My university interlocutor had accused me of offering palliatives for marketing reasons, but what I’d wanted to offer is encouragement, a word that, though it carries the stigma of niceness, literally means to instill courage. Encouragement not to make people feel good, but to make them feel powerful. I’d eventually realize that what I was doing could equally be characterized as stealing away the best excuse for doing nothing: that you have no power and nothing you do matters. It was nurture of people’s sense of possibility, and it was dissent from a lot of the most familiar narratives in which despair and cynicism—that weird formula in which overconfidence about outcome undermines one’s will to play a role—justify nonparticipation. Something profound had shifted for me to feel capable of changing minds and responsible for tending to hearts. A sense of powerlessness and disconnectedness had faded away and a sense of possibility had replaced it, about my own capacity and role as well as about the way that change itself works.
Over the next several years, I became a political writer, writing essays in response to unfolding events and chronic situations and circulating them via a website that got picked up by news sites all over the world. It was often the worst things, the things I disagreed with or was outraged by, that inspired me to write, though I wrote a lot about what I loved as well—and what I opposed I opposed because it harmed or threatened to harm what I loved. And then I wrote something that took on a wild life of its own, wrote it as casually as I’d ever written anything. Everything else I ever wrote was on a subject I chose and approached intentionally, but feminism chose me or was something I couldn’t stay away from.
3
In those days I often headed my emails to Tina with weather reports, since she had moved far away for a teaching position and missed the Bay Area. We had been writing almost daily for years, and sometimes multiple times a day. On March 24, 2008, we’d been continuing the back-and-forth on an email from March 20 that I’d headed FULL MOON, EQUINOX, PRETTY DAY BUT CHILLY. That evening of March 24 I’d written her with a new heading, LONG FAINT HERRINGBONE CLOUDS BEFORE DUSK.
Two years before, I had left the studio apartment for a more spacious attic dwelling six blocks south. My friend Marina had just moved in with me there, in flight from an awful soon-to-be-ex, and I was delighted to have her with me. By the time of the alarming diagnosis I’d received that winter, we were close friends. The diagnosis meant major surgery a few weeks before this time, so we were nestled in, convalescing, each in our own way. She was one of those people with whom a conversation once opened up tumbles and flows of its own accord, with jokes and laughter mixed in with explorations of ideas and events, aspirations and emotions, the conversations I’d dreamed of.
A friend to talk to in person, a friend to write to every day. It was a hard time, and there is grumbling in the email to Tina, but I had reached a point where my social life was all that I could desire. Marina, who usually had a birdlike brightness of eye, a vivacity and an exceptional emotional warmth, as well as a brilliant political mind, had been subdued after her separation until that evening of the long faint herringbone clouds. Thanks to the email (Tina also liked food descriptions), I knew I’d made us a dinner of pasta, artichokes, and greens from the Civic Center Farmers’ Market, and that I had invited over my younger brother, also a close friend of hers, who joined us after he had participated in a demonstration in which 4,000 candles were lit for victims of a massacre, and that we had drunk a bottle of red wine, and under that mild influence Marina had recovered her sparkle and her verve.
The herringbone clouds letter didn’t mention that I had been joking that night, as I had for years, about writing an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me.” I’d brought it up at the dinner on my little drop-leaf oak dining table with the massive vaselike center legs, the one I’d bought from the elderly lesbian couple next door. When I did, Marina had energetically urged me to write the piece and said how much young women like her sister needed it.
Many years later, in the apartment I currently inhabit, I sat at another kitchen table, with a film actress who had come to talk with me about feminism. The next day an enormous bouquet arrived with a card quoting back what she liked best of what I had said: “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. Marina heard in my anecdotes the possibility of telling that to the world or to some women in it, and she thought they ought to hear it.
I was an early riser, and she was catching up on much-needed sleep, and the attic had just two large rooms. The kitchen and the daybed on which guests slept were in the west room. The east room was my bedroom and office, with a long, built-in desktop held up at its center by the old spindle-legged desk. So the morning of the 25th, rather than disturb her rest, I sat down at that desk once again and did her bidding. The essay poured out with ease or rather tumbled out seemingly of its own accord. When this happens it means that the thoughts have long been gestating and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that your job is to get out of its way.
What I wrote that morning startled me, because when I had been joking the night before, I hadn’t connected men explaining things to me to what I would write that morning. The essay’s beginning is comedy: in an incident from five years earlier, a man talks over me to explain my own book to me and is briefly stunned to realize (when my companion finally succeeds in interrupting him) that I, the person he’s already dismissed and turned into an audience, am the author of that “very important book” on Muybridge on which he is holding forth.
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. That asymmetry about who’s in charge of the facts applied to everything from intellectual matters to what just happened a moment ago, and it undermines women’s capacity to do almost anything, including, sometimes, survive.
The essay begins with that funny anecdote about the man who told me about the very important Muybridge book. The essay’s next anecdote from my own life was something else:
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. . . .
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br /> 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.
I am a woman who when a poet friend spoke to me of an incident with a nun in Catholic school as “the only time anyone ever hit me” was staggered to try to imagine a life as safe and calm as hers in this respect. I am the daughter of a man who considered it his right to hit women and children and did as his father did before him, and of a woman who had or felt she had for two decades no recourse from that man and no place to register a complaint. I am a woman who by the first years of my teens had to learn to squirm and worm and fade away when adult men pursued me because telling them to leave me alone was in that era of my youth inconceivable as something I had the right or even the safety to say and they had the obligation or even inclination to heed. I am a woman who during my youth thought it likely I would be raped and maybe also murdered and all my life have lived in a world where women were raped and murdered by strangers for being women and by men they knew for asserting their rights or just being women and where those rapes and murders were lasciviously lingered on in art. I am a woman who has been told at crucial times that I was not believable and that I was confused and that I was not competent to deal in facts. And in all that I am ordinary. After all, I live in a society where rape kits and campus stalking awareness month and domestic violence shelters in which women and children are supposed to hide from husbands and fathers are normal fixtures.
And I am a woman who became a writer and through it gained some standing while writing about other things from art to war, and sometimes tried to put that standing to work to try to open up space for others’ voices. I am a woman who one morning wrote an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me” that is about the way that the mild disparagement of having your subject of expertise explained to you by a fool who does not know that he does not know what he’s talking about or who he’s talking to is on a spectrum, and that the other end of the spectrum is full of violent death.
I had a version of the essay printed out to put on the breakfast table with Marina’s coffee and my tea a couple of hours later, and at 10:42 that morning I sent thirteen friends, including Tina, the essay in an email also titled MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME. That morning’s version had a little superfluous ornamentation weeded out before publication, including, to my surprise when I look now, an epigraph from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” but it is very close to the essay I published online and, in truncated version, in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks later.
I had written about my own experiences and perceptions, and they had turned out to have a lot in common with other women’s experiences and perceptions. It went viral immediately and got millions of hits at the website Guernica over the years because the experiences and situations I described were so brutally common and so inadequately acknowledged. It has most likely had more impact than anything else I’ve done, this essay I wrote in one sitting that morning. As the title essay of a 2014 anthology of my feminist essays, it became a bestseller in South Korea and stayed that way for years in the United States, and it appeared in several other languages from Danish to Spanish to Farsi.
It prompted an anonymous commenter at the website LiveJournal to coin the word mansplaining soon after it first appeared, a word that caught on, that entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014, that is now widely known and used in English, exists in dozens of languages, and has begat a host of variations such as whitesplaining (and that’s often credited to me, though I did not coin it). It also provided some encouragement I’m proud of. A very famous woman writer, soon after the essay appeared, sent it to a well-known pundit, a bellicose misogynist, with this message: “Reading this wonderful essay by Rebecca Solnit reminded me of something I have been meaning to say to you for a long, long time. Go fuck yourself,” and it prompted one young woman I met to get divorced.
I have been thrilled and moved by the young women who came up to me to say that something I’ve written helped them locate their power and their value and reject their subjugation. You don’t really know what you do when you write, because it depends on how people read, and there are ways that knowing their appetites and interests can guide you down familiar paths and ways that not knowing can take you to appetites and interests you didn’t know existed and sometimes your readers didn’t either. There’s a Buddhist phrase about the work of bodhisattvas: “the liberation of all beings.” I see feminism as a subset of that work.
4
A writer’s voice is supposed to be hers alone. It’s what makes someone distinct and recognizable, and it’s not quite style and not just tone or subject; it’s something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for. But the feminist themes that became a major part of my work after “Men Explain Things to Me” is for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival.
