I have a memory that I frequently find myself returning to these days. I'm in high school and we're in the change room at the local pool for the dreaded stint of swimming. Like most of my peers, I am embarrassed by my body and am therefore changing into my swimmers under a towel. The changing room is filled with older women in my memory, they're elderly, which means in reality they were likely all somewhere between 40 and 60 and they're naked. I am horrified by this, but not because I am awkward about witnessing their nudity. Instead (and I acutely remember this being my thought at the time), I feel sad and disgusted by the complete lack of care these women have at the impression their bodies will make on the rest of us. They walk calmly between the showers and the mirrors, bodies on display, jiggling, sagging, flopping. Didn't they realise they were meant to be ashamed to look like that? At the very least, I thought, they should quietly fade into the background, or make their bodies occupy as little space as possible.
Set in the fictional village of Ebisugaoka in 1960s Japan, Silent Hill f follows Hinako, a high school-aged girl who is navigating her transition from girlhood to womanhood, defying gender roles and resisting an arranged marriage. As she grapples subconsciously with these struggles, it is revealed in both subtle and overt ways how Hinako has endured psychological and physical abuse in a patriarchal society.
We are witnessing the restoration of patriarchy, nationalism, racism and capitalist individualism. It is the nostalgic fury of right-wing movements that want to return to an idealised past, one that perhaps never truly existed, and to re-establish hierarchical orders. We need to revive a Marxist analysis in light of the new social movements. We must commit to saying what we want to see realised, and not just complain about what is going wrong.
We are witnessing the restoration of patriarchy, nationalism, racism, and capitalist individualism. It is the nostalgic fury of right-wing movements that want to return to an idealized past one that perhaps never truly existed and to reestablish hierarchical orders. This is the terrifying panorama described by Judith Butler. Butler, 69, spoke last Friday at the Reina Sofia Museum auditorium in Madrid with Joseba Elola, coordinator of EL PAIS's Ideas supplement, during a subscriber event marking the publication's 10th anniversary.
I really loved the questions that it asked about violence and protection, and what it means to be able to protect someone at the cost of violence. It also offered a lot of interesting perspectives on what it means to be a monster and what we make of monsters. So, I had a really great time taking the historically-inspired setting of this myth and integrating it with all these questions that are really interesting to me, especially [using] a fantasy lens.
"We know there's an outrageous, horrific rise in violence against women, sexual crimes and rape," she said. "Now there's the rise of incel culture and the likes of Andrew Tate pushing ideas of men's power and what they're entitled to. It's really sad that those pushing the anti-trans narrative don't realise that's exactly what they're playing into."
He enlisted a whole bunch of Ideology-patriarchy; social conservatism; utterly fake upside-down Christianity-in service of those basic motivations, not only to justify his own appetite for and personal acts of sadism and domination but to cast punishment and predation as far out into the world as he could manage. He studied psychology and the Bible so that he could borrow their authority and instrumentalize them to do widespread cruelty more effectively.
What would writers do without problematic patriarchs? From King Lear to Logan Roy, they are the linchpins of countless family dramas: adored fathers who dominate and damage their children in equal measure.
