It’s a myth that wisdom comes only with age, the writer argues. Young women and girls offer new tools to use

As you grow older you become an immigrant from a vanished country, a country some of your peers may remember but the young may find unimaginable or incomprehensible. You could call it the land of before; before some great change, before we did things this way, before we decided that was unacceptable, before we shed new light on an old problem. I was shaped by a world that no longer quite exists, so I can’t imagine myself at, say, 18 in the present moment, because to do so is to imagine someone utterly different. She does not exist, and I – as we all do – exist as the cumulative effect of my experiences, opportunities or lack thereof, and ideals.

So much of what shaped and scarred my younger self, and made me a solitary feminist, and then much later one among many, was the unspeakability of violence against women and all the denigration, harassment and silencing that went with it. It was epidemic, and yet every incident was supposed to be an isolated incident, and nobody was supposed to connect the crimes to the culture that relished violence against women as entertainment, and denied it existed in any significant way as fact, and made sure that prevention and prosecution were as feeble as they were rare. All those forces still exist, but something else does alongside them: a vigorous conversation, speaking and naming and describing and defining; rejecting the excuses and cover-ups and justifications.