In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters.
In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters.
She ends on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!”
This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf ’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women.
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; 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). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.
这本也算是“网红书”了吧，如果之前没怎么接触过女性议题可以把这本当作女权主义入门书籍看，结尾作者对未来的展望也蛮乐观的：潘多拉的魔盒已被打开，这场战争中会有牺牲，但人们的理想不会被抹去。不过难怪作者那句“violence doesn‘t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender”引起争...这本也算是“网红书”了吧，如果之前没怎么接触过女性议题可以把这本当作女权主义入门书籍看，结尾作者对未来的展望也蛮乐观的：潘多拉的魔盒已被打开，这场战争中会有牺牲，但人们的理想不会被抹去。不过难怪作者那句“violence doesn‘t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender”引起争议，槽点太多，当时看到后默默在旁边画了三个问号（这都逃不掉来自白人的凝视？）(展开)
这本也算是“网红书”了吧，如果之前没怎么接触过女性议题可以把这本当作女权主义入门书籍看，结尾作者对未来的展望也蛮乐观的：潘多拉的魔盒已被打开，这场战争中会有牺牲，但人们的理想不会被抹去。不过难怪作者那句“violence doesn‘t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender”引起争...这本也算是“网红书”了吧，如果之前没怎么接触过女性议题可以把这本当作女权主义入门书籍看，结尾作者对未来的展望也蛮乐观的：潘多拉的魔盒已被打开，这场战争中会有牺牲，但人们的理想不会被抹去。不过难怪作者那句“violence doesn‘t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender”引起争议，槽点太多，当时看到后默默在旁边画了三个问号（这都逃不掉来自白人的凝视？）(展开)
1.生活中常常遇见这样的时刻：我对某人说了一番话，某人先说不不不，接着换了个方式把我的观点重复了一遍，或者仅仅做了并不矛盾的补充。 mansplain v. (of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing....
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2008 年 Rebecca Solnit 发表了文章 Men Explain Things to Me (男人向我解释事情），讲述一位男士在一次聚会上对着作家本人滔滔不绝大谈她新近出版的一本书，但其实他对该书的内容只是一知半解。这篇文章促进了一个新词的诞生，mansplain。这个词由 man 和 explain 合成，作...
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1. Men Explain Things To Me（爱说教的男人） 关键原因：Arrogance（男性普遍的傲慢 Lack of credibility（女性普遍地被矮化、欠缺权威 女性被社会驯化，逐渐变得“自我怀疑”与“自我局限”，男性则被社会鼓励，在女性面前极容易自大自满。 2. The Longest War （最漫长的战...
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昨天正好看到有人把mansplain（man＋explain）翻译成“男性说教”。 感觉像是，要不“gay蜜（的explain）不是男性（的explain）”，要不就是“其他性别的人不会进行说教”。 翻译成“男式说教”就好多了。 然而背后的干预行动逻辑还是“stop being a man”的逻辑…… 如果能看...
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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 gran...
2020-12-31 10:32
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, greatgrandmothers,
a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history.
Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four greatgrandmothers.
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.
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.
He covered her like a sheet, like a shroud, like a screen. She had no separate existence.
Veils go a long
way back. They existed in Assyria more than three thousand years ago,
when there were two kinds of women, respectable wives and widows who
had to wear veils, and prostitutes and slave girls who were forbidden to do
so. The veil was a kind of wall of privacy, the marker of a woman for one
man, a portable architecture of confinement. Less portable kinds of
architecture kept women confined to houses, to the domestic sphere of
housework and childrearing, and so out of public life and incapable of free
circulation. In so many societies, women have been confined to the house to
control their erotic energies, necessary in a patrilineal world so that fathers
could know who their sons were and construct their own lineage of begats.
In matrilinear societies, that sort of control is not so essential.
家庭主妇
According to the project Ferite a
Morte (Wounded to Death), organized by the Italian actress Serena Dandino
and her colleagues, about sixty-six thousand women are killed by men
annually, worldwide, in the specific circumstances they began to call
“femicide.” Most of them are killed by lovers, husbands, former partners,
seeking the most extreme form of containment, the ultimate form of
erasure, silencing, disappearance. Such deaths often come after years or
decades of being silenced and erased in the home, in daily life, by threat
and violence. Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once.
Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that
would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her
story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man,
the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is
already a victory, already a revolt.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.
Not all of them aspire to do so or succeed. Nonfiction has crept closer to
fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because
too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like
the future, is dark. There is so much we don’t know, and to write truthfully
about a life, your own or your mother’s, or a celebrated figure’s, an event, a
crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of
darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us
that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting
with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the
absence of exact information.
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. That so much change has been made in four or
five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively,
irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a
thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that
she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get
anywhere.It takes time. There are milestones, but so many people are traveling
along that road at their own pace, and some come along later, and others are
trying to stop everyone who’s moving forward, and a few are marching
backward or are confused about what direction they should go in. Even in
our own lives we regress, fail, continue, try again, get lost, and sometimes
make a great leap, find what we didn’t know we were looking for, and yet
continue to contain contradictions for generations.
Thinking Out of the Box
What doesn’t go back in the jar or the box are ideas. And revolutions are,
most of all, made up of ideas. You can whittle away at reproductive rights,
as conservatives have in most states of the union, but you can’t convince the
majority of women that they should have no right to control their own
bodies. Practical changes follow upon changes of the heart and mind.
Sometimes legal, political, economic, environmental changes follow upon
those changes, though not always, for where power rests matters.
It’s important to note (as I have in “In Praise of the Threat” in this book),
that the very idea that marriage could extend to two people of the same
gender is only possible because feminists broke out marriage from the
hierarchical system it had been in and reinvented it as a relationship
between equals. Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many
things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. Liberation is a contagious project, speaking of
birds coming home to roost
We have so much further to go, but looking back at how far we’ve come
can be encouraging. Domestic violence was mostly invisible and
unpunished until a heroic effort by feminists to out it and crack down on it a
few decades ago. Though it now generates a significant percentage of the
calls to police, enforcement has been crummy in most places—but the ideas
that a husband has the right to beat his wife and that it’s a private matter are
not returning anytime soon. The genies are not going back into their bottles.
And this is, really, how revolution works. Revolutions are first of all of
ideas.
The online world is full of mostly anonymous rape and death
threats for women who stick out—who, for instance, participate in online
gaming or speak up on controversial issues, or even for the woman who
recently campaigned to put women’s images on British banknotes (an
unusual case, in that many of those who threatened her were actually
tracked down and brought to justice). As the writer Caitlin Moran tweeted:
“For those who say, ‘why complain– just block?’—on a big troll day, it can
be 50 violent/rape messages an hour.”Maybe there is a full-fledged war now, not of the sexes—the division is
not that simple, with conservative women and progressive men on different
sides—but of gender roles. It’s evidence that feminism and women continue
achieving advances that threaten and infuriate some people. Those rape and
death threats are the blunt response; the decorous version is all those
articles Faludi and N+1 cite telling women who we are and what we may
aspire to—and what we may not.Then there are all the tabloids patrolling the bodies and private lives of
celebrity women and finding constant fault with them for being too fat, too
thin, too sexy, not sexy enough, too single, not yet breeding, missing the
chance to breed, having bred but failing to nurture adequately—and always
assuming that each one’s ambition is not to be a great actress or singer or
voice for liberty or adventurer but a wife and mother. Get back in the box,
famous ladies. (The fashion and women’s magazines devote a lot of their
space to telling you how to pursue those goals yourself, or how to
appreciate your shortcomings in relation to them.)
The new feminism is making the problems visible in new ways, perhaps
in ways that are only possible now that so much has changed.
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.
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 for pregnant women in the United States. At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence,...
2020-12-31 10:06
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 for pregnant women in the United
States. 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.
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
seven-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.
Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn’t really
a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women then pointed out that, in insisting
on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men
succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do. (For the
record, I do believe that women have explained things in patronizing ways,
to men among others. But that’s not indicative of the massive power
differential that takes far more sinister forms as well or of the broad pattern
of how gender works in our society.)At TomDispatch in 2008, I got an email from an older man in
Indianapolis, who wrote in to tell me that he had “never personally or
professionally shortchanged a woman” and went on to berate me for not
hanging out with “more regular guys or at least do a little homework first.”
He then gave me some advice about how to run my life and commented on
my “feelings of inferiority.” He thought that being patronized was an
experience a woman chooses to have, or could choose not to have—and so
the fault was all mine.
