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Men Explain Things to Me; Facts Didn't Get in Their Way
I still don't know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion's young ladies. The house was great -- if you like Ralph Lauren-style chalets -- a rugged luxury cabin at 9,000 feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning stove. We were preparing to leave, when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money.
He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books."
I replied, "Several, actually."
He said, in the way you encourage your friend's seven-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about?"
They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"
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.
Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, with a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid friends of whom it could be said -- like the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales I still remember from Mr. Pelen's class on Chaucer -- "gladly would he learn and gladly teach." Still, there are these other men, too. So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.
But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century 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.
I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.
When River of Shadows came out, some pedant wrote a snarky letter to the New York Times explaining that, though Muybridge had made improvements in camera technology, he had not made any breakthroughs in photographic chemistry. The guy had no idea what he was talking about. Both Philip Prodger, in his wonderful book on Muybridge, and I had actually researched the subject and made it clear that Muybridge had done something obscure but powerful to the wet-plate technology of the time to speed it up amazingly, but letters to the editor don't get fact-checked. And perhaps because the book was about the virile subjects of cinema and technology, the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.
A British academic wrote in to the London Review of Books with all kinds of nitpicking corrections and complaints, all of them from outer space. He carped, for example, that to aggrandize Muybridge's standing I left out technological predecessors like Henry R. Heyl. He'd apparently not read the book all the way to page 202 or checked the index, since Heyl was there (though his contribution was just not very significant). Surely one of these men has died of embarrassment, but not nearly publicly enough.
The Slippery Slope of Silencings
Yes, guys like this pick on other men's books too, and 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.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics since 2001 was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI woman who issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was certainly shaped by a Bush administration to which you couldn't tell anything, including that Iraq had no links to al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to be a "cakewalk." (Even male experts couldn't penetrate the fortress of their smugness.)
Arrogance might have had something to do with the war, but this syndrome is a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to let Mr. Important and his overweening confidence bowl over my more shaky certainty.
Don't forget that I've had a lot more confirmation of my right to think and speak than most women, and I've learned that 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, like the ones who have governed us since 2001. There's a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.
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.
Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just beginning to get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was telling -- as though it were a light and amusing subject -- how a neighbor's wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know that he wasn't trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for her fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand....
Even getting a restraining order -- a fairly new legal tool -- requires acquiring the credibility to convince the courts that some guy is a menace and then getting the cops to enforce it. Restraining orders often don't work anyway. 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 in pregnant women in the U.S. 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.
I tend to believe that women acquired the status of human beings when these kinds of acts started to be taken seriously, when the big things that stop us and kill us were addressed legally from the mid-1970s on; well after, that is, my birth. And for anyone about to argue that workplace sexual intimidation isn't a life or death issue, remember that Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach, age 20, was apparently killed by her higher-ranking colleague last winter while she was waiting to testify that he raped her. The burned remains of her pregnant body were found in the fire pit in his backyard in December.
Being told that, categorically, he knows what he's talking about and she doesn't, however minor a part of any given conversation, perpetuates the ugliness of this world and holds back its light. After my book Wanderlust came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of my own perceptions and interpretations. On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest -- in a nutshell, female.
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 six-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.
Women Fighting on Two Fronts
A few years after the idiot in Aspen, I was in Berlin giving a talk when the Marxist writer Tariq Ali invited me out to a dinner that included a male writer and translator and three women a little younger than me who would remain deferential and mostly silent throughout the dinner. Tariq was great. Perhaps the translator was peeved that I insisted on playing a modest role in the conversation, but when I said something about how Women Strike for Peace, the extraordinary, little-known antinuclear and antiwar group founded in 1961, helped bring down the communist-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities, HUAC, Mr. Very Important II sneered at me. HUAC, he insisted, didn't exist by the early 1960s and, anyway, no women's group played such a role in HUAC's downfall. His scorn was so withering, his confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seemed a scary exercise in futility and an invitation to more insult.