That work of mine sometimes included a chorus and sometimes joined one. When you pursue creative work, immortality is often held up as an ideal. You’re supposed to aspire to make something that will be recognized and that will, as they say, “keep your name alive,” and it’s true that words are alive when they’re read or heard. But I learned from the artists I researched and wrote about and the movements that changed the culture that there are two ways of making contributions that matter. One is to make work that stays visible before people’s eyes; the other is to make work that is so deeply absorbed that it ceases to be what people see and becomes how they see. It is no longer in front of them; it’s inside them. It is no longer the artist; it’s the people who are no longer only the audience.
Works of art that had an impact in their time sometimes look dated or obvious because what was fresh and even insurrectionary about them has become the ordinary way things are, how we edit films or see history or nature or sexuality or understand rights and their violations. Thus the vision of one or of a few becomes the perspective of many. They have been rendered obsolete by their success—which makes the relevance of even much nineteenth-century feminist writing a grim reminder that though we’ve come far, it’s not far enough.
I’ve sometimes thought immortality is a desert idea, from the monotheistic fanaticisms of the desert, where a scar or a treasure can last for thousands of years, where some Bedouin shepherds can take the Dead Sea Scrolls out of a jar in a cave about twenty-two hundred years after they were put there—including the Book of Isaiah reminding us that “all flesh is grass.” In humid places everything decays, and much decays back into the soil, and that soil nurtures new life, and perhaps the best thing creative work can do is to compost into the soil so that, unremembered, it becomes the food of a new era, or rather, devoured, digested, the very consciousness of that era. Marble lasts, but soil feeds.
My life has spanned a revolution against the old authoritarianisms. In response to the late 1950s and early 1960s crises of nuclear fallout and pesticides, ordinary people questioned the authority of the scientists in service of the military and the chemical companies, and then the nascent environmental movement asked broader questions about anthropocentrism, capitalism, consumerism, and ideas of progress and the domination of nature. Racial justice movements questioned the centrality of whiteness, gay and lesbian liberation movements questioned the centrality of heterosexuality, and feminism questioned patriarchy (and when we were lucky, these boulevards intersected). Though they were more than questions; they were demands for change and for the redistribution of power and value.
Change is the measure of time, and these movements were often regarded as having failed to realize short-term or specific goals, but in the long term they often changed the very premises by which decisions
were made and facts were interpreted, and how people imagined themselves, each other, their possibilities, their rights, and society. And who decided, who interpreted, what was visible and audible, whose voice and vision mattered.
Feminism was in a lull in 2008, when I wrote that essay. Many things progress the way feminism has in recent years, with an unpredictable pattern of gradual change, or stagnation, or regression, punctuated by sudden crises in which the situation and collective imagination change rapidly. For feminism these eruptions have often been around a dramatic event in the news. In 2012 campus antirape activists in the USA were becoming more visible and audible and effective, and then two crimes got a lot of media coverage—the Steubenville, Ohio, gang sexual assault on an incapacitated sixteen-year-old in August and the New Delhi rape-disembowelment-murder of Jhoti Singh on a public bus that December—and something changed.
Or something had already changed, because these were ordinary horrible stories that got an extraordinary amount of coverage, perhaps because who decides what is news and from whose perspective it will be told had already changed. For what seemed to me the first time, these stories were presented as emblematic of an epidemic rather than, as such crimes almost always had been before, as isolated anomalous incidents that didn’t raise questions about how common such violence is and how it affects women in general. When the long tolerated is suddenly seen as intolerable, someone has become audible and someone else has begun listening for the first time.
At the beginning of 2013 a dam broke. Behind it were millions of women’s stories about sexual violence, violence made possible by their inaudibility and lack of credibility and the inconsequentiality of their stories. Torrents of stories poured forth. In response to the misogyny-driven Isla Vista massacre of 2014 by a young man who hated women and wanted to punish them for not delivering the sex he thought he was entitled to. In response to a sports star beating his fiancée, in response to women being discredited and attacked for speaking up about a celebrity who’d assaulted them. In response to the 2017 revelations about sexual abuse first in the film industry and then in every industry from the restaurant business to the agricultural fields and the tech industry in the upheaval called #MeToo, and then beyond the USA, from Iceland to South Korea. In response to the 2018 Supreme Court hearing at which a woman told her story of being assaulted at age fifteen, and the residual trauma, and received death threats as a result of speaking up.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 17