The term “mansplaining”
Chords, nerves: the thing is still circulating as I write. The point of the
essay was never to suggest that I think I am notably oppressed. It was to
take these conversations as the narrow end of the wedge that opens up space
for men and closes it off for women, space to speak, to be heard, to have
rights, to participate, to be respected, to be a full and free human being.
This is one way that, in polite discourse, power is expressed—the same
power that in impolite discourse and in physical acts of intimidation and
violence, and very often in how the world is organized—silences and erases
and annihilates women, as equals, as participants, as human beings with
rights, and far too often as living beings.That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from
minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we
would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we
looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic
violence separately from rape and murder and harrassment and
intimidation, online and at home and in the workplace and in the streets;
seen together, the pattern is clear).
Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity,
and to liberty.
Not that I went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the
news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually
be a pattern.
There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and
deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a
case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of
attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the
abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this
country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica,
constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.
We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this
country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights
or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a
race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
Someone wrote a piece about how white men seem to be the ones who
commit mass murders in the United States and the (mostly hostile)
commenters only seemed to notice the white part. It’s rare that anyone says
what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible: “Being
male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in
several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having
antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family.” It’s not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that
women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to
theorize where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more
productively.
Murder is the extreme version of that authoritarianism, where the
murderer asserts he has the right to decide whether you live or die, the
ultimate means of controlling someone. This may be true even if you are
obedient, because the desire to control comes out of a rage that obedience
can’t assuage. Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie
such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict
suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator
and the victims.
It’s a system of control. It’s why so many intimate-partner murders are of women who dared to break up with those partners.
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; of the two million injured annually, more than
half a million of those injuries require medical attention while about
145,000 require overnight hospitalizations, according to the Center for
Disease Control, and you don’t want to know about the dentistry needed
afterwards. Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women
in the United States. “Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be
maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and
traffic accidents combined,” writes Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the few
prominent figures to address the issue regularly.
Mostly, however, we don’t talk about it—though a graphic has been
circulating on the Internet called Ten Top Tips to End Rape, the kind of
thing young women get often enough, but this one had a subversive twist. It
offered advice like this: “Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might
assault someone ‘by accident’ you can hand it to the person you are with, so
they can call for help.” While funny, the piece points out something terrible:
the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on
potential victims, treating the violence as a given. There’s no good reason
(and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to
survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be
predators.And they’re out to gut reproductive rights—birth control as well as
abortion, as they’ve pretty effectively done in many states over the last
dozen years. What’s meant by “reproductive rights,” of course, is the right
of women to control their own bodies. Didn’t I mention earlier that violence
against women is a control issue?
What’s the matter with manhood? There’s something about how
masculinity is imagined, about what’s praised and encouraged, about the
way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed.
Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent
on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as
though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be
free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together. Surely the
mindset of those who think they need to win, to dominate, to punish, to
reign supreme must be terrible and far from free, and giving up this
unachievable pursuit would be liberatory.
There are other things I’d rather write about, but this affects everything
else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and
sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much
more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if
we weren’t so busy surviving. Look at it this way: one of the best
journalists I know is afraid to walk home at night in our neighborhood.
Should she stop working late? How many women have had to stop doing
their work, or been stopped from doing it, for similar reasons? It’s clear
now that monumental harrassment online keeps many women from
speaking up and writing altogether.
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. So, Mr. Very Importa...
2020-12-31 09:59
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.
So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I shouldhave known when Sallie interrupted him, to say, “That’s her book.” Or triedto interrupt him anyway.But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” threeor four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenthcentury 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.
Yes, 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.
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.
ok.....how do i get rid of this stupid highlighter?
金句好多哈哈 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. 认识到这一点——并且改变这一点 I surprised myself when I wrote the essay, which began with an amusing incident and ended with rape and murder.
2020-06-04 13:45
金句好多哈哈
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.
认识到这一点——并且改变这一点
I surprised myself when I wrote the essay, which began with an amusing incident and ended with rape and murder.
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 gran...
2020-12-31 10:32
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, greatgrandmothers,
a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history.
Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four greatgrandmothers.
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.
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.
He covered her like a sheet, like a shroud, like a screen. She had no separate existence.
