Men Explain Things to Me

by Rebecca Solnit

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.

billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.

The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

“Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined,” writes Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the few prominent figures to address the issue regularly.

I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it. She just discovered that she herself did not exist, but her brothers did.

Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients.” If they were telling the truth, he would have to challenge the whole edifice of patriarchal authority to support them.