Yagmur Uygarkizi from Radical Girlsss speaks to Jeanne and Linda about feminist healing

Yagmur: In 1993, Jeanne Sarson, a public health nurse in Nova Scotia, Canada, receives a call in the middle of the night from a woman in distress. The rest is her story. Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald, friends, nurses, and activists compile decades of activism against torture in their forthcoming book Women Unsilenced: Our Refusal to Let Torturers- Traffickers Win.

It all started the night they received a call from a woman who shared her ordeal growing up in a family of torturers. Since then they have listened to many other stories and discovered a world of evillism as they call it, filled with heinous acts of torture.

They have never looked away though, instead they have listened to women's stories for decades and worked relentlessly to get the reality of misogynistic and misopedic torture recognised globally and legally.

 Our duty is now to carry on their work and listen to survivors, to un-silence women.

 In this episode of the FiLiA podcast, Jeanne and Linda share their wisdom on feminist healing, talk about the power of anger and laughter and tell us about their indefectible hope for change. 

So I was just wanting to hear from your own words, what the book is about the work that you've been doing for the past decades and what you hope to achieve with this book being published now? 

 Jeanne: Well, if I go to what I want to achieve, I think I said that in the book, I didn't want to die with my story silent.

So I'm finding that very important to me because what I was worried about is that, we had this story and it was a story that impacted on women and girls, not only the one woman that brought the issue to us, but I just felt that if we died with the story, we would be abandoning so many other women and girls, because really at the very beginning, well, you really never, never really just believed that it was only one woman in our whole province of a million people that would have had this ordeal.

So that's one of the powerful achievements for me is that we'll get our story told. And in the end, many women joined us with our ability to write the book. So that meant that like the title says Women Unsilenced that I'm not dying silent. I would say that's one big achievement. 

Linda: So you want one of us to say what the book is about and what, what our goal was. And what was the third thing? 

Yagmur: Telling us about your, your decades of activism.

Linda:  So what the book is about for me anyways, is that it really tells our story, Jeanne and my story from childhood to the work that we did. Some of our childhood and adolescence and young womanhood and how, when we met with the first woman and found out that she was a torture survivor, we realised that the world really wasn't open to her or to all the other women that we found out about later.

So it was a way to try to create a safe space for women and girls in the world who had been tortured and to identify to the world how prevalent non-state torture really is. And to show us another way of helping, that's not pathologising, that's based on equality between the woman and us. And that is a, is a partnership between two women helping another woman, so that there's a collective of feminists, it shows how women can work together and caring and to hopefully role model that way for other, especially young women coming up.

We were thinking about young feminists in particular and we didn't want them to have to go through what we did to try to dig out all of the troubles and trials and risks. We wanted to be able to frame it in a way that, that we could open that path for those young feminists and that they could step in and say, okay, I want to do this, or I don't want to do it, but this is what it's going to involve.

My hope is that we will really put a framework that shows another way of healing, other than pathologising. I'm really upset about how women in particular, women who have endured extreme atrocities such as non-state torture, but all women who have endured any kind of violence, including myself, that's why I insisted I was not mentally ill growing up and I would rather die than be labelled mentally ill.

I wasn't going into that system. I just wasn't. Because it's not fair because violence is not a mental illness. And if you label your mind and your spirit as mentally ill, you're starting out in the wrong place. And I really wanted that message to be out there that women and young girls and young women don't have to go that way to heal.

And that healing is possible. Healing is possible for me. It's possible for you. And it's possible for women. Who've endured, non-state torture, you know, the worst crimes of humanity and they can still heal. So that was a powerful message I wanted, so the hope of that. 

Yagmur: I'll ask something about healing, but before that I wanted to ask you about the term non-state torture because I was so irritated, maybe just like a bit like you. You talk about your frustration at times a lot in the book, especially when it comes to the legal acknowledgement, but what irritated me a lot is that you have to qualify it as non-state because the whole political system is based on the idea that sexual politics is not politics.

So it's not just plain torture, but you have to call it non-state. So I wanted to know more about what is torture, how do you explain torture, the purpose and how it works, some of the acts that are done to women and what is this non-state torture and what are you wanting to achieve on the legal level? 

Jeanne: Well, I guess in some ways it goes back to your first three questions, really, because we knew if we didn't find the right name, I mean, we live in a patriarchal society. So how can you challenge patriarchy and being considered serious at the same time to try to shift the concept around inequality, to gain equality.

And we really knew, right from the beginning, that if we did not seem credible in the way we presented, that we would be dismissed. And if we were dismissed, that would mean that the women that were talking to us would be discredited because that's what's going on anyway, around sexualised violence.