Veils go a long
way back. They existed in Assyria more than three thousand years ago,
when there were two kinds of women, respectable wives and widows who
had to wear veils, and prostitutes and slave girls who were forbidden to do
so. The veil was a kind of wall of privacy, the marker of a woman for one
man, a portable architecture of confinement. Less portable kinds of
architecture kept women confined to houses, to the domestic sphere of
housework and childrearing, and so out of public life and incapable of free
circulation. In so many societies, women have been confined to the house to
control their erotic energies, necessary in a patrilineal world so that fathers
could know who their sons were and construct their own lineage of begats.
In matrilinear societies, that sort of control is not so essential.
家庭主妇
According to the project Ferite a
Morte (Wounded to Death), organized by the Italian actress Serena Dandino
and her colleagues, about sixty-six thousand women are killed by men
annually, worldwide, in the specific circumstances they began to call
“femicide.” Most of them are killed by lovers, husbands, former partners,
seeking the most extreme form of containment, the ultimate form of
erasure, silencing, disappearance. Such deaths often come after years or
decades of being silenced and erased in the home, in daily life, by threat
and violence. Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once.
Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that
would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her
story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man,
the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is
already a victory, already a revolt.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.
Not all of them aspire to do so or succeed. Nonfiction has crept closer to
fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because
too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like
the future, is dark. There is so much we don’t know, and to write truthfully
about a life, your own or your mother’s, or a celebrated figure’s, an event, a
crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of
darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us
that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting
with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the
absence of exact information.
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. That so much change has been made in four or
five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively,
irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a
thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that
she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get
anywhere.It takes time. There are milestones, but so many people are traveling
along that road at their own pace, and some come along later, and others are
trying to stop everyone who’s moving forward, and a few are marching
backward or are confused about what direction they should go in. Even in
our own lives we regress, fail, continue, try again, get lost, and sometimes
make a great leap, find what we didn’t know we were looking for, and yet
continue to contain contradictions for generations.
Thinking Out of the Box
What doesn’t go back in the jar or the box are ideas. And revolutions are,
most of all, made up of ideas. You can whittle away at reproductive rights,
as conservatives have in most states of the union, but you can’t convince the
majority of women that they should have no right to control their own
bodies. Practical changes follow upon changes of the heart and mind.
Sometimes legal, political, economic, environmental changes follow upon
those changes, though not always, for where power rests matters.
It’s important to note (as I have in “In Praise of the Threat” in this book),
that the very idea that marriage could extend to two people of the same
gender is only possible because feminists broke out marriage from the
hierarchical system it had been in and reinvented it as a relationship
between equals. Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many
things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. Liberation is a contagious project, speaking of
birds coming home to roost
We have so much further to go, but looking back at how far we’ve come
can be encouraging. Domestic violence was mostly invisible and
unpunished until a heroic effort by feminists to out it and crack down on it a
few decades ago. Though it now generates a significant percentage of the
calls to police, enforcement has been crummy in most places—but the ideas
that a husband has the right to beat his wife and that it’s a private matter are
not returning anytime soon. The genies are not going back into their bottles.
And this is, really, how revolution works. Revolutions are first of all of
ideas.
The online world is full of mostly anonymous rape and death
threats for women who stick out—who, for instance, participate in online
gaming or speak up on controversial issues, or even for the woman who
recently campaigned to put women’s images on British banknotes (an
unusual case, in that many of those who threatened her were actually
tracked down and brought to justice). As the writer Caitlin Moran tweeted:
“For those who say, ‘why complain– just block?’—on a big troll day, it can
be 50 violent/rape messages an hour.”Maybe there is a full-fledged war now, not of the sexes—the division is
not that simple, with conservative women and progressive men on different
sides—but of gender roles. It’s evidence that feminism and women continue
achieving advances that threaten and infuriate some people. Those rape and
death threats are the blunt response; the decorous version is all those
articles Faludi and N+1 cite telling women who we are and what we may
aspire to—and what we may not.Then there are all the tabloids patrolling the bodies and private lives of
celebrity women and finding constant fault with them for being too fat, too
thin, too sexy, not sexy enough, too single, not yet breeding, missing the
chance to breed, having bred but failing to nurture adequately—and always
assuming that each one’s ambition is not to be a great actress or singer or
voice for liberty or adventurer but a wife and mother. Get back in the box,
famous ladies. (The fashion and women’s magazines devote a lot of their
space to telling you how to pursue those goals yourself, or how to
appreciate your shortcomings in relation to them.)
