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Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn't Get in Their Way
By Rebecca Solnit
TomDispatch.com
Sunday 13 April 2008
I still don't know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest
slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished
way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion's young ladies.
The house was great - if you like Ralph Lauren-style chalets - a rugged luxury
cabin at 9,000 feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning
stove. We were preparing to leave, when our host said, "No, stay a little
longer so I can talk to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of
money.
He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night,
and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me,
"So? I hear you've written a couple of books."
I replied, "Several, actually."
He said, in the way you encourage your friend's seven-year-old to describe
flute practice, "And what are they about?"
They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out
by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in
2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild
West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization
of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about
the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"
So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly
willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had
come out simultaneously and I'd somehow missed it. He was already telling me
about the very important book - with that smug look I know so well in a man
holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.
Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, with
a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged
and published me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid
friends of whom it could be said - like the Clerk in The Canterbury
Tales I still remember from Mr. Pelen's class on Chaucer - "gladly
would he learn and gladly teach." Still, there are these other men, too.
So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known
when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to
interrupt him anyway.
But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book"
three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century
novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book
it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times
Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories
into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless - for a moment,
before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot
before we started laughing, and we've never really stopped.
I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard
to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda
that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.
When River of Shadows came out, some pedant wrote a snarky
letter to the New York Times explaining that, though Muybridge
had made improvements in camera technology, he had not made any breakthroughs
in photographic chemistry. The guy had no idea what he was talking about. Both
Philip Prodger, in his wonderful book on Muybridge, and I had actually researched
the subject and made it clear that Muybridge had done something obscure but
powerful to the wet-plate technology of the time to speed it up amazingly, but
letters to the editor don't get fact-checked. And perhaps because the book was
about the virile subjects of cinema and technology, the Men Who Knew came out
of the woodwork.
A British academic wrote in to the London Review of Books
with all kinds of nitpicking corrections and complaints, all of them from outer
space. He carped, for example, that to aggrandize Muybridge's standing I left
out technological predecessors like Henry R. Heyl. He'd apparently not read
the book all the way to page 202 or checked the index, since Heyl was there
(though his contribution was just not very significant). Surely one of these
men has died of embarrassment, but not nearly publicly enough.
The Slippery Slope of Silencings
Yes, guys like this pick on other men's books too, and people of both genders
pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories,
but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in
my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether
or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.
Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it
hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up
and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by
indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.
It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported
overconfidence.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics since
2001 was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI woman
who issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was certainly shaped
by a Bush administration to which you couldn't tell anything, including that
Iraq had no links to al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to
be a "cakewalk." (Even male experts couldn't penetrate the fortress
of their smugness.)
Arrogance might have had something to do with the war, but this syndrome is
a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, a belief
in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career
as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely
freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to let Mr.
Important and his overweening confidence bowl over my more shaky certainty.
Don't forget that I've had a lot more confirmation of my right to think and
speak than most women, and I've learned that a certain amount of self-doubt
is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing -
though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots,
like the ones who have governed us since 2001. There's a happy medium between
these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of
give and take where we should all meet.
More extreme versions of our situation exist in, for example, those Middle
Eastern countries where women's testimony has no legal standing; so that a woman
can't testify that she was raped without a male witness to counter the male
rapist. Which there rarely is.
Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just beginning
to get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had a boyfriend whose
uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was telling - as though it
were a light and amusing subject - how a neighbor's wife in his suburban bomb-making
community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night
screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know
that he wasn't trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable
middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not
a credible explanation for her fleeing the house yelling that her husband was
trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand....
Even getting a restraining order - a fairly new legal tool - requires acquiring
the credibility to convince the courts that some guy is a menace and then getting
the cops to enforce it. Restraining orders often don't work anyway. Violence
is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to
assert your right to control over their right to exist. About three women a
day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. It's one of the main
causes of death in pregnant women in the U.S. At the heart of the struggle of
feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace
sexual harassment legal standing as crimes has been the necessity of making
women credible and audible.
I tend to believe that women acquired the status of human beings when these
kinds of acts started to be taken seriously, when the big things that stop us
and kill us were addressed legally from the mid-1970s on; well after, that is,
my birth. And for anyone about to argue that workplace sexual intimidation isn't
a life or death issue, remember that Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach,
age 20, was apparently killed by her higher-ranking colleague last winter while
she was waiting to testify that he raped her. The burned remains of her pregnant
body were found in the fire pit in his backyard in December.
Being told that, categorically, he knows what he's talking about and she doesn't,
however minor a part of any given conversation, perpetuates the ugliness of
this world and holds back its light. After my book Wanderlust
came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of
my own perceptions and interpretations. On two occasions around that time, I
objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't
happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest
- in a nutshell, female.
Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having public
standing as a writer of history helped me stand my ground, but few women get
that boost, and billions of women must be out there on this six-billion-person
planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that
the truth is not their property, now or ever. This goes way beyond Men Explaining
Things, but it's part of the same archipelago of arrogance.
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining,
wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial
tables, I may have another forty-something years to live, more or less, so it
could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.
Women Fighting on Two Fronts
A few years after the idiot in Aspen, I was in Berlin giving a talk when the
Marxist writer Tariq Ali invited me out to a dinner that included a male writer
and translator and three women a little younger than me who would remain deferential
and mostly silent throughout the dinner. Tariq was great. Perhaps the translator
was peeved that I insisted on playing a modest role in the conversation, but
when I said something about how Women Strike for Peace, the extraordinary, little-known
antinuclear and antiwar group founded in 1961, helped bring down the communist-hunting
House Committee on Un-American Activities, HUAC, Mr. Very Important II sneered
at me. HUAC, he insisted, didn't exist by the early 1960s and, anyway, no women's
group played such a role in HUAC's downfall. His scorn was so withering, his
confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seemed a scary exercise in futility
and an invitation to more insult.
I think I was at nine books at that point, including one that drew from primary
documents and interviews about Women Strike for Peace. But explaining men still
assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel
to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know
what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch -
even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences
about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie. Back in
my hotel room, I Googled a bit and found that Eric Bentley in his definitive
history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities credits Women Strike
for Peace with "striking the crucial blow in the fall of HUAC's Bastille."
In the early 1960s.
So I opened an essay for the Nation with this interchange,
in part as a shout-out to one of the more unpleasant men who have explained
things to me: Dude, if you're reading this, you're a carbuncle on the face of
humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.
The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women - of my
generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan
and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me
and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation,
or the revolution, or even the category called human.
After all, Women Strike for Peace was founded by women who were tired of making
the coffee and doing the typing and not having any voice or decision-making
role in the antinuclear movement of the 1950s. Most women fight wars on two
fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right
to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and
truths, to have value, to be a human being. Things have certainly gotten better,
but this war won't end in my lifetime. I'm still fighting it, for myself certainly,
but also for all those younger women who have something to say, in the hope
that they will get to say it.
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So many men, so little time; Rebecca Solnit left out hundreds more
anecdotes of her own and her friends' experiences of being hectored to craft
this tirade, which should in no way be taken as an endorsement of Hillary Clinton.
She is on chapter eighteen of her next book.
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