So the same thing would happen with sexualised torture because it's just sex, you know, really. And so we were very conscious that somehow we had to have the foot in the door, so patriarchy would listen, so that we could push so one day it would be great just to know that torture happens and it wouldn't matter who perpetrated the torture.

 But until we get there, because for me, like when we were writing the book at the end, I said to Linda, we had this discussion. I wanted to put that if we have to have the UN that we should get rid of the Commission on the Status of Women. What we should have is the Commission on Human Equality, because what's going on now.

We have a treaty over here for indigenous. We have a treaty over there for slavery. We have this over here, this over here, and really it's all the same thing. It's all about human and equality. So how do we bring everybody together and say, this is human equality issue.

And if we all sit in this room and you're sitting there and say, I want this, well, the question then becomes, well, if I want this, if we're sitting in a room full of equality, is everybody else around that table getting the same attention. 

So we had this discussion and we decided not to put it in this book.

So in some ways, what has happened when you asked the earlier question about what's the goal for where we're going. We've almost ended up thinking we have to write the other half of the story.

 But the other thing about getting back to the question about having to name it non-state because in some ways it's not really ever non-state because so many of the women are perpetrated by state actors too, in the domestic sphere. But because we've got the separation, you have to try to, to work through the patriarchy, to try to get your voice in there and be credible. 

And the other thing that happened to us with this first woman, which is not in the book, we have very serious attacks trying to shut us down by perpetrators or alleged perpetrators around our profession because we're licensed in a professional association.

So in order to work as nurses, we had to maintain our license. So they went after our license trying to shut us down so that we couldn't work. And then they would have the first woman they'd capture her again and discontinue. So, um, that's why we brought in Capra in the book. His statement, um, that you can make models to justify what we were saying.

And the thing about model making to me, it's not patriarchy or non-patriarchy. It's a model about reality. So when we're making models, I don't feel that I'm in patriarchy. I just feel I'm in my feminism and that this is the reality I'm seeing; this is the reality I'm explaining. It belongs to me and I'll share it with you, but I've never felt that the models were about patriarchy at all.

Actually, I knew that they couldn't look at it at the model and say it made sense, or it didn't. So that's why we had to use Capra but I never, ever thought of the models of being anything else, but Linda and my journey through a reality that we weren't familiar with, so I can understand why it's well, it's irritating.

Linda and I so often talked about how many women came before us and how many voices were there and how much was just put in the garbage can if she will. So I had a strong feeling that we had to try to be sound enough. That patriarchy couldn't dismiss us because we're not finished yet. We're not finished trying to claim the right.

And if you look at article five of the Universal Declaration, it doesn't just say only men have the right. It says no one has the right to be subjected to torture. So that's an equality statement. So we're not finished, we haven't achieved that yet that no one shall be subjected to torture.

Today we're coming out with a new image, if you will, it's called the Non-state Torture War. We had to call it the non-state torture war against women and girls. And we put out a model there of around the world of how much so-called non-state torture is going on right around the world.

So, we're not finished. I'll leave that there. 

Linda: We're not just fly-by-nighters. You know that by now, 28 years, two women are not going to commit 28 years for no pay for nothing. I mean, we're very, very serious about this. And we have a 60-year plan and we started that 60-year plan 28 years ago.

And people will say, well, is this a surprise to you? Well, no, it's not a surprise to us. You have to be very, very serious to find an opening through patriarchy. You have to pick very, very strategic. Every word means something. And you have to be so careful that you can't discredit your work or yourself or the women.

And like the other day, a woman was very upset with us. A woman who was prostituted, who asked us the question, you know, is prostitution torture. And we had to say, no, because we don't have enough women in prostitution saying it's torture. We can say that the women who came to us endured torture and they identified as torture, but we don't have a critical mass of women who were in prostitution demanding that it be recognised as torture.

So we would never devalue their voices or devalue the work of what we've done. It has to be a collective of representative of many, many voices. So we're very serious about every angle that we take in the work. 

Yagmur: Jeanne you've talked about belief and credibility and we're talking about being serious.

When I read the book, talking about credibility, when I read the testimonies of the women, I kept thinking this is incredible. And then it made me think, I could not believe that this was happening. I wanted to know how you believed, what made you trust it. So I realised this is happening because this is beyond human understanding and imagination, a lot of the things that we hear.

Jeanne: Eell, I guess number one, just like I'm looking at you, I'm trusting you, I'm trusting the emotion that you're expressing. I'm trusting the struggle you may have with the book or with the concepts or your own life. And when, like the first woman Sarah came to us, um, but you know how it started with the telephone call.

For Linda and I, the room that they entered, there was really no judgment. Sarah just came and was herself. And I think because for Linda and I, it's not looking at the person with a preconceived notion. You asked us if we wanted the questions ahead of time. So it's like, no, I'm trusting however you're coming. I'm not trying to figure out who you are before I even get there. I figure whatever comes, comes, and it will feel genuine or will not. 

