abigail bruggs’s Reviews > The Years > Status Update

These are her selves, it seems to her, who continue to exist in these places. In other words, past and future are reversed. The object of desire is not the future but the past…”

“…all the things she has buried as shameful dying, of and which are now worthy of retrieval, unfolding, in the light of intelligence. As her memory is gradually freed of humiliation, the future again becomes a field of action. Fighting for women's rights to abortion, against social injustice, and understanding how she has become the woman she is today, are all part of the same endeavor.”

We would have loved to resemble the movie heroines, possess the freedom to behave as they did. But between the films and books, on the one hand, and the dictates of society on the other, lay a vast zone of prohibition and moral judgment.

For girls, shame lay in wait at every turn. The verdict of too loomed large over their clothing and makeup: too short, long, low-cut, tight, flashy, etc. The height of their heels, whom they saw, what time they went out and came in, the crotch of their underwear, month after month, were subject to all-pervasive surveillance by society.

“…repress the desire for food and the obsession with the monthly blood that no longer flows. Reflect on the real so it will cease to be real, become an abstract thing intangible, a product of intelligence. A few weeks later, she will stop eating, buy Néo-Antigrès fat-burning pills, and be reduced to pure consciousness.”

Signs of collective change cannot be perceived in the specific features of lives, except perhaps in the disgust and fatigue that led thousands of individuals at once to think, in exasperation, "So that's how it is nothing will ever change."