“Our Problems Are All Fudged At the Edges”
Over the past week, two separate women that I’m teaching self defense to asked me, “what about the eyes?” They had had previous training where they were taught that a good form of self defense is to try and gauge the attacker’s eyes out, but both of these women were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to make themselves do that, if they needed to. One of the women also mentioned she had been told to splay her keys between her fingers if she’s walking anywhere and feels unsafe.
Two days later, my friend Hannah published a beautiful, intense video she had made for the International Day for Ending Violence Against Women, which this year fell on 25 November — which also happened to be Thanksgiving Day in the United States. The coincidence is ironic because, on a day in the US that is meant to celebrate the joining of two cultures and two peoples to build one great nation, one might also point out that Native American women are murdered and sexually assaulted at rates as high as 10 times the average in the United States.
The video is short: only about 5 minutes. And it consists of a series of archival clips from documentaries and newsreels from the 1950s to the 1980s that Hannah juxtaposes brilliantly to a soundtrack provided by Sarah Spencer. The video opens with a photoshoot from the early 1980s on one side, where the photographer tells the model…