The new feminism is making the problems visible in new ways, perhaps
in ways that are only possible now that so much has changed.
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.
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 for pregnant women in the United States. At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence,...
2020-12-31 10:06
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 for pregnant women in the United
States. 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.
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
seven-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.
Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn’t really
a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women then pointed out that, in insisting
on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men
succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do. (For the
record, I do believe that women have explained things in patronizing ways,
to men among others. But that’s not indicative of the massive power
differential that takes far more sinister forms as well or of the broad pattern
of how gender works in our society.)At TomDispatch in 2008, I got an email from an older man in
Indianapolis, who wrote in to tell me that he had “never personally or
professionally shortchanged a woman” and went on to berate me for not
hanging out with “more regular guys or at least do a little homework first.”
He then gave me some advice about how to run my life and commented on
my “feelings of inferiority.” He thought that being patronized was an
experience a woman chooses to have, or could choose not to have—and so
the fault was all mine.
The term “mansplaining”
Chords, nerves: the thing is still circulating as I write. The point of the
essay was never to suggest that I think I am notably oppressed. It was to
take these conversations as the narrow end of the wedge that opens up space
for men and closes it off for women, space to speak, to be heard, to have
rights, to participate, to be respected, to be a full and free human being.
This is one way that, in polite discourse, power is expressed—the same
power that in impolite discourse and in physical acts of intimidation and
violence, and very often in how the world is organized—silences and erases
and annihilates women, as equals, as participants, as human beings with
rights, and far too often as living beings.That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from
minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we
would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we
looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic
violence separately from rape and murder and harrassment and
intimidation, online and at home and in the workplace and in the streets;
seen together, the pattern is clear).
Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity,
and to liberty.
Not that I went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the
news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually
be a pattern.
There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and
deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a
case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of
attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the
abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this
country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica,
constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.
We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this
country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights
or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a
race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
Someone wrote a piece about how white men seem to be the ones who
commit mass murders in the United States and the (mostly hostile)
commenters only seemed to notice the white part. It’s rare that anyone says
what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible: “Being
male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in
several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having
antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family.” It’s not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that
women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to
theorize where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more
productively.
Murder is the extreme version of that authoritarianism, where the
murderer asserts he has the right to decide whether you live or die, the
ultimate means of controlling someone. This may be true even if you are
obedient, because the desire to control comes out of a rage that obedience
can’t assuage. Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie
such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict
suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator
and the victims.
It’s a system of control. It’s why so many intimate-partner murders are of women who dared to break up with those partners.
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; of the two million injured annually, more than
half a million of those injuries require medical attention while about
145,000 require overnight hospitalizations, according to the Center for
Disease Control, and you don’t want to know about the dentistry needed
afterwards. Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women
in the United States. “Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be
maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and
traffic accidents combined,” writes Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the few
prominent figures to address the issue regularly.
Mostly, however, we don’t talk about it—though a graphic has been
circulating on the Internet called Ten Top Tips to End Rape, the kind of
thing young women get often enough, but this one had a subversive twist. It
offered advice like this: “Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might
assault someone ‘by accident’ you can hand it to the person you are with, so
they can call for help.” While funny, the piece points out something terrible:
the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on
potential victims, treating the violence as a given. There’s no good reason
(and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to
survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be
predators.And they’re out to gut reproductive rights—birth control as well as
abortion, as they’ve pretty effectively done in many states over the last
dozen years. What’s meant by “reproductive rights,” of course, is the right
of women to control their own bodies. Didn’t I mention earlier that violence
against women is a control issue?
What’s the matter with manhood? There’s something about how
masculinity is imagined, about what’s praised and encouraged, about the
way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed.
Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent
on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as
though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be
free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together. Surely the
mindset of those who think they need to win, to dominate, to punish, to
reign supreme must be terrible and far from free, and giving up this
unachievable pursuit would be liberatory.
There are other things I’d rather write about, but this affects everything
else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and
sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much
more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if
we weren’t so busy surviving. Look at it this way: one of the best
journalists I know is afraid to walk home at night in our neighborhood.
