Control of Our Destinies

By Sam Mills

"Current attacks on women who failed to fight or speak up remind me of the way that men were treated when they came back from the First World War. Their shell shock was initially downplayed and derided because in the public imagination the men ought to have returned as jolly war heroes rather than wrecked and distraught souls suffering hallucinations and the shakes. As we come to understand more about trauma, however, we realize that for those who suffer PTSD whether men on the battlefield or women suffering assault the body keeps their score..."— Sam Mills, author of Chauvo-Feminism: On Sex, Power and #MeTooSam Mills' 'Control of our destinies' is part of The Indigo Press's short-form Indigo Express series — short essays and fiction commissioned in companion with, and in celebration of, our authors' books. Find out more on www.theindigopress.com/exclusive-writing/

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Indigo Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911648352

Book preview

In the aftermath of #MeToo, as famous men were falling and backlash gaining lash, Melanie Phillips denounced the movement in a piece for The Times: ‘Female emancipation was all about giving women control over their own destinies. Now they have that control, they are presenting themselves once again as powerless victims of male oppression, even whilst benefitting from being presented as sex objects.’1

It is a horrible, fascinating sentence; there is much to unpack. I disagree with many elements of Phillips’ argument, but the term that snags my interest is ‘control over their own destinies’ and the confident assumption, ‘Now they have that control…’. It implies that modern women live entirely by free will, without the fateful interferences of society, patriarchy, culture, politics, biology and so on.

When it comes to the old-age free will versus determinism debate, I am a compatibilist: I believe in both existing simultaneously. As we look at a history of gender, it is true that the average woman in 2021 (in parts of the West, at least) enjoys far greater freedoms than women have had in the past. In Ancient Rome, for example, a married woman