This piece of writing you’re now reading is not a “My Turn” — it’s an “Our Turn.” We’re all better off thinking and sharing these thoughts together, a common humanity wanting to bring out the best in ourselves, the best in each other, and the best of who we want ourselves to be.
Once again, Greenfield’s Human Rights Commission is at the forefront of bringing our small city, our county, our community, and our best selves together for another meaning-making film and sharing event. Thank you, Isaac Mass, of the Greenfield Garden Cinemas, for enabling us to do so with this opportunity. Thank you, Greenfield Recorder, for granting us this space to share and promote and move forward this opportunity for all in our community to participate in. And, most importantly, we should thank and bless ourselves for our willingness to take advantage of the opportunity to engage in sharing a movie and post-film discussion and Q-and-R together as a living/learning experience for all! Our Greenfield Human Rights Commission will sponsor, host, and facilitate a post-film reflection and discussion of your responses and reactions to the film and whatever it brings up for you. We need to speak our minds, allow our voices to flow – and we need to listen! Join us at the GGC at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 3.
This time, we’ll focus on the recently released film, “She Said.” This film will engage, deepen, and perhaps crystallize our understanding of the limiting of our human potential based on the severe restrictions of living in an increasingly binary, heterosexist, homophobic, and misogynistic world. Most of us, as adults in the U.S., have read, and possibly experienced directly or indirectly, the #MeToo movement. This national movement arose out of the misogyny of Harvey Weinstein and his Hollywood cronies and colleagues. This film is based on the narratives and truths that emanated from those individuals whose integrity, livelihood, and aspirations were trampled and abused by a man — and the systems that spawned him — thus playing out all that is wrong and abusive with the word “power.”
This is a story with no “spin”: everything Weinstein did is in parallel with understanding the hugely negative and corrupt impact of sexism at its worst and most extreme. And not just him: we know that these insidious attitudes, behaviors, and interactions have kept [white] men in power, maintained and sustained a sexist and misogynist status quo. All this while belittling women for decades and centuries. “She Said” leaves little unsaid and even less to be misunderstood about men’s systemic and systematic mistreatment of women.
It has been said that “women hold up half the sky.” Women also hold up — and uphold — our families, our social and educational and political institutions and systems, and are hugely responsible for many of the successes in all arenas of human experience. Men, in particular, have much learning, and unlearning, ahead of ourselves in order to better support and celebrate the lives of women. This film, along with the chance to listen to and speak with our neighbors about it, is for absolutely all of us.
And we need to talk about this, more; further, we need to change this mistreatment of girls and women, forevermore. Real change starts from within, from within that little core buried in the heart of each of us, and big change grows from there, into our relationships, our families, our humanly (if not humanely) created systems and patterns of human action and transaction — our ways of living, learning, working, earning, loving, and dreaming. To do anything less than share, think, and act and change together, is to abdicate the most basic of our responsibilities as social and human beings.
On the afternoon of Saturday, Dec. 3, we all have this opportunity: come and view “She Said” at the Greenfield Garden Cinema at 3 p.m. Please consider booking in an extra 30 minutes following the film to sit together and think, listen, learn, and respond to your neighbors and friends: How can I, and we, break the chain of sexism, misogyny, discrimination, and stereotyping of women which poisons our homes, families, schools, workplaces, and every other situation where women and men, boys and girls, interact together?
If it is meant to be, it is not only up to me, it is up to each and every one of us, each and every day, with each and every interaction we have. Come, and become a part of the change we all want to live and experience. Please be there — You are needed!
Daniel Cantor Yalowitz, Ed.D., is an intercultural and developmental psychologist, consultant, local author, and social and community change activist. He is also the chair of the Greenfield Human Rights Commission.