There is an inevitable, incredible thing that happens when you put a bunch of women in a room together with space to talk freely.
No, we don't shriek like banshees at the moon, plait our hair into one giant nest and cast spells - that's reserved for a Sunday afternoon. What we do is exchange stories about things that have happened to us, particularly dealings in harassment, sexism and abuse that might otherwise never see the light of day.
As writer Clementine Ford says in her astounding manifesto Fight Like a Girl, women need to keep sharing these stories to galvanise ourselves against a gross world that often tries to erode the validity of our experiences. No matter how much we are told that we were being hysterical or that we made it up or we were asking for it, it's all real. What happens to us is real. Our feelings are real. Any opportunity to confirm that reality should be grasped with two hands and shouted from the rooftops.
There is perhaps no more powerful example of this rooftop shouting than in TVNZ's So This Happened, a groundbreaking online series that's become a permanent platform for airing out these dark, musty corners. Produced by Lucy Zee and Maha Albadrawi, the short animated web series breathes life into women's experiences through animation, as local women share instances of harassment, racism and abuse, and how they did (or didn't) deal with it at the time. As many of them say in their videos, if only they had known what they know now.
Take Maha, who was just trying to enjoy a beer in the sun when a man confronted her about being a terrorist because she told him she was from Iraq. Or Shannon, who was trying to get a book from the library when a pervert snapped a picture up her skirt. Or Catarina, who was trying to get home from work when she came face to face with a bus masturbator. These stories will be familiar to many and shocking to some, becoming all the more palpable when frankly, sometimes wryly recollected by the women who were directly involved.