I think I was at nine books at that point, including one that drew from primary documents and interviews about Women Strike for Peace. But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch -- even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie. Back in my hotel room, I Googled a bit and found that Eric Bentley in his definitive history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities credits Women Strike for Peace with "striking the crucial blow in the fall of HUAC's Bastille." In the early 1960s.
So I opened an essay for the Nation with this interchange, in part as a shout-out to one of the more unpleasant men who have explained things to me: Dude, if you're reading this, you're a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.
The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women -- of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.
After all, Women Strike for Peace was founded by women who were tired of making the coffee and doing the typing and not having any voice or decision-making role in the antinuclear movement of the 1950s. Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being. Things have certainly gotten better, but this war won't end in my lifetime. I'm still fighting it, for myself certainly, but also for all those younger women who have something to say, in the hope that they will get to say it.
So many men, so little time; Rebecca Solnit left out hundreds more anecdotes of her own and her friends' experiences of being hectored to craft this tirade, which should in no way be taken as an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. She is on chapter eighteen of her next book.
79 Comments so far
Show AllThe more things change, the more things remain the same.
Women have been in a uphill battle for the identical respect and treatment that men take for granted. And other than gaining the right to vote and own property, they have to continue to struggle.
In the atmosphere of todays Bushco America, it is no wonder that we are well on our way back to the '50's television wonderland of dominant men, women in the kitchen, and a new pointless war every year...
Very amusing and pretty little ideas Sweetie, but of course, none of it is true.
REBECCA: Thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope the wonderful men who read CD may gain some empathy from this article. It's SO true. The most telling example I ever experienced of "the above" was when I was a student in London staying at a youth hostel with other students. In the living room 3 males were debating some issue and I sat down and offered an opinion. They continued talking as if I wasn't there, and that night, they banged on my door and I am very glad the LOCK held. I might have been raped.
I had a photographic exhibition shown in many places during the early l970's and at a gallery in N.Y. someone was taking notes from some of the captions. I went up to the man, older than me, to ask what he was doing and when I stated that I objected, lest I was credited with the quotes, he was incredulous that a YOUNG WOMAN could have put together the photo-essay.
violence directed at women, both overt and covert is something women live with. Like many women, I have been followed home, occasionally threatened, and twice NEARLY raped. Good karma and excellent vocal chords--the better to scream with--got me out of those 2 encounters.
ENN said, "I've seen reports by women that indicate women are more prone to conflict than men and that a world ruled by women would be more conflicted and violent than our current world." (This was added to the DM Greene article.)
ENN: Presuming such a "report" came from a bona fide study not prejudiced at its onset, the RAGE in women from being on the receiving end of 3000 years of supressed political representation, thwarted reproductive rights, NOT voting (for centuries) or owning property, etc could in fact signify a good deal of RAW energy in need of an outlet! However, the PRINCIPLE of Mars is by nature masculine, and the PRINCIPLE of Venus is by nature feminine. WE all own portions of both, and how we deploy these archetypal energies is both the result of choice and our programming.
My sister is a member of a group of teacher's aids that compare notes with each other. One of the ladies has been trying to counsel and encourage the others on when the time is right to be loud and say, "F-Off".
I'll have to admit that the article was a bit long for someone working on a bout of sunstroke to complete, but the advice is still applicable, and I just may take it myself.
Well said and it needed to be said. Further, we all need to stay focused on this human propensity for arrogant ignorance to prevail over shaky certainty. That is, as much as we like to follow a strong, confident leader, our experience shows us over and over again that certainty is illusory and that we are better served by thoughtful, rational, and yes, uncertain, action. Uncertainty preserves the proper amount of caution as well as the option to re-evaluate and revise a course of action.
Thank you, Thank you, THANKYOU, Rebecca!! You said it beautifully! It is the thing that we all know from life-long experience, but I've never heard it actually described before. I've actually tried to explain it to some of the closer men in my life who did it as well. They never got it, of course. "I was imagining things, over-reacting, etc." IF it's true the women are "more prone to conflict", we certainly have several excellent reasons for anger - like the phrases just mentioned - they make me absolutely livid! And then I'm usually told that "I have no sense of humor." OH, the stories we could all tell! Rebecca, I think there's another book in this!
