Men Explain Things to Me

by Rebecca Solnit

It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

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.

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.

I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn’t happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest—in a nutshell, female.

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,

but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern.

Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

In addition, men obviously also suffer violence, largely at the hands of other men,

A significant portion of the women you know are survivors.

that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror.

The latest spin is that lead exposure was responsible for a lot of our violence, except that both genders are exposed and one commits most of the violence.

I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more productively.

murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.

It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country.

“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,”

There’s no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.

An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill, and urinate on you.

Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.

and in cases of rape still often tries the victim rather than the rapist, as though only perfect maidens could be assaulted—or believed.

Congressional Republicans refused to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act because they objected to the protection it gave immigrants, transgender women, and Native American women.

one of three Native American women will be raped, and on the reservations 88 percent of those rapes are by non-Native men who know tribal governments can’t prosecute them.

So much for rape as a crime of passion—these are crimes of calculat...

Didn’t I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?

who impregnate their victims have parental rights in thirty-one states.

the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren’t likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds.

some. Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.

Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving.

It’s clear now that monumental harassment online keeps many women from speaking up and writing altogether.

We have far more than eighty-seven thousand rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated

It has to change. It’s your job to change it, and mine, and ours.

The head of the IMF is charged with sexual assault. If that term confuses you take out the word “sexual” and just focus on “assault,”

“The rights of man” was one of the great phrases of the French Revolution, but it’s always been questionable whether it included the rights of women.

her. That was before she felt her buttock being cupped and said something to me, as young women often do, tentatively, quietly, as though it were perhaps not happening or perhaps not quite a problem.

His action, like so much sexual violence against women, was undoubtedly meant to be a reminder that this world was not mine, that my rights—my liberté, egalité, sororité, if you will—didn’t matter.

But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That’s not what traditional marriage was.

“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.”

And what lay behind Castro’s alleged actions must have been a desire for a situation in which he held absolute power and the women were absolutely powerless, a vicious version of the traditional arrangement.

And feminism made same-sex marriage possible by doing so much to transform a hierarchical relationship into an egalitarian one.

but for the most part it’s a relationship between people who have equal standing and so are free to define their roles themselves.

Her life was not hers to determine. It was his.

Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality.

It’s a boon to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It’s for all of us.

Here, in this painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez, a woman both exists and is obliterated.

I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it.

Thus coherence—of patriarchy, of ancestry, of narrative—is made by erasure and exclusion.

Names erased a woman’s genealogy and even her existence.

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband;

He covered her like a sheet, like a shroud, like a screen. She had no separate existence.