Part II of V
Of course, as times change so does policy. There has been a lot of talk by politicians about making sure non citizens are unable to vote (which I am confident they are not). And so came about the proposed policy to require voters to have their birth certificate name match their current legal name. This leads to an entire body of problems for people who want to match their gender identity with a name or even married women/people who changed their last name. It has had an unfortunate ripple effect: first women become legally dead and become “one” with the husband by taking his last name, and were encouraged to do so because they could not obtain things such as registering to vote, obtain a driver’s license, or a passport. Some even started to hyphenate their last name as well. However, in all cases their birth certificate does not match their current legal name effectively making them ineligible to vote. What a twist of policy! And now that bill has indeed passed.35
Despite this intentional hoarding of power by men historically and in the present, people have still gone about their daily lives as best they can. But the harassment, abuse, and sexual abuse of women has been continually fueled by this outdated and ridiculous notion that we, as women, belong to men. The notion that our bodies, our minds, our assets are really only an extension of men instead of truly belonging to ourselves is where men’s entitled attitudes stem from because of policy. And this has shown up repeatedly and even in the modern era with the rise of social media. I can almost guarantee any woman out there living her/their life publicly has had some sort of harassment simply by just being. Whether it be being punched in the face for walking down the street looking at their phone36 or wildly rude comments online, men are watching and always have something to say. I personally also have had comments online and in person that were beyond rude for no apparent reason except that we dare to step outside of what men’s society has expected of us as women the last 100 years.
And an interesting yet unfortunate thing is: women are harassed while the perpetrating men are sheltered and defended. And it is no different when this happens to famous climbers. And we will see this play out with two specific examples with the Reel Rock films. But first, let’s get acquainted with the history of Reel Rock itself.
Reel Rock is a film festival founded in 2005 by white men Josh Lowell, Peter Mortimer, and Nick Rosen under the companies Big Up Productions and Sender Films.37 Considering each of these men are about the average age of 50 years old, that means they were born close to the years of marital rape still being legal, women finally legally being empowered to have bank accounts, no fault divorce still not a concept in a lot of states, and approximately 10 years after segregation ended. This means their parents were the generation that women and Black people still did not have many of the rights we have today. Their parents probably lived through segregation and only fault based divorces being legal policy, which still shapes the next generation’s ideas and attitudes about women. And this is probably the experience of most white men their age, unless specific work is done to scrutinize policy…
Read/watch/listen to the rest of this journey on my Substack
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Works Cited
35. Benen, Steve. “House Republicans pass the ‘SAVE Act,’ which is a solution in search of a problemhttps://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/house-republicans-pass-act-solution-search-problem-rcna200681 04/10/2025
36. Burga, Solcyré. “Women in NYC Are Posting TikToks About Getting Punched in the Face on the Street.” https://time.com/6961350/tiktok-women-nyc-punched-street-trend/ 04/04/2025
37. MountainFilm. “Josh Lowell.” https://www.mountainfilm.org/people/josh-lowell/ 04/04/2025
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