Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

I’ve sometimes been taken to task by people as though I equate minor indignities with major crimes, people who don’t or prefer not to understand that we talk about a lot of things on a spectrum, and we can distinguish the different points on the spectrum, but the point is that it’s one spectrum. Making black people drink out of separate drinking fountains and lynching them are different in degree and kind, but they both emerge from the same effort to enforce segregation and inequality, and almost no one has trouble understanding that. Since the essay I wrote that morning was published, I’ve heard from lawyers, scientists, doctors, scholars in many fields, athletes and mountaineers, mechanics, builders, film technicians, and other women who’ve had their field of expertise explained to them by men who didn’t have any idea what they were talking about but thought the world was so ordered that knowledge was inherent in them as lack of it was in women, that listening was our natural state and obligation and holding forth their right, perhaps that it is her job to let his sense of self expand as hers shrivels.

Ok. I hear this