Should she stop working late? How many women have had to stop doing
their work, or been stopped from doing it, for similar reasons? It’s clear
now that monumental harrassment online keeps many women from
speaking up and writing altogether.
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. So, Mr. Very Importa...
2020-12-31 09:59
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.
So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I shouldhave known when Sallie interrupted him, to say, “That’s her book.” Or triedto interrupt him anyway.But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” threeor four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenthcentury 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.
Yes, 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.
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.
ok.....how do i get rid of this stupid highlighter?
金句好多哈哈 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. 认识到这一点——并且改变这一点 I surprised myself when I wrote the essay, which began with an amusing incident and ended with rape and murder.
2020-06-04 13:45
金句好多哈哈
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.
认识到这一点——并且改变这一点
I surprised myself when I wrote the essay, which began with an amusing incident and ended with rape and murder.
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 gran...
2020-12-31 10:32
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, greatgrandmothers,
a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history.
Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four greatgrandmothers.
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.
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.
He covered her like a sheet, like a shroud, like a screen. She had no separate existence.
Veils go a long
way back. They existed in Assyria more than three thousand years ago,
when there were two kinds of women, respectable wives and widows who
had to wear veils, and prostitutes and slave girls who were forbidden to do
so. The veil was a kind of wall of privacy, the marker of a woman for one
man, a portable architecture of confinement. Less portable kinds of
architecture kept women confined to houses, to the domestic sphere of
housework and childrearing, and so out of public life and incapable of free
circulation. In so many societies, women have been confined to the house to
control their erotic energies, necessary in a patrilineal world so that fathers
could know who their sons were and construct their own lineage of begats.
In matrilinear societies, that sort of control is not so essential.
家庭主妇
According to the project Ferite a
Morte (Wounded to Death), organized by the Italian actress Serena Dandino
and her colleagues, about sixty-six thousand women are killed by men
annually, worldwide, in the specific circumstances they began to call
“femicide.” Most of them are killed by lovers, husbands, former partners,
seeking the most extreme form of containment, the ultimate form of
erasure, silencing, disappearance. Such deaths often come after years or
decades of being silenced and erased in the home, in daily life, by threat
and violence. Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once.
Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that
would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her
story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man,
the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is
already a victory, already a revolt.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.
Not all of them aspire to do so or succeed. Nonfiction has crept closer to
fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because
too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like
the future, is dark. There is so much we don’t know, and to write truthfully
about a life, your own or your mother’s, or a celebrated figure’s, an event, a
crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of
darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us
that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting
with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the
absence of exact information.
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. That so much change has been made in four or
five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively,
irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a
thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that
she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get
anywhere.It takes time. There are milestones, but so many people are traveling
along that road at their own pace, and some come along later, and others are
trying to stop everyone who’s moving forward, and a few are marching
backward or are confused about what direction they should go in. Even in
our own lives we regress, fail, continue, try again, get lost, and sometimes
make a great leap, find what we didn’t know we were looking for, and yet
continue to contain contradictions for generations.
Thinking Out of the Box
What doesn’t go back in the jar or the box are ideas. And revolutions are,
most of all, made up of ideas. You can whittle away at reproductive rights,
as conservatives have in most states of the union, but you can’t convince the
majority of women that they should have no right to control their own
bodies. Practical changes follow upon changes of the heart and mind.
Sometimes legal, political, economic, environmental changes follow upon
those changes, though not always, for where power rests matters.
It’s important to note (as I have in “In Praise of the Threat” in this book),
that the very idea that marriage could extend to two people of the same
gender is only possible because feminists broke out marriage from the
hierarchical system it had been in and reinvented it as a relationship
between equals. Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many
things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. Liberation is a contagious project, speaking of
birds coming home to roost
We have so much further to go, but looking back at how far we’ve come
can be encouraging. Domestic violence was mostly invisible and
unpunished until a heroic effort by feminists to out it and crack down on it a
few decades ago. Though it now generates a significant percentage of the
calls to police, enforcement has been crummy in most places—but the ideas
that a husband has the right to beat his wife and that it’s a private matter are
not returning anytime soon. The genies are not going back into their bottles.
And this is, really, how revolution works. Revolutions are first of all of
ideas.
