This story of violence does not continue. It comes to an end.
The women appoint three families to decide whether they will stay and fight further attacks or leave the colony. What follows is a compassionate, intelligent, and tense debate about the nature and possibility of forgiveness, who’s responsible for what, what freedom means, and what kind of future they want for themselves and their children.
The women’s new future is shaped by the past still breathing down their necks; they craft a better narrative out of the remnants of a terrible one. Their response to the community’s vicious cycle of abuse does not immediately dismantle or transform its entire system. Though this might come about over time, the changes are triggered by the ending of destructive patterns and the forming of life-giving ones within their immediate context. The women have been victimized, but they don’t treat themselves as victims. Instead, they pursue what fairness and justice they can formulate from within the crucible of their trauma.
Laughter intersperses the film, surprising and unapologetic in its appearance. It’s one of the key features of the book Toews wanted included in the film. “Sometimes I think people laugh as hard as they’d like to cry,” Autje narrates. The laughter is a release, allowing the characters (and the audience) a moment to breathe. But its function is more profound than that. It points to the fierce joy that comes from working together to create something better.
The film’s final image is of the newborn baby, eyes crinkled, tiny limbs stretching out to meet the world. Bookending the film’s beginning, Autje tells the little one, “Your story will be different from ours.”
*
I imagine a future where the truth that women and men are made in God’s image is honored from the inside out. —S
What we now call feminism arose from those who dreamed of a future where women could go to school, vote, and have protection against exploitation. They imagined just enough to spark the first step that set a redemptive trajectory in motion. As one example, Wolstonecraft scholar Erika Bachiochi describes how many early women’s rights advocates promoted what some have termed “voluntary motherhood.” In response to marital abuse and unwanted pregnancies they asserted that women should be able to say no when they did not want sex and should have a voice in when they became pregnant. Their vision set a new precedent—one that following generations continue to expand upon. Today, feminism still needs dreamers who are humble listeners and bold collaborators amid the hot takes, party lines, and virtue signaling that spoil so many arenas of modern discourse.
Women Talking is not just a work of fiction. It’s a call-and-response to a tale that is all too real and repeated all too often across cultures, communities, and worldviews. In this case, the story happened in a real Mennonite colony in Bolivia. Real women and girls with names and dreams were bloodied and violated by men who were their neighbors, uncles, brothers, and husbands. This isn’t some fairy-tale exercise, but a brutally urgent need.
We need transformation on both a big-picture legal, political, and cultural scale, and at the particular community-level, amid the myriad of ways women’s and men’s lives intersect, overlap, and intertwine. Current debates center on the most intimate and significant aspects of our lives: whether consent is a sufficient benchmark; ways of preventing sexual assault and harassment; whether sex traits or an inner sense of self define what a woman is; the different ways parenthood implicates men and women; where the bodily autonomy of one individual ends and another’s begins. Coming to just solutions to these problems requires earnest dialogue, curiosity, and teamwork. It requires a farsighted vision of partnership that transcends the tumultuous debates of today. It requires looking beyond partisan and religious divides and finding enough common ground to meet around boardroom tables and kitchen counters.
*
Perhaps the conversation in that Halifax restaurant was our own TARDIS-like doorway. The iconic Doctor Who device appears to be a regular blue police box, finite and ordinary, but it’s actually a spacetime traveling machine capable of reaching whole new dimensions. It speaks to a reality bigger than what we can currently imagine, though the door by which we enter is small.
The truth is not made up of one story; it is multidimensional. We can only understand and resolve legitimate disagreements if we approach them attuned to these many perspectives. Conversations like ours in the restaurant—and the friendships that enable them—open up dimensions of possibility that could transport us to a better future. One where women and men gather around tables to hear and understand one another, hash out our problems over Irish beer, oysters, and fries, and together dream of a world where women’s dignity is uncontested in every sphere.
Ilana Reimer
Writer & Editor
Ilana is a writer and editor living in Ottawa, Ontario.
Photograph by Ardian Lumi
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