Men Explain Things to Me

by Rebecca Solnit

  He said it even more bluntly last year:

  Since 1981, the United States has followed a policy, until the last year or so when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food, so, thank goodness, they can leap directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did.

  Clinton’s admissions were on a level with former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s 2008 admission that the premise of his economic politics was wrong. The former policies and those of the IMF, World Bank, and free-trade fundamentalists had created poverty, suffering, hunger, and death. We have learned, most of us, and the world has changed remarkably since the day when those who opposed free-market fundamentalism were labeled “flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions, and yuppies looking for their 1960’s fix,” in the mortal words of Thomas Friedman, later eaten.

  A remarkable thing happened after the devastating Haitian earthquake last year: the IMF under Strauss-Kahn planned to use the vulnerability of that country to force new loans on it with the usual terms. Activists reacted to a plan guaranteed to increase the indebtedness of a nation already crippled by the kind of neo­liberal policies for which Clinton belatedly apologized. The IMF blinked, stepped back, and agreed to cancel Haiti’s existing debt to the organization. It was a remarkable victory for informed activism.

  Powers of the Powerless

  It looks as though a hotel maid may end the career of one of the most powerful men in the world, or rather that he will have ended it himself by discounting the rights and humanity of that worker. Pretty much the same thing happened to Meg Whitman, the former eBay billionaire who ran for governor of California last year. She leapt on the conservative bandwagon by attacking undocumented immigrants—until it turned out that she had herself long employed one, Nicky Diaz, as a housekeeper.

  When, after nine years, it had become politically inconvenient to keep Diaz around, she fired the woman abruptly, claimed she’d never known her employee was undocumented, and refused to pay her final wages. In other words, Whitman was willing to spend $178 million on her campaign, but may have brought herself down thanks, in part, to $6,210 in unpaid wages.

  Diaz said, “I felt like she was throwing me away like a piece of garbage.” The garbage had a voice, the California Nurses Union amplified it, and California was spared domination by a billionaire whose policies would have further brutalized the poor and impoverished the middle class.

  The struggles for justice of an undocumented housekeeper and an immigrant hotel maid are microcosms of the great world war of our time. If Nicky Diaz and the battle over last year’s IMF loans to Haiti demonstrate anything, it’s that the outcome is uncertain. Sometimes we win the skirmishes, but the war continues. So much remains to be known about what happened in that expensive hotel suite in Manhattan last week, but what we do know is this: a genuine class war is being fought openly in our time, and last week, a so-called socialist put himself on the wrong side of it.

  His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was the same old story, but hers was a new one about the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished, that includes all of us, that matters so much, that we will watch but also make and tell in the weeks, months, years, decades to come.

  Postscript

  This essay was written in response to the initial reports of what happened in Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s Manhattan hotel room. Afterward, through the massive application of money to powerful teams of lawyers, he was able to get the New York prosecutors to drop the criminal case—and malign his victim’s reputation with information his lawyers provided. Like many very poor people and people from countries in turmoil, Nafissatou Diallo had lived in the margins, where telling the truth to authorities is not always a wise or safe thing to do, so she was portrayed as a liar. In a Newsweek interview, she said that she had been hesitant to come forward with her rape charges and fearful of the consequences. She had come out of silence and shadows.

  Like other women and girls who’ve been raped, particularly those whose stories threaten the status quo, her character was put on trial. Front-page headlines in the New York Post, the local Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid, claimed that she was a prostitute, though why a prostitute worked full-time as a union hotel maid for $25 an hour was hard to explain, so no one bothered. (The Post was obliged to settle after she brought a libel lawsuit.)

  People—notably Edward Jay Epstein in the New York Review of Books—formulated elaborate stories to explain away what happened. Why had a woman who witnesses said was very upset told a story of being sexually assaulted, why had the alleged assailant attempted to flee the country in an apparent panic, and why was his semen found on her clothing and elsewhere, confirming that a sexual encounter had taken place? There was either a consensual or a nonconsensual sexual encounter. The simplest and most coherent explanation was Diallo’s. As Christopher Dickey wrote in the Daily Beast, Strauss-Kahn “claims that his less-than-seven-minute sexual encounter with this woman he’d never met before was consensual. To believe him, you’d have to buy the line that Diallo took one look at his potbellied, 60-something naked body fresh out of the shower and just volunteered to go down on her knees.”

