A Rapist Running the US Will Affect European Women's Lives Too: Thordis Elva's speech in Prague National Gallery on eve of election

(for the original article in Czech, click here)

"We are the spark of light that ignites the revolution," says the Icelandic author and activist, who continues: "As European women, it would be naive of us to think a convicted criminal and predator becoming the head of the United States will leave us unaffected. It will impact women everywhere," she says. As a response to Donald Trump's election victory, we are publishing the speech Thordis Elva gave at the World According to Heroine conference on Monday, where we launched the Czech translation of her book I Want to Look You in the Eye.

Thordis Elva:

Prague is beautiful in the fall, but I must admit that my favourite season is the fall of the patriarchy, if you know what I‘m saying?

My name is Þórdís Elva Þorvaldsdóttir, and as if that wasn‘t enough, it means Thundergoddess, River fairy, daughter of the protected one. To answer the most common questions I get about my name then no, I don‘t have my own goth metal band, but I will consider taking a seat on your dungeons and dragons team – if you‘re any good.

When I was little, having a name that means goddess of thunder felt a little anticlimactic because it‘s really lightning that has the razzle dazzle, lightning is the fireworks, thunder is just the noise. But I have since then accepted that maybe it is my fate to break silence. Because violence thrives in silence.

I‘m here because I‘m famous for the worst thing that ever happened to me, literally, which is a very strange identity to have, which is why I‘ve worked hard at turning it into something constructive, perhaps even healing. It resulted in this book that the Czech republic is now the 14th country to publish, and when I‘m asked what it‘s about and I want to give a short answer, I say: It‘s about why so many women would rather be alone in a forest with a bear than a man, if you know what I mean.

The longer answer is that it‘s about how I was sexually assaulted at the age of 16, confronted my perpetrator nine years later, wrote to him for eight additional years and decided to fly half way across the world to meet up with him at the age of 32, exactly half my life after that fateful night. I know, a normal person would‘ve just gotten herself a therapist and a bottle of vodka, right?

But I had to know why. I had to understand why men like my perpetrator and co-author Tom who have been raised in stable environments, drinking privilege straight from the tap and inheriting a world that was built for them leads too many of them to believe that they are entitled to trample upon the most fundamental human rights of their fellow women on such a gross scale it‘s the biggest pandemic any of us will ever live, forget covid. Men‘s violence against women is crippling and killing more women worldwide than war, malaria, cancer and traffic accidents combined. Let that sink in.

I know this because I‘ve been a public figure for 20 years in the area of violence prevention and social change, and there have been times where I‘ve been invited to speak in high places, at conferences for global leaders and it‘s nearly always exclusively men and their wives are sent off to the hotel poolside and the men sit stiff across tables from each other in conference rooms unable to bridge their cultural divides and meanwhile, misogyny is a truly global phenomena so their wives at the poolside already speak the same language despite having different mother tongues and believing in different gods and having different colored skin but they‘ve all had been met with the double standards of patriarchy, all of them have had to escape unwanted male attention, all of them been afraid to walk home at night all of them have bodies that bleed monthly and have been told so suck it up and most of them have been through childbirth and nursed a suckling infant who depends solely on them for their entire survival, many of them have had to sacrifice their dreams and aspirations at least partly because they‘re women and someone‘s gotta take care of the children and that dinner don‘t cook itself. Women worldwide share a global system of oppression that gives them so much more in common, so if you truly want peace talks, let the men sit stiffly by the poolside and stare blankly at each other because they can‘t relate while women have brokered that ceasefire before lunch because that lunch don‘t cook itself, if you know what I‘m saying?

A woman‘s place is in the revolution, am I right ladies?

And we sure as hell need a revolution. Let us demonstrate why we need it. I am now going to ask you to raise your hand, and keep it in the air, if you have ever done any of the following things to avoid being assaulted, OK?

To avoid being assaulted, I have either:

-Avoided being alone outside after dark.

-Not worn clothes that someone else could call „revealing“.

-Not accepted a drink from someone.

-Not accepted the invitation to a date or a party.

-Not done your makeup the way you would‘ve wanted to.

-Not told a man to get lost because you were afraid of how he would react.

-Not had headphones in both of your ears.

-Not parked your car in a dark area.

-Walked with your keys sticking out of your fist or mace in your bag, or pretended to be on the phone

-or any other precaution to avoid being sexually assaulted.

If your hand is in the air right now, you are not the problem. You are bending over backwards to avoid having the problem attack you.

This is why we need a revolution. We need a new social contract around masculinity. With 98% of sexual assaults committed by men, I am now going to address men as a group and say that it‘s YOU guys who need to be taking precautions and making changes. It’s you who need to be in touch with your feelings before they manifest into harm towards you or someone else, it’s you who need to speak out against locker room talk, and disrupt your friends’ sexist jokes, challenge masculine ideas based on elevating yourself at the expense of others, it’s you who needs to model for boys that it’s safe and healthy to cry, it’s you who need to intercept when women are being harassed on the streets or in nightclubs, it’s you who need to take a stand against violent pornography because your own sexuality deserves better, show your support for gender equality, not just equal pay but also the equal right to life without a constant fear of violence. We need masculinity that doesn‘t have to prove itself all the time, leading to boys and men feeling like failures if they don‘t measure up and causing 70% of suicides worldwide to be committed by men.