The male/female aspects of nature were designed to be complimentary to one another. A deep understanding of nature, uncovers that there are 3 elements in every interaction: active, passive, and modifying (or unifying).
The male/female aspects were not designed to be in competition with one another, but each to enhance the other. Like everything else, society is confused about the natural purpose of the male and female. We have gone against nature in so many ways, we no longer understand the difference between natural and unnatural. What is unnatural is many cases is a perversion of what is natural.
All that is truly natural flows in holistic harmony with entirety of Being, while all that is unnatural works against it. The female is most effective in her 'passive' element, while the male is most effective in his 'active' element (that does not mean that the female in never active, and the male never passive). For what is truly natural, this dynamic is always complimentary.
Now, exploitation is a completely different matter, and one in which BOTH the female and male are quite capable of. Presently, in society, it seems that female gets the worse end of the stick. Sexist exploitation is often mutual, and it really points to larger problem within human relationship: IMBALANCE.
Guilty as charged...but trying to change.
Growing up in a 50's style household my role models were typical, unlearning is difficult but can be overcome.
Thanks for the insight
This article is a lovely exercise in "let us look for the bad things in men and pretend that women contain either none of these flaws or no flaws at all."
To jump from a know-it-all man to a man who kills and burns a woman is simply an "argument in the extreme."
As if being trained "in self-doubt and self-limitation" by PEOPLE who wish to tell you how to think only happens to women.
Then there is George Bush's arrogance! GW is not an example of what a man should be. He is a dry drunk who failed at everything he ever tried and only survived because daddy bailed him out.
Also, this article contains nothing of what it is like to be a lone man working with a bunch of women. Will the women try to use "bullying by exclusion" on the man? As if women are never conniving, backbiting, or in other ways evil!
In the end, the article reminds me of the years just after the women's liberation started. Movies were made and television episodes aired of a future earth. A future in which all of the men were dead and the world was a better place. Better, because everyone knows that women never do those awful things that men do!!!
PS: chessgames56 wrote a great comment!!!!!!!
I'm a man about the same age as the author (early 40s). I'd LIKE to think that the men of my generation and younger behave better than the (older) men described in the article. We grew up with moms whose jobs were just as important as our dads', sisters going to law school, Title-9, etc.
I don't mean to undercount how far we are from a truly post-sexist society, but it is getting better isn't it? My perception is that we men who grew up in the 70s and later are better, in general, than our older comrades, at understanding that women are people who happen to be female, rather than some alien species.
Or am I just fooling myself?
What do people think?
My wife is my best friend - for 25 years we have shared ideas and thoughts on books, movies, current events, politics, religion - you name it. Our best friends are a lawyer, one of the most brilliant people I have ever met, and her husband, who is an MD, and when we get together we listen and discuss and sometimes debate, but never have any of us thought that gender played any role in intelligence, credibility, or articulation of ideas.
I therefore cannot relate to this article, though from the comments already posted it seems to be striking a resonant chord with a number of folks who I can only assume are also female. The thing is, I too have encountered males who try to explain things to me, like the bore described at the beginning of the article. Only I'm a male. And I have also encountered women who do the same. I've never thought that their behavior had anything to do with gender - I've always just chalked it up to them being pompous asses with low self-esteem.
Clearly there is an element of sexism in some males who preach to women. But this doesn't explain very well why there are men who feel the need to preach to me, does it? And what of women who feel compelled to talk down to me as well? How would the author account for that?