So for the women, when they talked, it was genuine and their suffering was off the scale. You can't replicate suffering like they were suffering the way Sarah was suffering.

For the other women that came, it was that same thing, Linda and I, like we said, we just went in to say, you know, I'm Jeanne, this is Linda and you're who you are. And this is the story you want to tell us. So we're here just to listen and, and that's all we did is listen. 

And it was just believing what they were saying. There was no sense of nonverbal or even verbal feedback that would tell us that they weren't genuine. So just believed it. And every time we went back with their story and say, okay, have we understood? Where did we misunderstand? What do you want corrected?

The pattern of connectedness was always the same. If somebody is not genuine, you could talk to them today and maybe a week down the road, you talked to them again. And the story is not connected. And you're left kind of thinking, well, how does this make sense? Because a week ago, this wasn't the same.

 But it wasn't like that with the women, the story was the same path over and over again. And they just kept expanding on their story. And it was never just thinking back. Did I ever have a moment that I did not believe them? I would say no. Sometimes, if Linda and I started misunderstanding, what would happen is our own feelings would come and we'd look at each other and we'd say, we're feeling like we're going off the river. So it was our issue that we're misunderstanding what was coming at us or how we were understanding.

So really it was about understanding ourselves and being very aware of our own responses about whether we were doubting our own understanding and not the women's stories. 

Linda: And I think being nurses helped us because the non-verbals were so dramatic. When you're listening to such horror stories, especially when it started with Sarah, her non-verbal signs, her screams were blood curdling, she curled up in a ball in the corner, in the room. Her eyes, when she was disassociating, you could just literally see them going into the back of her head.  Her breathlessness, you can't act that over and over and, and what would be the purpose of her to keep coming back and doing that? So once we'd had her as a foundation a reality, and she started out with more of the milder stories and it just became more extreme and more extreme and more extreme. And that's how women tell us that they tell the easiest ones first. And by the time she got to the horrendous ones, why would we doubt those when all of the stream beforehand was all true? 

I know back then, we, hadn't heard a lot of atrocity that we're hearing now today, we're hearing a lot more atrocity that's happened to women and girls. So even back then, I think it was more glaring how shocking it was. There was just a trust in her as a person that she wouldn't be subjecting herself to this for any purpose. 

And the other women's stories came the same. The only time, and I wouldn't say we didn't doubt her suffering or the ordeals, we just doubted the way that she was distorted and lied to, to retell them. You know, we had to help them reframe them that what they had been told was happening. The psychodramas or whatever. But we didn't doubt that the goal was always the torture of them and how they tricked them into that and, and psychologically tortured them. 

So, no, never. You just have to understand nurses witness a lot of human suffering in many different forms in death and dying and pain. So you learn those non-verbals and these were very consistent with any other nonverbal sites seen in suffering. 

Yagmur: There's another thing that really surprised me in your work is that, you've talked, I'm glad you talked about the river because you completely go against the tide and everything that's being done.

What I found fascinating is that you have such a strong feminist allowances, whereas from my experience of care. And also what you tell in the book: care of women tends to be either overly medicalised, what you were saying, Linda or sex neutral, and even among care workers that work. For example, with women who are exiting prostitution, with women who have experienced extreme forms of violence, I haven't seen necessarily a feminist reckoning.

How can you explain this such strong feminist reckoning that both of you have, even at the very young age, can you explain that? 

Jeanne: I think, when I stood behind my mother's leg and called my grandmother a bitch, it happened there. I couldn't have told you that a three, obviously, you know, but I think it cemented how I felt. I think because my mother left.  As a single woman I watched the misogyny, how much sexism she had to deal with how much oppression she had to deal with, how much intrusiveness and misogyny she had to deal with. 

I think it also comes because it's like I had to decide that if I was going to survive, I had to make up my own mind about things. So I don't remember ever, even as an adult woman in my thirties, I don't remember spending any time reading feminist literature really. I decided I had to make up my own mind.

Actually what played a vital part besides surviving the torture, I went to the north of Canada into Aboriginal communities that were very isolated. I spent 11 years in the Arctic and at that time the northern communities were fairly isolated. Some of them had not actually seen Caucasian people in maybe 10 years in some of the communities that have lived off the land, their whole life. I was watching, I was nursing and what would happen in these isolated communities, professionals from south, which meant other provinces in Canada, not outside of Canada, they would come up with superiority, classism, privilege. And  it drove me to no end to have to stand.

I would go through the community and tell the women. Now, listen, when this crew comes in, you don't have to let them in your house because they would come in wanting to study us about how we could survive in isolation like we were surviving. And so I'd go around to the women and say, you know, just because they come in and they want to come in and study you, you don't have to let them in.

