Rebecca Solnit - Men Explain Things to Me

Contents

2014 Rebecca Solnit

Haymarket Books

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ISBN: 978-1-60846-457-9

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This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Action Fund.

Cover design by Abby Weintraub. Interior images Ana Teresa Fernandez.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

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For the grandmothers, the levelers, the dreamers, the men who get it, the young women who keep going, the older ones who opened the way, the conversations that dont end, and a world that will let Ella Nachimovitz (born January 2014) bloom to her fullest

chapter 1

Men Explain Things to Me

2008

I still dont know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasions young ladies. The house was greatif you like Ralph Laurenstyle chaletsa rugged luxury cabin at 9,000 feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning stove. We were preparing to leave, when our host said, No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you. He was an imposing man whod made a lot of money.

He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me, So? I hear youve written a couple of books.

I replied, Several, actually.

He said, in the way you encourage your friends seven-year-old to describe flute practice, And what are they about?

They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West , my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?

So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingnue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and Id somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important bookwith that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

Here, let me just say that my life is well sprinkled with lovely men, with a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened to and encouraged and published me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid friends of whom it could be saidlike the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales I still remember from Mr. Pelens class on Chaucergladly would he learn and gladly teach. Still, there are these other men, too. So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him, to say, Thats her book. Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say, Thats her book three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadnt read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechlessfor a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and weve never really stopped.

I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda thats eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.

The Slippery Slope of Silencings

Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what theyre talking about. Some men.

Every woman knows what Im talking about. Its the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises mens unsupported overconfidence.

I wouldnt be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics since 2001 was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI woman who issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was certainly shaped by a Bush administration to which you couldnt tell anything, including that Iraq had no links to al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to be a cakewalk. (Even male experts couldnt penetrate the fortress of its smugness.)

Arrogance might have had something to do with the war, but this syndrome is a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to let Mr. Important and his overweening confidence bowl over my more shaky certainty.

Dont forget that Ive had a lot more confirmation of my right to think and speak than most women, and Ive learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressingthough too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. Theres a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.

More extreme versions of our situation exist in, for example, those Middle Eastern countries where womens testimony has no legal standing: so that a woman cant testify that she was raped without a male witness to counter the male rapist. Which there rarely is.

Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just beginning to get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was tellingas though it were a light and amusing subjecthow a neighbors wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know that he wasnt trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for her fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand....

Even getting a restraining ordera fairly new legal toolrequires acquiring the credibility to convince the courts that some guy is a menace and then getting the cops to enforce it. Restraining orders often dont work anyway. Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. Its one of the main causes of death for pregnant women in the United States. At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes has been the necessity of making women credible and audible.

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