As I read this article to its conclusion, I couldn't help but get the feeling that despite the disclaimers she had provided in a few places in her her write-up (which seemed like they had been added as after-thoughts, at the last minute, and perhaps at the urging of some helpful editor), this particular woman believes that, by and large, she - and presumably all other women - are somehow superior to the male population. Presumably the reason for this superiority is that women such as she never, ever lecture, talk down to, or hector males, even though, in this article, she is talking down to and hectoring the entire male population. Which, of course, would make this entire article a rather long-winded case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Rebecca Solnit
your very behavior empowers the men you rant about. stop playing their games in their frames. as long as you do, you lose. create your own frames. you sure have met more than your share of #$%holes though.
As a demonstrator against the the HUAC myself, I thank Rebecca for reminding me of the Women Strike for Peace and the encouragement that they were for the rest of us.
Ah, yes, a smug little piece written by a snob.
The author Rebecca Solnit is part of a larger group known as snobbish artists. Don't get me wrong; I have utmost respect and genuine awe of the talents and products of artists (I have to: My wife is one), but this article reminds me so much of the gatherings of snobbish artists at functions organized by wealthy patrons.
In a previous life I lived on Beacon Hill in Boston, and was often invited to such gatherings organized by old money. Several times I was approached by a wealthy patron of the arts who would engage me in the art topic du jour and then ask "And what sort of art do you create?". Immediately upon disappointing them by pointing out that I merely taught at MIT, the patrons (both men and women) would promptly turn heel in search of a real artist.
No sympathy for this holier-than-thou piece from Rebecca Solnit.
The smartest person in the library where I worked was a woman. She would come up with all kinds of great ideas at meetings but they would just die. Couple months later, some man would come up with the same idea and it would be instituted.
I agree with the author. I don't think it makes one a snob to say that being silenced is universal even among the educated who should know better.
Wow. Again, women's issues, women's lives still need to be defended as legitimate political turf. How far have we come indeed?
What Solnit is saying is SOOOO True. I live in NYC, most of the time in my 20s and early 30s. I look and sound young. Men do assume you are stupid until you prove otherwise. But i have never allowed anyone to silence me or avoided letting the man know somehow that you are ignoring me and I do not dig. In other words, I am not a silent one. Far more likely to be seen as crazy, which men easily assume of women.
In classroom settings, there is less of an issue. But here's an example from this morning. My boyfriend and I meet with a male (orthodox religious) real estate agent. I ask a question. The male directs his eyes, face and answer to my boyfriend. Did i not just ask this question? I hone in on his eyes, making more intense eye contact, sidle up to him, until he looks at me -- uncomfortably -- after finishing his answer to my boyfriend. Every apartment we have seen where we have male agents, I get the same treatment. One orthodox Jew refused to shake my hand.
How often do i pay with my credit card, and it is returned to my boyfriend?
No, to be assumed a moron and financially dependent until proven otherwise, or not even acknowledged is not a worthy enough oppression to be taken seriously by the mainstream left.
The discourses of racism imperialism and sexism must come together -- in the context of class/ economics. To deny that this is a problem shows how care the left still hasn't come and is still run by men and accomplice liberal women.
My late husband, my daughter and I went out to dinner. My husband was trying to explain wine to me. I have taken some wine courses and had studied the subject in depth - he hadn't.
I replied, "Next, I suppose you are going to explain chemistry to me" (I have a degree in chemistry and he has no experience in the subject).
Position Creates Opposition
Think about it, it doesn't matter what gender is doing it, bringing your heavy-handed position forward creates an uncomfortable, undesirable, unwelcome feeling of opposition on some level.
The paradigm now emerging holds the ideal of masculine-feminine synergy and integration. Our outer reality reflects our inner constitution. As we as individuals learn to balance and integrate our inner masculine and feminine aspects and engage as the connected "one" that we are -then masculine over-confidence/arrogance will be replaced with spiritual confidence of being.
Apparent differences become opportunities of discovery and exploration of new thought; expanding our consciousness and informing us of our inner state of being. This creates Awareness, and from awareness shifts in consciousness and understanding are obviously enacted upon.
"Awareness means you simply see who you are without struggling to change.