In some places there were just nursing stations and that meant I was alone in the community as a nurse because often nurses would come in and they'd last a few months and leave again because the workload was always so heavy. In some places like in Northwest Territories, there was a hospital there.

And when I went there, I had to do things like get the administrator of the hospital to come down and say to them, okay, you bring your wife here, put her on this table in an examining room. And there's only a curtain that everybody walks by and it flips open. So there you are, as a woman with your legs up in stirrups and people walking by and the curtains flowing. And because they were Inuit or Indian women, they weren't being treated with equality and respect. 

So I'd have to do things like that. I drag him down and say, okay, I want a solid wall here because that woman is on the table with her legs up, often, it was for venereal infections because a lot of the white men that came up sexually violated, took advantage of their positional power of whiteness.

And I told to him, bring your wife here and put her there and let her tell you how it would feel. So I'd get the walls up. It was always a struggle to have a voice for individuals that I felt are a vulnerable group. So I think my feminism just built on those kind of responses.

There was no TV. It was at the height of probably the feminist movement. I was very isolated and with these communities, so I was just building my own position. Besides growing up and watching my mother and my northern experience, I would say had a strong influence on my sense of feminism and feminism and nursing.

Linda: I think for me, I tried to figure that all out and the best I can come to is I think I was born with an innate sense of equality and how equality is important. And I can remember as a child, I knew that my parents were wrong. So it didn't matter if I could hold adults accountable. Because if you believe in equality, then you want the truth.

You're always searching for the truth. What is the truth in this situation? And instead of what people are acting like as the truth. So the truth was, my parents were wrong. Even though they were my adults and they're supposed to be caring for me. And supposedly adults are right, children are taught that adults are right.

Then I went to school and there was an indigenous population of kids in the school that I went to a Catholic school. And I saw that there was racism that they were treated less than we were. It was very obvious to me. I thought all kids saw that, but they didn't because I've talked about it since to my peers, that we went to school with them.

They have a total different memory of the school process than I do. And then of course the nuns and the priests were terrible. They were just so abusive. I thought, well, you know, it's as bad as home. And it didn't matter if they were so-called religious people. They had the hatred of children and I looked around and saw my mother being beaten because she was female and women weren't treated equally.

So I think it just came from a sense of equality. So I don't have any trouble with, I mean, I know I missed miss things in reality. I didn't understand homosexuality or lesbian when I was little, because nobody was out visible enough for me to see that. And there was no conversation, but intersectionality is not a hard concept for me because that's how I framed in the world when I was little, how are we as people? What is the truth about equality? Those weren't the words I use, but that's what I was always looking for. Trying to understand relationships. And when you look for it, there's a mess, and feminism is just part of that, we're not good at equality.

Yagmur: I really liked the fact that in the book you have in your stories that you've talked about quite a bit today as well in the mix and you add your own testimony. I don't know of any woman who hasn't had an experience of some form of sexual violence abuse, and given that we all are in to some extent in need of healing, but we all are in to some extent also somehow hurt.

How does feminist healing look like? How can we help each other out something you were talking about Linda, earlier?

Linda: Well, I think we have to undo internalised misogyny, that we were taught and stop as women being competitive with each other or jealous of each other, or trying to control each other.

I think that's really important and learn to earnestly work together, caring about each other so that it's not about, who's going to get ahead here it’s how we can move forward together. And that's what Jeanne and I are hoping that we role model, because that's how we work.

It makes for such a quality of life in the work that you do. If you're working together, not pitting one's self against the other, because what will that prove in the end? You're not much of a helper if you can't even work with another woman, we have very few disagreements over these last 28 years, so we've worked through them all. It hasn't been a big hurdle because I think we both have such a strong goal of making a better world, especially for women and girls. And that means that we have to be together on that goal. 

And I wanted to say too, that my ultimate goal is prevention for little girls. So that little girls or little boys aren't born into such families or that if they are they're found earlier. And so we have to really be committed to work together on that. 

So, you know, being honest with each other, trusting each other, caring about each other, I know that if I need support that Jeanne will be there and I'll do the best I can. If we have a difference of opinion, that doesn't mean that we don't care about each other. We don't need to use harsh words or try to pull each other along. We're just walking beside each other. I think that's the role modelling that we want to show.

Jeanne: The other thing I wanted to say, it relates to this question.

