I remember when I first started in the business, I lost a lot of friends. Some were jealous, some were annoyed at the fact that I was an actress.
Feminism? The word itself means exactly the same thing to me as the word God does – it’s a spirituality that is deeply personal, deeply subjective, and deeply no one else’s business. You can identify the word however you want, it’s just the non-exploration of it that is unacceptable to me.
My parents are artists, so I grew up with my mom having bonfires, seven guitars, and talented musicians and artists around like Jack Hirschman.
Sip Someone else’s logic then spit it out.
Tell me how you prove coercion? How you prove the difference between being hit on and hunted? How you prove your arms were held down? Your body was touched? Your life was threatened if you ever told anyone? For people who have suffered violent sexual crimes, proof – the very act of proving – is more than just a burden. It is boundless bearing. An eternity of futility.
I cast out the crime of me; my casualty. Silence, you must leave. Sadness, go. Surrender, shame. Cruelty, quiet now.
I live in a country built on celebritizing its citizens’ grief and amplifying stories of violence and assault for political gain, click counts, or television ratings. Let me be emphatically clear: They. Don’t. Care. About. Us. People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek.
Your career has another five years, maybe, she says, if you’re lucky. According to who? I ask. According to every actress who’s come before you. So I turn my focus to every actress coming after me. I.
Sexual assault is the single least-reported violent crime. And when it is reported, the victims are blamed and shamed. Or not believed. Or silenced. Punished. Or their attackers are never prosecuted at all.
The mind is the master and the body is the servant.
It’s you versus you.” Meaning, you’re the only thing standing in your own way.
I’ve learned how to make a meal out of pain, how to brand my sorrow.
Until women are allowed to make mediocre works of art while still succeeding in the way that many white men get to do this every single day, we will not have the power to take our creative freedoms back. We will be limited by impossible expectations reserved for the few. As long as we are put and put ourselves on a patriarchal pedestal, too high to succeed and doomed to fail, then surely we will be set up to do exactly that, every time.
We publicized it. We capitalized on it. We exploited it for ratings or whatever, for stories, with our memes and GIFs and tweeting and all that. We jump on the train. We show their pictures on live TV. We make clever hashtags. We find ways to, like, absolve ourselves from responsibility or say we’ve helped out with a retweet or something. We’ve helped because we’ve mentioned an injustice in passing to our neighbor and we both got to shake our heads.
Have you ever heard wolves howl in a place where wolves do not reside?
People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek.
Putting our minds to something has never been the problem. The problem has been: Who decides whose mind is worthy?
I could get rejected for jobs in acting, directing, or writing for the rest of my life, but nothing would ever take away what the experience of directing my first feature film had taught me: that I know myself better than I think I do and that I know my worth better than others think they do.
People marched not just because of what Donald Trump did, but because of what all the Donald Trumps have always done. Women marched not just because a woman had lost, but because we too were all done with losing.
This world demands nothing short of perfection from women who aim high, and our need to see perfection in women has, until recently, far outweighed our need for their participation.
It’s not your fault. But healing your own pain does belong to you now.