Men Explain Things to Me

by Rebecca Solnit

I began with a ridiculous example of being patronized by a man, I ended with rapes and murders. We tend to treat violence and the abuse of power as though they fit into airtight categories: harassment, intimidation, threat, battery, rape, murder. But I realize now that what I was saying is: it’s a slippery slope. That’s why we need to address that slope, rather than compartmentalizing the varieties of misogyny and dealing with each separately. Doing so has meant fragmenting the picture, seeing the parts, not the whole.

A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere. It takes time.

Thanks to demographics, that conservative push is not going to work—the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again—and because genies don’t go back into bottles and queer people are not going back into the closet and women aren’t going to surrender. It’s a war, but I don’t believe we’re losing it, even if we won’t win it anytime soon either; rather, some battles are won, some

are engaged, and some women are doing really well while others suffer. And things continue to change in interesting and sometimes even auspicious ways.

The men who get it also understand that feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a campaign to liberate us all.