  Afterward, other women came forward to testify about being assaulted by Strauss-Kahn, including a young French journalist who said he tried to rape her. He was implicated in a sex-party ring whose interactions with prostitutes violated French law: as I write he’s facing charges for “aggravated pimping,” though rape charges brought by a sex worker were dropped.

  What matters, in the end, is that a poor immigrant woman upended the career of one of the most powerful men in the world, or rather exposed behavior that should have ended it far earlier. As a result, French women reassessed the misogyny of their society. 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.

  chapter 4

  In Praise of the Threat:

  What Marriage Equality Really Means

  2013

  For a long time, the advocates of same-sex marriage have been saying that such unions pose no threat, contradicting the conservatives who say such unions are a threat to traditional marriage. Maybe the conservatives are right, and maybe we should celebrate that threat rather than denying it. The marriage of two men or two women doesn’t impact any man-and-woman marriage directly. But metaphysically it could.

  To understand how, you need to look at what traditional marriage is. And at the ways in which both sides are dissembling: the advocates by denying, or more likely overlooking the threat, and the conservatives by being coy about what it’s a threat to.

  Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase “same-sex marriage” for the term “marriage equality.” The phrase is ordinarily employed to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That’s not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of its history in the West, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a servant or slave.

  The British judge William Blackstone wrote in 1765, in his influential commentary on English common law and, later, American law, “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.” Under such rules, a woman’s life was dependent on the disposition of he
r husband, and though there were kind as well as unkind husbands then, rights are more reliable than the kindness of someone who holds absolute power over you. And rights were a long way off.

  Until Britain’s Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, everything belonged to the husband; the wife was penniless on her own account, no matter her inheritance or her earnings. Laws against wife beating were passed around that time in both England and the United States but rarely enforced until the 1970s. That domestic violence is now (sometimes) prosecuted hasn’t cured the epidemic of such violence in either country.

  The novelist Edna O’Brien’s recent memoir has some blood-curdling passages about her own journey through what appears to have been a very traditional marriage. Her first husband was withering about her literary success and obliged her to sign over her checks to him. When she refused to sign over a large film-rights check, he throttled her, but when she went to the police they were not much interested. The violence horrifies me, but so does the underlying assumption that the abuser has the right to control and punish his victim and the way such violence is used to that end.

  The Cleveland, Ohio, case of Ariel Castro, accused in 2013 of imprisoning, torturing, and sexually abusing three young women for a decade, is extreme, but it may not be quite the anomaly it is portrayed as. For one thing, Castro, it is claimed, was spectacularly and openly violent to his now-deceased common-law wife. And what lay behind Castro’s alleged actions must have been a desire for a situation in which he held absolute power and the women were absolutely powerless, a vicious version of the traditional arrangement.

  This is the tradition feminism protested and protests against—not only the extremes but the quotidian situation. Feminists in the nineteenth century made some inroads, those of the 1970s and 1980s made a great many more, which every woman in the United States and UK has benefited from. And feminism made same-sex marriage possible by doing so much to transform a hierarchical relationship into an egalitarian one. Because a marriage between two people of the same gender is inherently egalitarian—one partner may happen to have more power in any number of ways, but for the most part it’s a relationship between people who have equal standing and so are free to define their roles themselves.

  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. No hierarchical tradition underlies their union. Some people have greeted this with joy. A Presbyterian pastor who had performed a number of such marriages told me, “I remember coming to this realization when I was meeting with same-sex couples before performing their ceremonies when it was legal in California. The old patriarchal default settings did not apply in their relationships, and it was a glorious thing to witness.”

  American conservatives are frightened by this egalitarianism, or maybe just appalled by it. It’s not traditional. But they don’t want to talk about that tradition or their enthusiasm for it, though if you follow their assault on reproductive rights, women’s rights, and the late 2012–early 2013 furor over renewing the Violence Against Women Act, it’s not hard to see where they stand. However, they dissembled on their real interest in stopping same-sex marriage.