The online world is full of mostly anonymous rape and death
threats for women who stick out—who, for instance, participate in online
gaming or speak up on controversial issues, or even for the woman who
recently campaigned to put women’s images on British banknotes (an
unusual case, in that many of those who threatened her were actually
tracked down and brought to justice). As the writer Caitlin Moran tweeted:
“For those who say, ‘why complain– just block?’—on a big troll day, it can
be 50 violent/rape messages an hour.”Maybe there is a full-fledged war now, not of the sexes—the division is
not that simple, with conservative women and progressive men on different
sides—but of gender roles. It’s evidence that feminism and women continue
achieving advances that threaten and infuriate some people. Those rape and
death threats are the blunt response; the decorous version is all those
articles Faludi and N+1 cite telling women who we are and what we may
aspire to—and what we may not.Then there are all the tabloids patrolling the bodies and private lives of
celebrity women and finding constant fault with them for being too fat, too
thin, too sexy, not sexy enough, too single, not yet breeding, missing the
chance to breed, having bred but failing to nurture adequately—and always
assuming that each one’s ambition is not to be a great actress or singer or
voice for liberty or adventurer but a wife and mother. Get back in the box,
famous ladies. (The fashion and women’s magazines devote a lot of their
space to telling you how to pursue those goals yourself, or how to
appreciate your shortcomings in relation to them.)
The new feminism is making the problems visible in new ways, perhaps
in ways that are only possible now that so much has changed.
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.
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 for pregnant women in the United States. At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence,...
2020-12-31 10:06
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 for pregnant women in the United
States. 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.
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
seven-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.
Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn’t really
a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women then pointed out that, in insisting
on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men
succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do. (For the
record, I do believe that women have explained things in patronizing ways,
to men among others. But that’s not indicative of the massive power
differential that takes far more sinister forms as well or of the broad pattern
of how gender works in our society.)At TomDispatch in 2008, I got an email from an older man in
Indianapolis, who wrote in to tell me that he had “never personally or
professionally shortchanged a woman” and went on to berate me for not
hanging out with “more regular guys or at least do a little homework first.”
He then gave me some advice about how to run my life and commented on
my “feelings of inferiority.” He thought that being patronized was an
experience a woman chooses to have, or could choose not to have—and so
the fault was all mine.
The term “mansplaining”
Chords, nerves: the thing is still circulating as I write. The point of the
essay was never to suggest that I think I am notably oppressed. It was to
take these conversations as the narrow end of the wedge that opens up space
for men and closes it off for women, space to speak, to be heard, to have
rights, to participate, to be respected, to be a full and free human being.
This is one way that, in polite discourse, power is expressed—the same
power that in impolite discourse and in physical acts of intimidation and
violence, and very often in how the world is organized—silences and erases
and annihilates women, as equals, as participants, as human beings with
rights, and far too often as living beings.That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from
minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we
would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we
looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic
violence separately from rape and murder and harrassment and
intimidation, online and at home and in the workplace and in the streets;
seen together, the pattern is clear).
Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity,
and to liberty.
Not that I went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the
news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually
be a pattern.
There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and
deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a
case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of
attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the
abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this
country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica,
constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.
We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this
country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights
or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a
race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
Someone wrote a piece about how white men seem to be the ones who
commit mass murders in the United States and the (mostly hostile)
commenters only seemed to notice the white part. It’s rare that anyone says
what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible: “Being
male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in
several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having
antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family.” It’s not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that
women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to
theorize where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more
productively.
Murder is the extreme version of that authoritarianism, where the
murderer asserts he has the right to decide whether you live or die, the
ultimate means of controlling someone. This may be true even if you are
obedient, because the desire to control comes out of a rage that obedience
can’t assuage. Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie
such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict
suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator
and the victims.
It’s a system of control. It’s why so many intimate-partner murders are of women who dared to break up with those partners.
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; of the two million injured annually, more than
half a million of those injuries require medical attention while about
145,000 require overnight hospitalizations, according to the Center for
Disease Control, and you don’t want to know about the dentistry needed
afterwards. Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women
in the United States. “Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be
maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and
traffic accidents combined,” writes Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the few
prominent figures to address the issue regularly.
