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. As could an inquiry into the men perpetrating most of the violence, the threats, the hatred—the riot squad of the volunteer police force—and the culture that encourages them. Or perhaps this inquiry has begun.
At the end of 2012, two rapes got enormous attention around the world: the gang-rape murder of Jhoti Singh in New Delhi and the Steubenville rape case, involving teenage assailants and victim. It was the first time I remember seeing everyday assaults on women treated more or less as lynchings and gay-bashings and other hate crimes had been: as examples of a widespread phenomenon that was intolerable and must be addressed by society, not just by individual prosecution. Rapes had always been portrayed as isolated incidents due to anomalous perpetrators (or natural uncontrollable urges or the victim’s behavior), rather than a pattern whose causes are cultural.
The conversation changed. The term “rape culture” started to circulate widely. It insists that a wider culture generates individual crimes and that both must be addressed—and can be. The phrase had first been used by feminists in the 1970s, but what put it into general circulation, evidence suggests, were the Slutwalks that began in 2011 as a protest against victim-blaming.
A Toronto policeman giving a safety talk at a university told female students not to dress like sluts. Soon after, Slutwalks became an international phenomenon, of mostly young, often sexily dressed women taking back public space (rather like the Take Back the Night walks of the 1980s, but with more lipstick and less clothing). Young feminists are a thrilling phenomenon: smart, bold, funny defenders of rights and claimers of space—and changers of the conversation.
That policeman’s “slut” comment was part of the emphasis colleges have put on telling female students how to box themselves in safely—don’t go here, don’t do that—rather than telling male students not to rape: this is part of rape culture. But a nationwide movement organized by mostly female college students, many of them survivors of campus sexual assault, has sprung up, to force change in the way universities deal with such assaults. As has a movement to address the epidemic of sexual assault in the military that has also succeeded in forcing real policy changes and prosecutions.
The new feminism is making the problems visible in new ways, perhaps in ways that are only possible now that so much has changed. A study of rape in Asia drew alarming conclusions about its widespread nature but also introduced the term “sexual entitlement” to explain why so much of it takes place. The report’s author, Dr. Emma Fulu, said, “They believed they had the right to have sex with the woman regardless of consent.” In other words she had no rights. Where’d they learn that?
Feminism, as writer Marie Sheer remarked in 1986, “is the radical notion that women are people,” a notion not universally accepted but spreading nonetheless. The changing conversation is encouraging, as is the growing engagement of men in feminism. There were always male supporters. When the first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, thirty-two of the one hundred signatories to its Declaration of Independence–echoing manifesto were men. Still, it was seen as a women’s problem. Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone. The men who get it also understand that feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a campaign to liberate us all.
There’s more that we need to be liberated from: maybe a system that prizes competition and ruthlessness and short-term thinking and rugged individualism, a system that serves environmental destruction and limitless consumption so well—that arrangement you can call capitalism. It embodies the worst of machismo while it destroys what’s best on Earth. More men fit into it better, but it doesn’t really serve any of us. You can look to movements, such as the Zapatista revolution, which has a broad ideology that includes feminist as well as environmental, economic, indigenous, and other perspectives. This may be the future of feminism that is not feminism alone. Or the present of feminism: the Zapatistas rose up in 1994 and are still going, as are myriad other projects to reimagine who we are, what we want, and how we might live.
When I attended a 2007 Zapatista encuentro in the Lacandon forest, focusing on women’s voices and rights, at the end of 2007, women testified movingly about how their lives had changed when they had gained rights in the home and the community as part of their revolution. “We had no rights,” one of them said of the era before the rebellion. Another testified, “The saddest part is that we couldn’t understand our own difficulties, why we were being abused. No one had told us about our rights.”
Here is that road, maybe a thousand miles long, and the woman walking down it isn’t at mile one. I don’t know how far she has to go, but I know she’s not going backward, despite it all—and she’s not walking alone. Maybe it’s countless men and women and people with more interesting genders.
Here’s the box Pandora held and the bottles the genies were released from; they look like prisons and coffins now. People die in this war, but the ideas cannot be erased.
Image Credits
All images by Ana Teresa Fernandez courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris.
1. “Untitled” (performance documentation), oil on canvas, 6"x8", from the series “Pressing Matters.”
2. “Aquarius” (performance documentation at San Diego/Tijuana border), oil on canvas, 54"x82", from the series “Ablution.”
3. “Untitled” (performance documentation at San Diego/Tijuana border), oil on canvas, 60"x72>", from the series “Pressing Matters.”
4. “Untitled” (performance documentation), oil on canvas, 70"x80", from the series “Ablution.”
5. “Untitled” (performance documentation), oil on canvas, 72"x60", from the series “Teleraña.”
6. “Untitled” (performance documentation), oil on canvas, 72"x60", from the series “Teleraña.”
7. “Untitled” (performance documentation), oil on canvas, 53"x57", from the series “Ablution.”
8. “Untitled” (performance documentation), oil on canvas, 8"x10", from the series “Teleraña.”
9. “Entre”(performance documentation between Tijuana/San Diego Border Fence), oil on canvas, 30"x40".
