Member-only story
Women and Silence
Vox: dystopian fiction, and the power of our voices.
Remember back in September when a whole lot of us feminists turned our Facebook profile photos black?
I just read a book that totally made me rethink that tactic.
At the time, I felt empowered, showing my 4-year-old daughter my friends list, explaining to her that each dark square was someone protesting. That there are lots of ways to protest, and this was one attempt, to be visible through our absence.
My favorite part of the whole thing was that the men in my life didn’t know about it beforehand. My husband didn’t know. My brother didn’t know. My dad didn’t know, though he doesn’t know much of anything that happens online.
I knew about it because I received numerous Facebook messages the day before, from women I’d befriended in all different phases of my life: childhood, college, parenthood. White women and women of color. Cis women mostly, and trans women too. We women were able to secretly communicate — even if we were using a huge corporation to do it — and in this, I felt powerful.
“Tomorrow, female blackout from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Its a movement to show what the world might be like without women. Your profile photo should just be a black square so that men…