Your awareness makes all the necessary changes, not your struggle." -Eckhart Tolle
Men who hold the ideal of reflecting the Divine Masculine honor the Divine Feminine principle. Women who integrate Divine Masculine qualities model integration and wholeness, wisdom, and lead us into the new paradigm of relating, intimacy, and community.
Sunyata Satchitananda
www.mythiclove.net/sunyata
The policies of corporate and state governance seem to mirror the worst aspects of human nature which I suppose include the so called 'battle of the sexes'.
The best warrior gets to spread his gene pool to the largest extent.
The most powerful technologies get to increase their dominance even though it may be better to discard them.
These same entities often take advantages of cultural, tribal, or sexual enmities to further their own goals.
The tragedy of the commons repeats itself in larger and larger spheres as non entity institutions find new ways to increase their power and control regardless of their potential negative effects and use the conflict paradigm to play us all.
Though the competitive nest building and ego enhancing technologies we have developed are truly awesome, our abilities to organize for truly sustainable lifestyles don't seem to have progressed much from the days of Gengis Kahn.
A friend of mine reports that when she was head of nursing at the hospital where she worked, the hospital administrator gave her a copy of a hospital-wide memo for her to distribute to the nursing staff. The memo was addressed to "Doctors and girls." My friend changed it to read "Boys and girls." That little story says it all in a nutshell.
"Women have been in a uphill battle for the identical respect and treatment that men take for granted. And other than gaining the right to vote and own property, they have to continue to struggle."
*sigh*
As a man who has been sexually harrassed by female employers, has found women as territorial and as greedy as men, as violent as men, and so on and so on, allow me to suggest that your politics, in this matter, may be a little... undernourished. The problem isn't men with power, the problem is people with power. And do you really assume that black men, and brown men, and poor men, and unemployed men, take respect and good treatment for granted?
RE: - He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?" / So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway. But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in.
One way that the hard of hearing cope is by monopolizing conversations. It is hard to tell whether the guy that Rebecca Solnit was talking to was chauvanistic or just hard of hearing.
Seems that all the guy heard was that she was interested in "Muybridge" and commenced to talk about "Muybridge" because, as long as he keeps talking about "Muybridge" this lovely young woman will, presumably, be too captivated to realise that he can barely make out a single word she says.
My Cousin did some research on the topic for her thesis. She, her brother, and her late mother were all hard of hearing. Once when my mother was talking to my cousin's mother (my mother's aunt), my brother and his friend counted all the "yes's" and "uh huh's" etc my mother uttered during the conversation (which was all my mother ever got a chance to say during those conversations).
Yes, the hearing impaired to use the telephone, they just don't let you speak much.
For a thorough and brilliant explanation of what the author calls "phallism," see Marilyn Frye's "The Politics of Reality." I've been a feminist for over 35 years and still found her analysis a treasure trove of enlightenment.
It's "than I" not "than me."
Great piece.
REBECCA -- You remind me of my Mom, and her tenacity. Bravo!
May the world continue it's aberrant shaking as it grows in wisdom and the circle of LIFE draws us together in completeness of balanced co-creation and existence
___________________________
Mom learned "fighting back" all too late in her professional career, to have one connected to her earlier passions, and through her sacrifice of not going back into professional work. At that time, my siblings and I were old enough for day care (in 1960s), while much energy still percolated in Mom for decades, but societies EXPECTATION had yet to catch up with her [ other ] life's purpose.
But these family years were hardly the normal fare, not with her creating many whole new worlds of action (for example being an eco-crusader decades prior to that "role" coming into existence). I grew up watching her making a BIG difference, but only later found out about how frustrating it was, as she had to put her career on -HOLD- to raise us kids for 20 years. Luckily for the world, she was the 'unsinkable mollie brown' and found the balance to form a wonderful family, become an influential professor -- and save the world (for the next generations, to pick up upon). This is a blessing that the world needs much more of.
! ~ ! Thanks Mom ! ~ !
___________________________
What profound responses from both Sunyata and chessgames56 !
I have little to add, other than to attempt to direct the other traffic above, to a more wholesome course.
