Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

Solitude was reprieve from this endless task, but when I turned to books I often turned into a man looking at women. Looking at women as problems or trophies or mildly baleful phenomena with opaque motivations and limited consciousness probably did something to me, and so did being encouraged to identify with the man over and over again, and to live in imagination in places where women were just ornaments in the margins or trophies or broodmares. In my case, this meant identifying with male protagonists, with the Jim of the almost womanless Lord Jim and Jim Carroll’s self-anointing stud junkie in The Basketball Diaries and with Pip rather than Estella in Great Expectations, and all the grail seekers and ring bearers and western explorers and chasers and conquerors and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent.