Men Explain Things To Me

“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.”

Solnit maintains that men’s presumption that they are more qualified than women, and their subsequent decision to speak over women, has a profound effect. It silences many women, intimidating them into not speaking out or drowning out their voices when they do.

“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.”

One of the results of women’s voices being considered less significant than men’s is that it weakens their credibility. This is highly significant in terms of violence against women because it works to undermine their allegations of abuse and their legal testimonies. Accordingly, much of the success feminism has achieved in these areas has been centered on ensuring that women’s voices are heard and their lived experiences recognized. 

“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.”

For women to function in many fields, they have to overcome the barriers put in place by rigid gender roles and patriarchal social organization. In order to make their points, they not only have to argue about the subject in question but also have to assert their right to hold space and share ideas, and affirm their ability to do so.

“Violence doesn’t have a race, class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.” 

Numerous explanations are given for the existence of violence in modern societies and numerous patterns are found to support such explanations. However, much popular discourse on the topic avoids acknowledging the biggest and most obvious pattern: that men commit the vast majority of violence. Failing to admit this and ask what it means undermines efforts to stop such violence.

“A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country. Just to be clear: not nine minutes, but nine seconds. It’s the number-one cause of injury to American women.”

Like many other countries, the United States often presents men’s violence against women as something exceptional and rare. However, this is far from the case. As Solnit indicates, it occurs with such incredible regularity that the true scale of the problem often has to be reasserted and clarified in order to be understood.

“Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they attempt to control women, and fear of that violence limits most women in ways they’ve gotten so used to they hardly notice—and we hardly address.”

Violence against women represents an effort to control women and reduce them to the role of objects existing for men’s exploitation. Moreover, to properly understand the function and result of violence against women one must not only look at the individual cases but the overall effect: a widespread and largely normalized fear of abuse that profoundly shapes women’s lives.

“Speaking of epidemics, one of three Native American women will be raped, and on the reservations 88 percent of those rapes are by non-Native men who know tribal governments can’t prosecute them. So much for rape as a crime of passion—these are crimes of calculation and opportunism.”

One of the reasons Republican politicians revoked the Violence Against Women Act is that they resented the protection it offered to immigrant women, trans women, and Native American women. This prompts Solnit to highlight what is one of the most overlooked aspects of America’s rape culture: the widespread abuse of indigenous women by non-native men who opportunistically exploit the limitations imposed on tribal governments.

“Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we’ve just been given? The extraordinarily powerful head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global organization that has created mass poverty and economic injustice, allegedly assaulted a hotel maid, an immigrant from Africa, in a hotel’s luxury suite in New York City.”

Given the vast difference in power and privilege between the two parties, Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged assault of Nafissatou Diallo functions as a metaphor for Western neo-colonial violence against, and exploitation of, the Global South. In fact, it functions so neatly in this role that it almost appears too obvious a metaphor, according to Solnit.

“His actions, like so much sexual violence against women, was undoubtedly meant to be a reminder that this world was not mine, that my rights—my liberté, égalité, sororité—didn’t matter.”

Solnit recalls being groped by an old man when she was 17. In highlighting the effects of this and the intentions behind the act, she demonstrates that such abuse functions as part of a continuum of violence that serves to tell women that their safety, security, and bodily autonomy are less significant than men’s pleasure.

“And Ms. Diallo won her case in civil court against the former head of the IMF, though one part of the terms involving what may have been a substantial financial settlement was silence. Which brings us back to where we began.” 

As Solnit’s essays demonstrate, men silence women in many ways. Diallo refused to be silenced by the alleged sexual assault and took her case to court. She was not silenced by the media defaming her character either. However, the settlement following her victory in civil court included an obligation not to talk about the case. Once again, a man with money, power, and privilege managed to silence a marginalized woman.

“Maybe the conservatives are right, and maybe we should celebrate that threat rather than denying it.”

Because it marks the union between two people who share the same level of gendered social standing, same-sex marriage can be seen as a marriage between equals. As such, it can also be seen as a threat to traditional marriage which is arranged around an unequal power dynamic between men and women. Solnit argues that this is only a threat to inequality and to those who approve of inequality and should be celebrated accordingly.  

