Recollections of My Non-Existence

by Rebecca Solnit

How much of this enters your consciousness before your consciousness is changed? What does it do to all the women who have a drop or a teaspoon or a river of blood in their thoughts? What if it’s one drop every day? What if you’re just waiting for clear water to turn red? What does it do to see people like you tortured? What vitality and tranquility or capacity to think about other things, let alone do them, is lost, and what would it feel like to have them back?

I tell this to note that we cannot imagine what an earth without this ordinary, ubiquitous damage would look like, but that I suspect it would be dazzlingly alive and that a joyous confidence now rare would be so common, and a weight would be taken off half the population that has made many other things more difficult to impossible.

these were not unusual but ordinary parts of a culture that obsessed over bodies and in those days quantified female beauty according to precise measurements and sizes, and told us that the rewards were boundless for meeting them, the punishments for failing endless, and punished all of us anyway, because these were ultimately standards everyone would fail to meet.

It is not always possible to say that a given weather event is due to climate change, but that climate change shapes the trends is clear, and the same can be said of discrimination—that this particular event may or may not be due to someone’s attitudes about people in your category, but the cumulative effect suggests a pattern.

The book’s epigraph was James Baldwin’s spectacular sentence “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” meaning that it’s not cunning but obliviousness, willful or otherwise, behind so much brutality.

Often, when a woman says that bad things have happened to her or to women and the perpetrators were men, she’s accused of hating men, as though the reality of those events is not relevant, only her obligation to be sunny no matter what is, or as though the fact that not all men are awful outweighs the reality that some are in ways that impact her.