I have a slant on this that is hardly news,Men's tendency is to attempt to solve physical problems out of their nature, which objectifies much of the perceptual balance (in that direction)
Women's tendency is to attempt to solve emotional and relational problems out of their nature, which subjectifies much of the perceptual balance (in that direction)
Neither will a women appreciated being told (by a "helpful" man) how to solve her "problems", not will a man appreciate being told how to feel (by a "helpful" woman). In both case men/women eventually do learn that the women does know what to do, and that she is confiding in a men for some sense of shared understanding (i.e. feelings)
the men does know how to feel, and was confiding in a women for some sense of shared understanding (i.e. actions)
tecullinan -- I'm glad that you've seen part of the beauty in chessgames56 posting,
but your own indicates that you might perhaps benefit from re-reading both his and yours a few more times.
Namaste
Men have to explain things because their brains are less integrated and its the only way one part of their brains can talk to the other part. The explaining isn't actually sexism, a man will do has well as a women as the explainee. Its just that when the women are the target, they take it personally. Listening and talking are arts, and working out what you really mean afterwards is complex.
As well as finding something decent to actually say, maintenance of the pecking order, and who does the talking, is also a fine balance, Unfortunately it is overdone for this purpose, with too much silencing of contrary opinion, or voices from below in the pecking order. Again women are not the only targets.
Great essay, Rebecca! Still smiling after 50 years of explanatory fools. My dad still hangs up on me when I'm right.
Being a man, I'll explain this - men figure things out, women find out.
Which is why men will drive around in circles and refuse to ask for directions,
when women will stop and ask.
It's why a female co-worker asked me if I could answer a question.
And why my answer often was "I don't know but I can give you an answer anyhow!"
'Finding out' doesn't mean refusing to 'figure out'.
But 'figuring out' often places asking on the bottom of the list of things to try. It can take a while, perhaps never, before that option is reached. One option that might be used instead is to bluff, not simply the other person but themselves. (Of COURSE I know the answer, but the real important thing are these other things which I know about...)
I think what Rebecca Solnit is writing about is the arrogance of men who believe in the myth of their infallibility. It apparently didn't hurt the "imposing man who'd made a lot of money". It probably helped create that money and became self-reinforcing. He created a persona to go with his physical "imposing" figure. Looks like an Alpha, talks like an Alpha, must be an Alpha.
One would wish CEOs weren't affected by such things but they are. They know physical height matters in the boardroom. Physical height matters in dating. So talking like one knows what one is talking about, in a way that's making oneself tall. People take shortcuts and act on appearance. Looks like, talks like, must be.
I had an Uncle that was like that "imposing man", minus the money. It may well be that only/mostly men are that kind of arrogant but that kind of arrogance recognizes no bounds.
Great article. " . . . eyes fixed on the fuzzy horizon of his own authority. . ."
That would be my dad, and while he's halfway deaf now, he wasn't while we were growing up.
And he has been expounding endlessly on everything for longer than I can remember.
Good point, hedology. Perhaps this kind of person (mostly men, sometimes women) really just
think of us, the listeners, as rather remote parts of their own brains, hence the explaining.
Unfortunately, the explaining seems to be a one-way street, clearly they do not perceive us as rather remote parts of their own brains !
This article speaks to the automatic self-silencing which women, children and some men too often practice in the presence of this type of person's world.
It's been going on a long time. In music history class we were studying the music of the very early Christian church. Before that, women actually spoke/sang in worship services. This did not happen again for at least a thousand years or so, until Hildegard von Bingen (surely you have all heard of her ?) So the professor explained that the banning of female voices in the early Church was misinterpreted -- it was not meant to be a total ban, just a ban for a particular church group.
Oh. Okay. Glad that's been cleared up. It was all a misunderstanding and the specific instance was only extrapolated to the general for most of the next two thousand years. But wait ! Just why were the women of that congregation told in the vernacular of the day to sit down and shut up ?
I raised my hand and asked.