  Those of us following the court proceedings around, for example, California’s marriage-equality battle have heard a lot about how marriage is for the begetting and raising of children, and certainly reproduction requires the union of a sperm and an egg—but those unite in many ways nowadays, including in laboratories and surrogate mothers. And everyone is aware that many children are now raised by grandparents, stepparents, adoptive parents, and other people who did not beget but love them.

  Many heterosexual marriages are childless; many with children break up: they are no guarantee that children will be raised in a house with two parents of two genders. The courts have scoffed at the reproduction and child-raising argument against marriage equality. And the conservatives have not mounted what seems to be their real objection: that they wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles.

  I know lovely and amazing heterosexual couples who married in the 1940s and 1950s and every decade since. Their marriages are egalitarian, full of mutuality and generosity. But even people who weren’t particularly nasty were deeply unequal in the past. I also know a decent man who just passed away, age ninety-one: in his prime he took a job on the other side of the country without informing his wife that she was moving or inviting her to participate in the decision. Her life was not hers to determine. It was his.

  It’s time to slam the door shut on that era. And to open another door, through which we can welcome equality: between genders, among marital partners, for everyone in every circumstance. Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It’s a boon to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It’s for all of us.

  chapter 5

  Grandmother Spider

  2014

  I

  A woman is hanging out the laundry. Everything and nothing happens. Of her flesh we see only several fingers and a pair of strong brown calves and feet. The white sheet hangs in front of her, but the wind blows it against her body, revealing her contours. It is the most ordinary act, this putting out clothes to dry, though she wears black high heels, as though dressed for something other than domestic work, or as if this domestic work was already a kind of dancing. Her crossed legs look as though they are executing a dance step. The sun throws her shadow and the dark shadow of the white sheet onto the ground. The shadow looks like a long-legged dark bird, another species stretching out from her feet. The sheet flies in the wind, her shadow flies, and she does all this in a landscape so bare and stark and without scale that it’s as though you can see the curvature of the Earth on the horizon. It’s the most ordinary and extraordinary act, the hanging out of laundry—and painting. The latter does what the wordless can do, invoking everything and saying nothing, inviting meaning in without committing to any particular one, giving you an open question rather than answers. Here, in this painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez, a woman both exists and is obliterated.

  II

  I think a lot about that obliteration. Or rather that obliteration keeps showing up. I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it. She just discovered that she herself did not exist, but her brothers did. Her mother did not exist, and nor did her father’s mother. Or her mother’s father. There were no grandmothers. Fathers have sons and grandsons and so the lineage goes, with the name passed on; the tree branches, and the longer it goes on the more people are missing: sisters, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history. Her family is from India, but this version of lineage is familiar to those of us in the West from the Bible where long lists of begats link fathers to sons. The crazy fourteen-generation genealogy given in the New Testament’s Gospel According to Matthew goes from Abraham to Joseph (without noting that God and not Joseph is supposed to be the father of Jesus). The Tree of Jesse—a sort of totem pole of Jesus’s patrilineage as given in Matthew—was represented in stained glass and other medieval art and is said to be the ancestor of the family tree. Thus coherence—of patriarchy, of ancestry, of narrative—is made by erasure and exclusion.

  III

  Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four great-grandmothers. Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to construct a linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning. I used to see it in art history all the time, when we were told that Picasso begat Pollock and Pollock begat Warhol and so it went, as though artists were influenced only by other artists. Decades ago, the Los Angeles artist Robert Irwin famously dumpe
d a New York art critic on the side of the freeway after the latter refused to recognize the artistry of a young car customizer making hot rods. Irwin had been a car customizer himself, and hot-rod culture had influenced him deeply. I remember a contemporary artist who was more polite but as upset as Irwin when she was saddled with a catalogue essay that gave her a paternalistic pedigree, claiming she was straight out of Kurt Schwitters and John Heartfield. She knew she came out of hands-on work, out of weaving and all the practical acts of making, out of cumulative gestures that had fascinated her since bricklayers came to her home when she was a child. Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life. Those excluded influences I call the grandmothers.

  IV

  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, prefaced by Mrs. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Brontë and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman’s genealogy and even her existence. This corresponded to English law, as Blackstone enunciated it in 1765:

  By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-French a femme-covert . . . or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. For this reason, a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence.