Men Explain Things to Me

by Rebecca Solnit

The word disappear, a verb, became a noun as so many thousands were transformed into the disappeared, los desaparecidos, but the people who loved them kept them alive.

Motherhood was an emotional and biological tie that the generals then in charge of the country could not portray as merely left wing or as criminal.

Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.)

It is easy to name the disappearances of the Dirty War as crimes, but what do we call the millennia of disappearances of women, from the public sphere, from genealogy, from legal standing, from voice, from life?

She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law.

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

This is what it’s about but not what it is. The woman who is represented is obscured, but the woman who represents is not.

“How in your opinion are we to prevent war?”—which she answered instead with the statement, “As a woman I have no country.”

The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.

Ah, but what is “herself”? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know.

Woolf gave us limitlessness, impossible to grasp, urgent to embrace, as fluid as water, as endless as desire, a compass by which to get lost.

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf—that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie.

Generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once.

the word-salad king, the factually challenged, the eternally riled—got called hysterical once in a while.

and being female was, so to speak, her Achilles’ heel.

Hysteria derives from the Greek word for “uterus,” and the extreme emotional state it denotes was once thought to be due to a wandering womb;

Sexual assault, like torture, is an attack on a victim’s right to bodily integrity, to self-determination and self-expression.

It intends to rub out the voice and rights of the victim, who must rise up out of that annihilation to speak.

It was as though a handy alibi had been constructed for all transgressive authority, all male perpetrators of crimes against females. She wanted it. She imagined it. She doesn’t know what she is saying.

For it’s particularly when women speak up about sexual crimes that their right and capacity to speak come under attack.

The feminism of that era is often dismissed as grimly antisex because it pointed out that sex is an arena of power and that power is liable to abuse and because it described the nature of some of that abuse.

Though she was criticized for doing nothing about his conduct at the time, it’s worth remembering that feminists had only recently articulated the concept and coined the term sexual harassment, and that only in 1986, after the incidents she described had taken place, had the Supreme Court recognized such behavior in the workplace as a violation of the law.

Still, even now, when a woman says something uncomfortable about male misconduct, she is routinely portrayed as delusional, a malicious conspirator, a pathological liar, a whiner who doesn’t recognize it’s all in fun, or all of the above.

Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim.

The implication that women as a category are unreliable and that false rape charges are the real issue is used to silence individual women and to avoid discussing sexual violence, and to make out men as the principal victims.

The framework is reminiscent of that attached to voter fraud, a crime so rare in the United States that it appears to have had no significant impact on election outcomes in a very long time. Nevertheless, claims by conservatives that such fraud is widespread have in recent years been used to disenfranchise the kinds of people—poor, non-white, students—likely to vote against them.

when universities or feminists or liberals “make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.”

I am like bad people who distort facts. I am subjective but believe I am objective; I feel but confuse feeling with thinking or knowing. It’s such a familiar litany and a familiar rage.

But with the real-life Cassandras among us, we can lift the curse by making up our own minds about who to believe and why.

322,230 annual rapes, resulting in 55,424 reports to police, 26,271 arrests, and 7,007 convictions—or slightly more than 2 percent of rapes counted and 12 percent of rapes reported resulted in jail sentences. Of which the number that were false is undoubtedly not colossal.

when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they’re more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters.

“When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it’s immersed in—the surrounding culture’s illness.”

He evidently interpreted his lack of sexual access to women as offensive behavior by women who, he imagined in a sad mix of entitlement and self-pity, owed him fulfillment.

It’s the way some men say, “I’m not the problem” or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males.

Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes that’s more important to talk about than protecting male comfort levels.

someone named Jenny Chiu tweeted, “Sure #NotAllMen are misogynists and rapists. That’s not the point. The point is that #YesAllWomen live in fear of the ones that are.”

In 1963, Betty Friedan published a landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, in which she wrote, “The problem that has no name—which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities—is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.”

A woman is still beaten every nine seconds in this country, but thanks to the heroic feminist campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, she now has access to legal remedies that occasionally work, occasionally protect her, and—even more occasionally—send her abuser to jail.

“Studies of the Surgeon General’s office reveal that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined.”

Rape culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture.

The world has changed profoundly, it needs to change far more—and on that weekend of mourning and introspection and conversation just passed, you could see change happen.

The history of women’s rights and feminism is often told as though it were a person who should already have gotten to the last milestone or has failed to make enough progress toward it.

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.

Even in our own lives we regress, fail, continue, try again, get lost, and sometimes make a great leap, find what we didn’t know we were looking for, and yet continue to contain contradictions for generations.

There’s no going back. You can abolish the reproductive rights women gained in 1973, with Roe v. Wade, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion—or rather ruled that women had a right to privacy over their own bodies that precluded the banning of abortion. But you can’t so easily abolish the idea that women have certain inalienable rights.

“The chickens come home to roost” is supposed to be a curse you bring on yourself, but sometimes the birds that return are gifts.

Thus, for example, most Americans polled would like to see economic arrangements very different from those we have, and most are more willing to see radical change to address climate change than the corporations that control those decisions and the people who make them.

It’s important to note (as I have in “In Praise of the Threat” in this book), that the very idea that marriage could extend to two people of the same gender is only possible because feminists broke out marriage from the hierarchical system it had been in and reinvented it as a relationship between equals.

Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples.

Domestic violence was mostly invisible and unpunished until a heroic effort by feminists to out it and crack down on it a few decades ago.