"They were behaving heretically," the good professor said. And all the young people in the class
(secular university, wide range of students) nodded in agreement.
Too bad I was there and far too old to buy into the 'heretical female' argument. Their 'heresy' was probably in seeing the future (another attempt at some sort of gender equity being hijacked in the name of the Lord) and trying to bring it to the attention of the local congregational leaders.
"Most women fight on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one for simply the right to speak. . . to have value. . ." thank you for an excellent article Rebecca.
A good book on this topic is "Women's Reality" by Anne Wilson Schaef.
What a cute article.
Being a male, I want to make it clear. I don't listen to women, or men, equally.
But to quote another writer -
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell
so it goes...
"Men have to explain things because their brains are less integrated..."
Less integrated than what?
'applause, boos, hisss, applause', following george is indeed pleasurable.
I do take issue with the preceding posters description of Artists. I am a Screen Writer, therefore poor, ergo not successful....Yet! Thanks to all Indie films allowing, granting the rich and famous actors fill roles screwing me. Anyway,
I am truly grateful my Mom, bi-polar undiagnosed until I was about 23, forever threw herself into my artistic self. Making up her own Fables at night as she told them as I listened with rapt attention, never mind if it was the first or fifth time I had heard it. Dragging me to Art Museums, making me watch B/W fims with her, coaxing me to draw, write, put on plays, design my own costumes. All of these things gave me courage, as well as she told people often to F$$K OFF, never took a bit of garbage from anyone, very direct and inquisitive, always with the asking. Made sure I became active in something that allowed me to become physically, mentally and strong, I chose Kung Fu, my Sifus Sifu is Grand Master Pan. Now I have the ability to remain calm yet am able to kill if it came to that, I still train and Chinese Martial Arts are worlds apart from what is represented in the caricature used in our country.
Mom, I thank you for being crazy enough, but you really were meaning you were in deep pain, to love me and teach me I am always able to make my own way, since you insisted on the Degree, too, college and such, I will forever remember your strength and courage and never ending, to this minute, confidence in my abilities to create and create always.
Men, not all. It is what it is. I do believe telling someone to Piss Off is necessary at times, ignore at other times, debate when we are able, try to attain and retain a physical ability to take care of those that intend harm. If older, get a gun, say you are bitter and from my hometown.
arkitekton -- less integrated … between brain HEMISPHEREs, as it appears that women are blessed with more highly integrated dual purpose in parallel brain sides, where men mostly hang out in the "left-side" (logic, authority, linear thinking)
Most of the modern brain science, demonstrates very advanced "super" learning, and skills, when both hemisphers are functioning coherently, so as to generate essentially the state exhibited by meditators.
With the use of binaural tech (music CDs + headphones), the difference frequency of the two sounds coming into each ear is auto-generated within the connection between the brain's two hemispheres, this then has the ability to match and entrain the brain to elicit various super patterns of thought (for the $20 price of a hemi-sync, or holo-sync 'music' CD).
There is more going on here now days, to fill several complete sites like CD -- more later (or before is you search)
Namaste
"The problem isn't men with power, the problem is people with power. And do you really assume that black men, and brown men, and poor men, and unemployed men, take respect and good treatment for granted?"
By no means is this a struggle that only affects women. I am a white man and it took me many years to learn to stand up for myself when confronted with more "alpha" type arrogant males. Women are not the only victims of this, but I do believe the struggle is harder for more women.
Being a male and an armchair progressive I have a lifetime of things to acknowledge before seeing the light clearly. Racism is right at the top and sexism right there with it. I am guilty of preaching to those I have judged to be one or two steps behind in the evolutionary struggle. There is no better way to be reminded of the truth then to shut up and listen to someone who knows whereof she speaks. Thanks for the lesson.
Solnit writes about the important contribution that women have made to peace movements, and then she gives an example of women being persecuted in the workplace with the story of a "Lance Corporal" in the Marines who was female being raped and murdered by another Marine, who is male (and who is now arrested).