“Gay men and lesbians have already opened up the question of what qualities and roles are male and female in ways that can be liberating for straight people. When they marry the meaning of marriage is likewise opened up.” 

Lesbians and gay men have long challenged traditional gender roles, exploring and increasingly normalizing alternative ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman. Same-sex marriage can bring this same liberating expansion to popular understanding of marriage and its cultural meanings and social functions.

“There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the business of naming, In some cultures women keep their names, but in most their children take the father’s name, and in the English-speaking world until very recently, married women were addressed by their husbands’ names. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Brontë and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman’s genealogy and even her existence.”

Throughout the book, Solnit highlights the connections between seemingly banal, innocuous aspects of patriarchal social organization and wider patterns of abuse. She does so again here, demonstrating that the practice of women taking men’s names has the effect of removing them from history, effectively silencing their voices and denying the significance of their experiences.  

“Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one man.”

It is still far from unusual for institutions and officials to suggest that women should remain inside, be accompanied by men, or dress in a certain way if they do not wish to be assaulted. By flipping this suggestion to suggest that men should have their freedoms restricted to stop rapists have the chance to assault women, the “pranksters” highlight quite how much the original suggestion adheres to, and relies upon, traditional gender roles and the devaluing of women’s freedom.  

“To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.” 

Solnit presents the image of a woman obscured by a sheet on a washing line as a symbol for the obliteration of women and their removal from public life. She subverts this image by describing herself hanging banners on a washing line, each referring to acts of assertion and autonomy by women who will not be silenced.

“Any yet the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed.”

For many, the darkness is something to be feared or something into which one must move assertively, bringing light and trying to pin down details. However, Solnit believes that the darkness is also a site of great potential and promise. She reframes the unclear, threatening night as the night in which intangible things are formed and changed.

“It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.”

It is easy to only focus on things that confirm our preconceptions and to avoid those things that are challenging, confusing, or too complex. However, Solnit believes that writers should undermine this habit, working to explore the ambiguities and complexities with subtlety and courage.

“To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.”

Both despair and optimism are forms of confidence or certainty about the future and both are used as excuses not to act, not to attempt to change what we believe is already fixed. Solnit suggests that uncertainty, although often viewed as a negative state that must be ended by striving for facts and fixed answers, can actually be a place in which hope grows because it contains the possibility of positive change. 

“She is always celebrating a liberation that is not official, institutional, rational, but a matter of going beyond the familiar, the safe, the known into the broader world. Her demands for liberation for women were not merely so that they could do some of the institutional things men did (and women now do, too), but to have full freedom to roam, geographically and imaginatively.”

One of the aspects of Woolf’s work that Solnit admires most is her advocacy for complex forms of freedom and liberation. While some focus only on institutional change, Woolf argues for the freedom to explore, grow, change, and move beyond restrictions and limitations. 

“It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo under capitalism and consumerism.”

In contemporary Western societies, things that can be measured and clearly demarcated are frequently valued over things which are more nebulous, intangible, or harder to define. As such, the task of exploring these unknowable, obscure areas—a task Solnit herself takes on—is a key part of undermining the destructive interests of mainstream capitalist ideology.

“Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends.”

A frequent criticism of feminism is that it should, by now, have achieved its goals and brought about gender equality. Anything less than this is presented as a failure of the feminist movement. However, this position overlooks the fact that gender inequality is firmly rooted in most societies on a number of different levels, ranging from legislation to deeply-held beliefs. Understood in this way, the changes feminism has already achieved are actually a measure of its great success not its pitiful failure.

“But you can’t so easily abolish the idea that women have certain inalienable rights.”

Central to understanding the significance of feminism’s contribution to society is the fact that it has brought about many in irrevocable changes. That is to say, while conservative forces may attempt to roll back legal rights or change legislation, feminism has already changed the beliefs of the vast majority of people and the ideas they now hold cannot be changed back. 

“I think the future of something we may no longer call feminism must include a deeper inquiry into men. Feminism sought and seeks to change the whole human world; many men are on board with the project, but how it benefits men, and in what ways the status quo damages men as well, could bear far more thought.”

Feminism has long analyzed men, with a particular focus on their social roles and the ways they perpetuate inequality and perpetrate violence. However, the limitations patriarchal society places on men and the ways in which feminism challenges these, according to Solnit, should be examined further.