Mostly, however, we don’t talk about it—though a graphic has been
circulating on the Internet called Ten Top Tips to End Rape, the kind of
thing young women get often enough, but this one had a subversive twist. It
offered advice like this: “Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might
assault someone ‘by accident’ you can hand it to the person you are with, so
they can call for help.” While funny, the piece points out something terrible:
the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on
potential victims, treating the violence as a given. There’s no good reason
(and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to
survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be
predators.And they’re out to gut reproductive rights—birth control as well as
abortion, as they’ve pretty effectively done in many states over the last
dozen years. What’s meant by “reproductive rights,” of course, is the right
of women to control their own bodies. Didn’t I mention earlier that violence
against women is a control issue?
What’s the matter with manhood? There’s something about how
masculinity is imagined, about what’s praised and encouraged, about the
way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed.
Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent
on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as
though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be
free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together. Surely the
mindset of those who think they need to win, to dominate, to punish, to
reign supreme must be terrible and far from free, and giving up this
unachievable pursuit would be liberatory.
There are other things I’d rather write about, but this affects everything
else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and
sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much
more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if
we weren’t so busy surviving. Look at it this way: one of the best
journalists I know is afraid to walk home at night in our neighborhood.
Should she stop working late? How many women have had to stop doing
their work, or been stopped from doing it, for similar reasons? It’s clear
now that monumental harrassment online keeps many women from
speaking up and writing altogether.
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. So, Mr. Very Importa...
2020-12-31 09:59
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.
So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I shouldhave known when Sallie interrupted him, to say, “That’s her book.” Or triedto interrupt him anyway.But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” threeor four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenthcentury 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.
Yes, 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.
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.
ok.....how do i get rid of this stupid highlighter?
金句好多哈哈 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. 认识到这一点——并且改变这一点 I surprised myself when I wrote the essay, which began with an amusing incident and ended with rape and murder.
2020-06-04 13:45
金句好多哈哈
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.
认识到这一点——并且改变这一点
I surprised myself when I wrote the essay, which began with an amusing incident and ended with rape and murder.
十二条鱼
人民文学出版社2020版
不知在哪的翠翠
Haymarket Books2020版
Ivan
人民文学出版社2020版
岂能无怪哉
人民文学出版社2020版
Tash Jam
人民文学出版社2020版
Esther
Haymarket Books2020版
深海锰结核
人民文学出版社2020版
0 有用 Яανeη 2020-12-31
作为入门级别女性主义的书籍是可以的，很多案例和金句都能引发（作为）女性（的我）的共鸣。
0 有用 Jessika 2020-06-24
这本也算是“网红书”了吧，如果之前没怎么接触过女性议题可以把这本当作女权主义入门书籍看，结尾作者对未来的展望也蛮乐观的：潘多拉的魔盒已被打开，这场战争中会有牺牲，但人们的理想不会被抹去。不过难怪作者那句“violence doesn‘t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender”引起争... 这本也算是“网红书”了吧，如果之前没怎么接触过女性议题可以把这本当作女权主义入门书籍看，结尾作者对未来的展望也蛮乐观的：潘多拉的魔盒已被打开，这场战争中会有牺牲，但人们的理想不会被抹去。不过难怪作者那句“violence doesn‘t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender”引起争议，槽点太多，当时看到后默默在旁边画了三个问号（这都逃不掉来自白人的凝视？） (展开)
0 有用 Яανeη 2020-12-31
作为入门级别女性主义的书籍是可以的，很多案例和金句都能引发（作为）女性（的我）的共鸣。
0 有用 Jessika 2020-06-24
这本也算是“网红书”了吧，如果之前没怎么接触过女性议题可以把这本当作女权主义入门书籍看，结尾作者对未来的展望也蛮乐观的：潘多拉的魔盒已被打开，这场战争中会有牺牲，但人们的理想不会被抹去。不过难怪作者那句“violence doesn‘t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender”引起争... 这本也算是“网红书”了吧，如果之前没怎么接触过女性议题可以把这本当作女权主义入门书籍看，结尾作者对未来的展望也蛮乐观的：潘多拉的魔盒已被打开，这场战争中会有牺牲，但人们的理想不会被抹去。不过难怪作者那句“violence doesn‘t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender”引起争议，槽点太多，当时看到后默默在旁边画了三个问号（这都逃不掉来自白人的凝视？） (展开)