Acknowledgments
There are so many people to thank. Marina Sitrin was a great friend and supporter and “Men Explain Things” was written at her instigation, and for, in part, her younger sister Sam Sitrin, and Sallie Shatz took me to that strange party in Colorado where it all began. Friendship with older feminists, notably Lucy Lippard, Linda Connor, Meridel Rubenstein, Ellen Manchester, Harmony Hammond, MaLin Wilson Powell, Pame Kingfisher, Carrie and Mary Dann, Pauline Esteves, and May Stevens has been valuable and reinforcing, as has that of younger feminists—Christina Gerhardt, Sunaura Taylor, Astra Taylor, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Elena Acevedo Dalcourt, and many others whose fierce intelligence about gender politics makes me hopeful about the future, as does the solidarity of the many men in my life and in the media who are now attuned to and audible on the issues.
But perhaps I should start with my mother, who subscribed to Ms. Magazine when it first appeared and kept up her subscription for years after. I think the magazine helped her, though she struggled for the four decades that followed with the usual conflicts between obedience and insurrection. For a child who had devoured the Ladies’ Home Journal, Women’s Circle, and anything else I could find to read, this new publication was a fiery addition to the diet and a potent tool to use to reconsider much of the status quo inside that house and outside. Which didn’t make it easier to be a girl in the 1970s, but did make it easier to understand why.
My feminism waxed and waned, but the lack of freedom to move through the city for women hit me hard and personally at the end of my teens, when I came under constant attac
k in my urban environment and hardly anyone seemed to think that it was a civil rights issue or a crisis or an outrage rather than a reason why I should take taxis and martial arts classes, or take men (or weapons) with me everywhere, or take on the appearance of a man, or take myself to suburbia. I didn’t do any of those things, but I did think about the issue a lot (and “The Longest War” is, for me, the third visit to that violent territory of women and public space.
Women’s work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together—maintenance work as the great feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles called it in her Maintenance Art manifesto. Much culture also works that way, and though I have been the named artist on all my books and essays, good editors have been the quiet forces that make the work possible some of the time and better. Tom Engelhardt, the editor who is also my friend and collaborator, has opened the door for much of my writing in the past decade, since I sent him an unsolicited essay in 2003. TomDispatch has been a paradise of like-minded people, of a small organization with a powerful reach, of a place where my voice doesn’t have to be squashed or homogenized to fit. It is telling that more than half the material in this book was written for TomDispatch, the letterbox in which I send letters to the world (and which the world seems to receive very well, thanks to the site’s amazing distribution).
The essays that appear in this book are edited versions of work previously published. “The Longest War” and the other essays in this book that first appeared at TomDispatch were studded with links to sources for statistics, anecdotes, and quotes. They would have made ponderous footnotes, so those sources are not given here but can be found in the online versions.
“Men Explain Things to Me,” “The Longest War,” “Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite,” as well as “Pandora’s Box and the Volunteer Police Force” all appeared at TomDispatch.
“In Praise of the Threat” is the only thing that I’ve ever published in the Financial Times. It came out there on May 24, 2013, as “More Equal Than Others: http://www.ft.com/intl /cms/s/2/99659a2a-c349-11e2-9bcb-00144feab7de.html.
“Grandmother Spider” was written for the one hundredth issue of Zyzzva Magazine, the San Francisco—based literary journal.
And the essay on Virginia Woolf was originally a keynote lecture to the binational Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf in 2009 at Fordham University.
About Haymarket Books
Haymarket Books is a nonprofit, progressive book distributor and publisher, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. We believe that activists need to take ideas, history, and politics into the many struggles for social justice today. Learning the lessons of past victories, as well as defeats, can arm a new generation of fighters for a better world. As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it.”
We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket Martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day, which gave us May Day, the international workers’ holiday, reminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation. These struggles continue today across the globe—struggles against oppression, exploitation, hunger, and poverty.
It was August Spies, one of the Martyrs who was targeted for being an immigrant and an anarchist, who predicted the battles being fought to this day. “If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement,” Spies told the judge, “then hang us. Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.”
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About Dispatch Books
As an editor at Pantheon Books in the 1970s and 1980s, Tom Engelhardt used to jokingly call himself publishing’s “editor of last resort.” His urge to rescue books and authors rejected elsewhere brought the world Eduardo Galeano’s beautiful Memory of Fire trilogy and Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, among other notable, incendiary, and worthy works. In that spirit, he and award-winning journalist Nick Turse founded Dispatch Books, a publishing effort offering a home to authors used to operating outside the mainstream.
With an eye for well-crafted essays, illuminating long-form investigative journalism, and compelling subjects given short shrift by the big publishing houses, Engelhardt and Turse seek to provide readers with electronic and print books of conspicuous quality offering unique perspectives found nowhere else. In a world in which publishing giants take fewer and fewer risks and style regularly trumps substance, Dispatch Books aims to be the informed reader’s last refuge for uncommon voices, new perspectives, and provocative critiques.
Dispatch Books’ first effort, Terminator Planet, explored the military’s increasing use of remotely piloted drones, which have turned visions of a dystopian future into an increasingly dystopian present. Now teamed with Haymarket Books, one of the leading progressive publishers in the United States, Dispatch Books exposed and analyzed the new model of US warfare with The Changing Face of Empire by Nick Turse and explored the untold story of how the wounded return from America’s wars in They Were Soldiers by Ann Jones.
About the Author
© Jim Herrington
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of fifteen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, including Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award); and atlases of San Francisco and New Orleans. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to Harper’s and frequent contributor to the political website TomDispatch.
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