When I lived in the Arctic as a nurse, I had access to the birth control pill to give to Inuit or Indian women. Before Southern Canadian women had access to it. And so this Inuit woman came and said she didn't want any more children. So I prescribed the birth control pill. And what was important about that is, she was no sooner home with the pills, then her husband appeared at the nursing station. This is an Inuit man who had no science and no education, appeared, angry that I had given his wife a pill that would keep her from getting pregnant. And what that taught me is the ingrained ness of misogyny that whether it's inherited through our evolution, I don't know I'm looking at this man who knows nothing about science, hasn't been indoctrinated with TV, you know, has really like a zero knowledge, but yet, by that one act, his masculinity was challenged. 

So how we as feminist are going to care around each other. I think not only do we have to recognise how patriarchy has men internalised misogyny, but women internalise misogyny.

And if we don't as a woman, if I don't question how I act, and if my actions are really based, and if we want to say evolutionary misogyny, then we're never gonna get to the issue of equality because there's more people on this planet who probably have been conditioned into misogyny than those of us who have struggled to decondition ourselves to misogyny.

So for a feminist caring, I think we can't excuse ourselves as well. I really don't. Linda and I had quite a bit of conversation about this in the book because we're holding women accountable in the book. There were women who were torturers, without question, and actually the women that attacked us and tried to take our license away, alleged perpetrators, they were all women.

 So I think as feminist, instead of fighting with each other, like, what's your theory of feminism? What's your theory of feminism? How about what's our respect for each other, as women, as human beings?

 And like Linda said, you know, you can have a difference of opinion. If our ultimate goal is to have equality, why can't we accept diverse ways of getting there?

We don't seem to be able to do that. Attacks come from every side it seems to me, I mean, that doesn't say that everything is right, but to keep fighting and fighting and fighting, instead of saying, okay, we have a problem here. How will we find the middle road and Linda and I often call the middle road because you have this side and this side, and it just seems we can't come to the middle and walk with the unified voice of how are we going to make this planet an equal place for everyone without damaging each other repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly.

And that's one of the reasons that, often when Linda and I talk, if we have the time, we often say we present together. Even if we only have 10 minutes, we share each five minutes because it's important. It's important that we each have a voice it's like listening to the women. If we're fighting, we're not listening to each other, we're fighting all the time.

 So it's like role modelling. So we share the time and it's important that we share the women's voices with a equality too and that was one of the reasons when you talked about feminist caring, we could never have written the book without putting some of ourselves in there because outside of that, it would feel to me that we were talking about women not talking with women. There's a difference.

So, I feel strongly about that, about the book.

We're self-publishing, so we have that freedom, but we talked about that too. Like if a publisher said, well, you have to take your own stories out of there. Forget it just wouldn't work.

And speaking of that, actually, we did have that position and with a chapter that we wrote about a handbook on human trafficking because it was written with Elizabeth as a co-author with us and they were struggling about how we wrote it because it wasn't the way they proceed, but we won our case. They put it in as is. 

So, I think that's the middle road, that coming together and how do we come together equally and practice at equally. 

Linda: Yeah, we were accused of being a meshed with the women's survivors and we were accused of toxic over-involvement and all of those things, because we see them as persons, as women like us.

And to me, the only difference between them and us is the luck of what family you're born into or what street you walked down or what person you came in contact as a teenager, most of its luck of the draw. So I don't see myself as any different than any other woman, any of those things could have happened to me.

And I feel very strongly about that, that means that they deserve and I demand of myself to treat them equally. Well, how else could I do that? I mean, if you want to promote equality, you have to help the people that you're helping with equality. You can't help them thinking that you're smarter than them, or that you're better than them.

When we go somewhere with a survivor, they travel with us, you know, we go places together, we sit down and eat with them. I mean, we don't just have them as some object that we drag along to talk. I mean, that's just not the way it would be. So people think that's enmeshment, good on them, if that's what they want to call it. But to me it's equal personhood in the process. 

Jeanne: I find that's called oppression. I think if we don't understand oppression … 

Yagmur: We don't understand opression. So that's where I want it to get at. We live in a world where torture is heralded as a simple game. Kink, the fashion industry is built on it. Pornography built on it and it was already irritating as it is. But after reading your book, I found it even more irritating. So what does it mean? What does it feel like to evolve in a world where torture is under-acknowledged and even celebrated? Okay. 

Linda:  Well, what it means is I'm infuriated all the time. I really am. I was looking at something that Caitlin Roper posted on Instagram yesterday where this ad in the mall, I don't know that she's from Australia, so I don't know the company, but the ad was a woman being choked in a little video and they had this as an ad in a mall. And so girls are gonna, and she's grinning, she's got the gag on and she's got the, the BDSM outfit on and she’s grinning where she's being choked.

So of course Katelyn is upset and so she should be, and I thought, oh my God, now it's not the epitome of sexualised torture, in a mall, a video. And it's promoting femicide. It's just absolutely the worst scam there ever was that patriarchy can make women and young girls believe that by being choked or breath games, or you have a code word or whatever that you're being whipped and that has anything to do with sex or fun or healthy sexuality. 

And to think that men can get off in court by torturing a woman to death. It's infuriating. It's absolutely infuriating. And we have to get a hold of this because it will get ahead of us if, if we don't otherwise, you know what I mean?

There has to be enough of us that get infuriated about it. It has nothing to do with sex. It's just the sexualisation of torture. Women are being tortured right in front of us and we're missing it. It's not even being hidden anymore. 

Jeanne: Yeah. Well, besides infuriating, that's exhausting. I mean, Linda and I talk about this sometimes every day, because it seems that you don't even have a chance to get up out of your chair when another one is ahead of you. And it's like there's no end to it, which is the truth. It seems like there's no end to it.

And here again, I think women have bought into it with the language we use. I keep going back to the oppression and the misogyny, because the thing like who would have said that being trafficked and to exploitation, pornographic exploitation, prostitution exploitation, but that was sex. I mean, we call it the language is sex trafficking.

I mean, and women buy into the language too, you know, what do you mean? It's sex trafficking. That's a whole human body. That's a whole person, you know? So the conditioning that we have to oppress and to harm and to minimise the harming. It's a very serious emotional track that we have going on.

Sometimes Linda and I, we have the discussion, whether our brains have evolved enough because we are an evolutionary species, like so far, they know, I think it's nine evolutions that have got us here. And there's still more species out there that they haven't discovered because they don't have the money to investigate all the caves where we, our ancestors hid in, you know, but whether some of it is anatomical, biological, certainly it's evolutionary. Our language is evolutionary and the conditioning is so profound. 

 As a public health nurse, I developed a program in school too, for 10 year olds. They want to call that sex education. I said, no it's relationship education. And I kept track before the program was stopped because of public health funding, but almost a thousand evaluations, the kids said what I was teaching was a relationship with yourself. Like the model is in the book and 90% of the thousand children said that that was the most important concept they learned, it's trying to, decondition how we sexualised everything. Instead of developing emotional awareness about the language, we use the simple word, like sex trafficking that has a huge impact.

And I think I became really aware of that when I lived in the Arctic, because each indigenous community spoke their own dialect. So they weren't exposed to what the conditioning we had. They must have had their own exposure, but the sexualisation, in pornography and stuff was still going on.

 That's why I'm wondering about the evolution. It was still going on in some ways, because little girl, children, they were seen as a burden if there were too many. So they put them out to freeze to death outside. So that language of devaluing femaleness, if you will, I'm left with thinking there's an evolutionary process that we’re missing the point, because how is it that so-called nomadic people make a decision that girl children are dispensable, you know, how do you do that?

The whalers that came into the Arctic. Some of them were so-called paedophiles because the stories go back where the men on the ship, liked the little Inuit girls, so to think that the Inuit people didn't have a resistance to saying no, hands-off our little girls. That just means to me, that there was an evolutionary process. because even the white men who came into the Arctic, the Inuit women were, if you will, exploited and prostituted, they didn't understand that. So to your question about how do we deal with that? I think we have to look at our species much more cautiously and hold ourselves really accountable for the language because language conditions us about how we think, how we perceive the reality in the world. And for Linda and I, in writing the book, how we use the language was a constant.

Simple things like, and sometimes we ran into difficulty with publications because of the words we would not say prostituted woman, we would say a woman who was exploited into prostitution.

So that's five words compared to two words, you know, so patriarchy uses two words, it serves their purpose. So, language is really vital to our own conditioning, because to me, if I say prostituted woman that affects my brain, that affects how I'm seeing the world. It affects how I emotionally I’m feeling. Prostituted woman. I mean, that's a put down just in two words. 

Yagmur: I think readers really enjoy finding some of the neologisms that you use and some of the words you use as well. And you Linda have talked about infuriating.

I have two more questions and one of them is about anger and something I've noticed in the testimonies, in your book, and also testimonies of women who survived rape. is that the anger? It’s not immediate. It's something I've noticed. It comes maybe at a later stage, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it was my impression, but I was wondering how do you let the anger in? Because I feel anger is a much more healthy feeling than we give it credit for. I feel that what you were saying earlier about the image of you're not angry, you are kind of missing the point. So how do we instil anger in a woman? 

Linda:  I never had that problem because I mean, I was angry from the time I was little. I didn't realise I internalised anger, but I also could express it outwardly to others. So like there's different kinds of anger, right? Anger is a complex emotion, but it's vital and you cannot be an activist if you don't have anger. I don't think it's possible because anger is the fuel that moves you forward because you're in constant indignation because of the violations of the human rights of people around.