The current masculinity is literally, killing us, across the gender spectrum. We are all victims of it – and we can all be a part of the solution. We can all take part in creating, accepting and celebrating the new masculinity that society so desperately needs, instead of emasculating the men and boys who don’t conform to the stereotypes. That’s on all of us. It’s also on all of us to dismantle the monster myth, that the people who commit rape are lunatics and animals and monsters under our beds, when in reality they are our brothers, our boyfriends, our star athletes, our famous actors, our trusted politicians. And they don‘t commit sexual assault DESPITE being all those things, the commit assault AND are all those things.

Which brings me to Dominik Feri, the Czech former politician currently serving time for rape – and what he has in common with my perpetrator, and essentially every other person who has ever committed sexual assault. They all share a common trait.

You see, Feri‘s victims testified that when he was coercing them into sex they didn‘t want to have, his argument was that they owed him this because he had talked to them, he had invested time in getting to know them, he had created the illusion that he actually saw them as three dimensional human beings that he respected – which in his mind made him entitled to sex. So when his victims tried to draw boundaries, he used their shared history against them – which is exactly what Tom my perpetrator also did – describing the same toxic entitlement where I owed him because we had been dating, as if the investment of a man‘s time in you grants him a right to your body, because at the end of the day, he prioritizes his wants over your rights.

Men with ideas of toxic entitlement to women‘s bodies are found everywhere. My home country Iceland has landed on top of the World Economic Forum‘s Gender Equality Index for 15 consecutive years and yet, 42% of Icelandic women are physically or sexually assaulted by a man in their lifetime. That says a lot about the rest of the world.

Speaking of the rest of the world, because we’re all interconnected, we are one day away from a historic election that will determine whether or not the convicted rapist and felon Donald Trump will get reinstated into the highest office in the largest democracy in the Western World and we have to be so naive as European women if we think that‘s not going to affect us. Because you know what? My mom and grandma grew up with breasts that were allowed to come out on good weather days as it was normal for people of all genders to be topless when enjoying the rare sun on their skin. But now, my daughters are living under an imported American moral code that washed upon our shores with the arrival of social media, invented and legislated by American men who are censoring our nipples and colonizing our bodies and if you don‘t think a total abortion ban like the one Trump is planning in the US is going to affect the rest of us, then you haven‘t been paying attention. Because there is no separation. At the end of the day, all of humanity is an interdependent collective made of the same stardust, wild hope and hot tears. As the poet Rumi once said: Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?

But I think we‘re scared to truly embrace the idea of our oneness, of because that would mean that there is no „us and them.“ It would mean that we are our American sisters in Texas where the Supreme court has just ruled that they would rather let a woman die and call it "pro-life." It would mean that human pain is the same everywhere and that there is no such thing as "other people‘s children“ when bombs are being dropped on tents in Gaza. It would mean that you are me and I am you and I am my sisters in Afghanistan too whose voices have now been deemed obscene and made illegal in public places. As if you can legislate a woman out of existence. I am my sisters in the porn industry who are being brutalized in the name of pleasure. I am also my foremothers who were kidnapped from Ireland to Iceland and raped into motherhood of my great great grandfathers. I am all of the brave people in this room who have come here today because you know, because you believe that we can do better. That we deserve better.

So how do we do better?

I want to address the bystanders in this room, those of you who have neither committed nor experienced sexual assault, and tell you that statistically, you know both perpetrators and survivors. And statistically, your survivor friends are likely to have experienced more than one sexual assault because if you‘ve been victimized once, research shows that the likelihood of it happening again go up 700% percent. Seven hundred percent. Because predators are good at spotting the wounded prey. So let‘s think of it this way:

You tell your friend you‘ve been in a car accident three times and they secretly think that makes you a bad driver until you tell them that you were the passenger all three times so it says nothing about you. Then your friend tells you that she‘s been sexually assaulted three times and you secretly think that makes her a slut who makes bad decisions BUT this is the part where I tell you that she was the passenger all three times, regardless of our prejudice and how that makes us feel, in rape the perpetrator is the one behind the steering wheel.

I‘ve often been asked if it helped me heal that Tom, my perpetrator said he believed me and that what he did was not my fault. My answer is yes. YES. But you know what? We don‘t need perpetrators to say those things. We can all be that person. Every single one of us can be the person who brings forth that healing. All of us in this room can be the one to say to a survivor I believe you, you did not deserve that. It was not your fault.

Anne Lamotte once said:

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”

So let‘s become the light. Let‘s hold space for all of us to heal.

As a woman who spent many years in the darkness caused by one man‘s actions, I ask you to imagine all the light we can create together – if we just dare to keep shining.

Thank you. Dekuje.

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The above photo was taken by Jana Plavec for Heroine magazine, November 2024