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The director, writer, and actor Brit Marling said recently, “Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you’ve read, in the films you’ve seen, in the stories you’ve been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disastrous ends.”
and sometimes I would sit there transfixed watching the fog cascade over itself like gargantuan, phantasmagorical tumbleweeds under the streetlight, as the wind pushed it in from the cold ocean where it had arisen.
Or I’d lie in bed and hear in the hush of night the foghorns blaring far away. Awakening in the middle of the night, in the center of a city and a place thought of as the inner city, I often heard the foghorns, and they carried me to the edges and beyond, to the sea, the sky, and the fog.
Your mother’s maiden name is often requested as the answer to a security question by banks and credit card companies, because it’s assumed her original name is secret, erased, lost as she took on the name of a husband.
It is so normal for places to be named after men (mostly white men) and not women that I didn’t notice it until, in 2015, I made a map renaming places after women and realized I’d grown up in a country where almost everything named after a person—mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, buildings, states, parks—was named after a man, and nearly all the statues were of men. Women were allegorical
people. A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways. The names of women were absent, and these absences were absent from our imaginations. It was no wonder we were supposed to be so slender as to shade into nonexistence.
I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat.
When we exited into a very black night, I somehow found myself talking about my own early struggles with publishing. It had been a long time since I’d recalled how bitter my early endeavors to put out books were, in their own small way, or rather how fervently men had sought to prevent me from publishing. I was lucky in that I overcame the obstacles they erected, but I presume others did not. And now I can see how white the world of publishing was and is, and that though some doors slammed because of my gender, others remained open because of my race.
Credibility is a basic survival tool.
sometimes answered the intrusive questions about why I didn’t marry and bear offspring with reference to being a San Franciscan, to being among people who had less conventional ideas of what a life could look like and what kinds of love could shore it up. It was a tremendous gift.
“It’s not you, it’s patriarchy,” which might be one of feminism’s basic messages. That is, there’s nothing wrong with you; there’s something wrong with the system that bears down on you and tells you you’re useless, incompetent, untrustworthy, worthless, wrong.
The same assumption that you are incompetent in your field of expertise may mean you’re viewed as incompetent to know if someone is trying to kill you. It’s an assumption that has resulted in death for many victims of domestic violence and stalking. This essay headed to places I did not know I was going to go.