You'd be desensitised if you weren't angry. I mean, I'd be worried about myself if I wasn't angry. So I think you just have to trust yourself to feel it and go against the socialisation because we're socialised from the time we're little girls not to be angry. I never thought of it that. I really didn't.

I didn't think about whether I could, that's one thing I, I guess, because my mother, she was so focused on my father. She really didn't tell me very many rules of any kind. I was more like the adult in the family. So I didn't have that rule that you couldn't be angry or you couldn't do this, or couldn't do that.

Not verbally anyways, nobody told me that and I didn't think about it that way. And I used to get angry in school. And so I grew up being angry. And like I say, unfortunately I internalised some that I wasn't aware of. I learned that later in life. So you have to be careful and be sure what you're internalising and what you're expressing.

But my heavens, what, what do you do if you don't get angry? You know, you get despondent, you give up, you think it's hopeless. The righteous anger is liberating. You can't let it consume. because then of course you destroy yourself and any possibility of any helping in the world.

So there's a fine balance. Like every day I'm angry at things, but I also know that I can only do so much. So I have to focus on what my role is and what my goals are. 

I'm really upset now about Belarus and that reporter there, because freedom of speech is so important and democracy is intimate to my spirit.

So I'm angry about that, but I can't think, well, I'm going to go and I just can't go there. I know that I'm angry, but I have to stay on my track of non-state torture. I can be angry for him and upset about Belarus, but still stay on my own track. And then I have to balance and say, okay, now I've thought about enough anger for the day. What's been good that's happened in the world today for me, or what's funny or what's beautiful. 

So I surround myself with not just anger and I don't kind of burn up in it. Anger is a friend, I just embrace it like a friend the same as I do hope or caring and any other of the emotions. 

Jeanne: Being pissed off every day is just a routine.

And when you were talking, Linda it reminds me, Linda and I took a Master's course and we went in saying anger is healthy. Well, the professor just about had to fit because she never saw anger as healthy. She always had it as unhealthy. So when you were talking, I can still see her up there and we're sitting in the class and everybody's looking at us and we're saying, you know, anger is healthy. You know, if you don't have anger pissed off at the way the world is, I mean, there's something wrong with you. And yeah, I think I was pissed off most of my life and I'll probably die pissed off. That's just a given because patriarchy and misogyny is there. And the struggle to get to the middle is a challenge.

But the issue that's really important for me and thinking about the women is the women that have intermittently come to us. They had no other option because this disassociation, they're flat. And to me, it's a marker of their healing. When they keep saying, when they call up and say, I'm angry. Yes. What am I going to do with this anger?

Well, the one thing we know is you have to name it. We've always taught. Okay. You have emotion, so, and knowing yourself it's to start the ability to name that emotion. Because like, if I'm talking to Linda and say, I'm pissed off as hell today, you know, I'm angry and I'm feeling that what that feels like sometimes it's like, your head is just gonna bounce right off your shoulders and other days it's yeah, I'm really, I'm really pissed off.

For the women, because the violations have been so profound, their anger when they were told all their lives, that they didn't have anger or they didn't have any emotion, they didn't say anger. And they were disassociated. It's pretty terrifying to all of a sudden feel these emotional feelings. So that's why it's so critical in my mind that they understand that's normal. And often it's a marker of healing because anger then says I've been hurt. Society's hurt me. And that's a vital piece to know that society is hurting. And we talk about that in the book. I mean, what's the sense of you and I having a healing conversation and you go out in the world there and its crap.

As soon as you step down the stairs, it hits you with oppression and misogyny and what have you. So it's an important step in healing to know that not only are you angry at what the perpetrators did, but you can recognise anger socially, but how society is treating me is wrong. And I have a right to be angry with it. I think that's a mark of feminism in my mind because recognising that the world that you live in is unjust and unfair, and you have the right to be angry and act upon it and name how you feel. 

Linda: And I think any woman that says that they're not angry about the world and the injustices that woman and girls endure, well then patriarchy has got them. because really that's the turning point emotion that you have to embrace it, to really see the truth of the world. If you are not seeing the truth of the world, you're not embracing who you are as a woman or who your daughters or granddaughters are and what they have to go through.

I take pride in my anger because I say to myself, they didn't get me. The ‘they’ being patriarchy. If they had got me, I'd be sitting here just smiling and beaming and, you know, pickling tomatoes and saying, I love my life. There's a lot of crap out there. So I can't do that. I can smile and laugh about somethings, but not about the reality of patriarchy and I will die in the same way. And I'll be proud they didn't get me because I can die angry.

Yagmur: Final question, because there is still an ode to happiness in your book and the importance of laughter. So I was wondering the other side of the equation. How do you let the happiness and the laughter back in as well? 

 Jeanne: We laugh every day. We're laughing right now. I mean, I think just speaking the truth, speaking about how you feel and swearing is sometimes very helpful.

Some of the women, they get upset when they start swearing, we say, oh, that's good for you because sometimes that's the only thing you have when you're pissed off as hell. You know, all you can do is swear. Yeah. For Linda and I we talk about this a lot. We laughed ourselves so many times. for so many different reasons.

Sometimes initially, if I go back to 1993, sometimes our imaginations would run wild. Like some of the first stories, like, what in the hell was going on out there? It was like reading a horror story and our imaginations would go over there and then we'd have to check in and say, come on, you know, like we're getting kind of carried away here, you know, let's get back on track.

And we had a lot of laughter around some of the, some of the thoughts we had. It's like torture humour with the women. We laugh at the torture humour because they were worried that it made them a bad person to have torture humour. So we had to address that and no, I mean, how else can you not have some way to have justice if you can't just kind of imagine what you would do with some of these fuckers, you know, so we'd laugh, we laugh at those things.

And when the women were healed enough to go there, they'd laugh with us. And we were very cautious. If you're just thinking about the women like with Sarah, we didn't laugh around Sarah for a long time because she would have seen that as laughing at her instead of with her situation. But for Linda and I, oh, sometimes we do crazy things and think why the heck did we do that? And then we find it funny. 

Some of our conversation, just are funny. We laugh every day. Really. I guess what it is, is that I've never been depressed or had depressiveness. I've never felt hopeless or have hopelessness. I've never felt that what we're trying to achieve is impossible.

 Even growing up, I never had those kinds of emotions. Not that people don't have them, but I think it becomes a way of looking at the world. I think if you embrace reality and accept reality, then those kind of negative and hurtful emotions don't come in to preoccupy your relationship with yourself. So I think then you can go out and see beauty. Like I've already, before I'm even talking to you, I'm already been outdoors in my garden, and marvelling at all the flowers that are growing out there. 

I guess if you feel there's some contentedness in self-acceptance accepting who you are as a person. And I think when you can do that, when you do stupid things, you can kind of laugh at yourself and it’s not harmful because you're not internalising that there's something wrong with you. You're just accepting that, Okay. That was kind of stupid. We thought it was kind of funny, you just shrug it off and move on, I guess. 

Linda: When Jeanne and I just laugh thinking about this when, when we stand back and look at ourselves, right, because we've been attacked for all kinds of things. And we're hearing more negativity about us again now, I guess it's because we must be surfacing in a different way. So we get lots of attacks. So we'll have to deal with that, but humour is one way to deal with it. And we were accused the other day of just being two individuals. You know, we don't, we don't have a non-profit. We're not aligned with any university. We don't have any structural grounding other than ourselves. Right? I mean, I think it's funny because it drives people crazy and we're talking at these things and everybody's got all these organisations that are behind them and then there's Jeanne and I, and that just gives me such hysteria because you know, you don't need all those really, if you don't believe in patriarchy. So we're not doomed by patriarchy. We're not embarrassed that we don't have them. So that's funny. 

I picture what it's like when we come into a room and people think of us, I mean, they told us as we look like just two little women from, we’re two little nurses from a little town in Nova Scotia that nobody knows. Who are these two people?

And then we start talking and you know, we're not afraid of positional power. So we'll challenge any power structure in the room because of the inherent belief in inequality. Structures, and positional power does not make you any more important than I am. And it doesn't make the women any less important to be advocating for. But it creates a funny situation too. 

I think it throws people off and I can't do anything about that, but I find it funny because it's disarming, you know, we can be disarming and that's a good thing. Maybe it'll open people's brains up differently.

Jeanne:  They roll their eyes at us.

Linda: I get a charge out of this because when you listen to us and you listen to this talk, there's no limits. We have no limits to what we would do. You know, other than be illegal, we don't have any fear about who we would challenge or where we would go.

The only restraints we have is if we can get in or how much it costs or some of those structural things, but we don't have any fear. So it might get makes it kind of funny. 

Jeanne:  We applied to present and we got accepted. I mean, we often throw this out there and just say, okay. And I was looking at how they have us listed, they have our names and nothing behind it. And the two other people presenting have this long list and they're related to the UN and this long list and Linda and I are looking at that and they're just our names and blank, nothing. And I'm looking at that and those things strike us funny. Cause they're kind of funny. 

 Linda: And we drive the conspiracy theorists crazy because they try to get us into a box that we're funded by this group or some conspiracy. We don't have any conspiracy. We're just two women that set out on a goal to try to make a difference for an extreme crime. And it happens to put us in very unusual circumstances and that's not the norm you see? So it throws them off. 

Yagmur: Well, thank you. Thank you for doing that. 

You are, you're making a difference. 

Jeanne: We're funny.