Does Solnit think it is a kind of progress for women to be in the Marines? Especially when these women are participating in a one-sided war of aggression?
CARIDAD: Nice tribute to your Mom (and related lessons along the way).
Interesting posts: NAMASTE, CHESSGAME, SUNYATA
Gee, accomplished author, it sucks to be you.
george w. bush, your comment is utterly brilliant and unbearabley funny. Or unbearably brilliant and utterly funny.
Another excellent exploration and exposition by Solnit.
I like to add letters to the name of "explaining men," the letters WFA--as in yes, that is Joe Blow WFA; shorthand for "World's Foremost Authority." And I suppose that last letter can also stand for another "term of endearment" that begins with "A."
Dear Ma'am Solnit (as you emphatically insist on putting your gender first),
What you're describing is probably general, rather than gendered, human condescension. And with society coming out of an era slanted towards men, men have been in dominance in the topmost, and therefore most condescending positions.
This article, though, makes you sound like a grudge-bearing, back-stabbing, bitterly competitive person. Not a nice combination. But maybe you don't go for «nice».
In "the out-and-out confrontational confidence" you complain about, beware that your article presents an instance of its own complaint.
After reading your article, I'm happy to say I haven't heard of your nine books - any of them - no matter how much self-confidence they provide you with. I started the article hoping for some humor, but was soon enough appalled at being attacked as part of a gender you apparently don't like much. Guess I'm part of the wrong half of humanity for you. Mea culpa.
Let me explain to you: your explanation of how bad it is to have explanations offered to you, and you contextually likening it to rape, is neither convincing nor endearing. Rather it explained to me why some women seem irrationally vengeful before any exchange has happened at all. So I guess thanks are in order. And I apologize for explaining this to you, if you already know this and I don't.
Try laughing at people's stupidities a little more, no matter what sex. I'm sure you'll enjoy it - better than writing rants of this sort.
One small point: I don't really believe there's any danger of you being silenced. However much you say you feel some threat of that. Rather you sound like an unpleasantly egocentric loudmouth, in a way that you may rest assured has nothing to do with gender.
In explaining so much about men, maybe you're stereotyping a bit? Just a little bit? A tiny little bit?
Don't get me wrong, I don't believe I can explain anything to you. I'm hoping, but like you I'm not holding my breath. In that we're equal. In being arrogant to each other, we're equally human together. At least we have something in common. Isn't that nice?
I bet you think there's two kinds of people in the world: those who divide everyone into two kinds, and those who don't. Guess which kind I am?
Oof. I made the mistake of reading the entire article. It was a wonderful idea for a piece (I'm all for skewering blowhards) that lapsed into rancid male-bashing. The scattershot bitterness is loathsome and cringe-inducing.
Women have been laughing at men for a long time, and for good reason. The idea that men choose to dominate conversations is an interesting one. It may be true (depending on the subject matter), but it's also often true that women won't step up in such situations. The exception is when the conversation is about relationships. In such situations, men typically play the opposite role - quiet and listening, and excluded from the conversation, for the most part.
The irony in this article was that this topic was supposed to be one that male felt comfortable with, but the female author was the real expert. Plus the whole class aspect (which is really the key, and less explored in this essay).
I don't offer any defense for men. I'd just say that sometimes the gender roles can switch. It can sometimes be difficult to generalize about these things (although not in this case).
One thought: men tend to talk about external things. Male jerks assume that women don't do that. You can find plenty of male jerks. You can find even more vapid conversations. One should never walk away from a conversation assessing one's effectiveness, though. You should walk away from a conversation thinking about what you learned.
Of course the article is absolutely true --- and more!
I remember a Manager of a real estate firm I worked for at one point, who would call us in individually -- majority females, of course --- and he'd babble on for about a half hour non-stop making very little sense, but staying on topic. There was nothing you could do but throw in a yes or no now and then. But he preferred no interruptions.
And, yes, husbands do it all the time. Not listening and explaining --- both. One example was my telling my husband one afternoon some bit of worldly news and the next afternoon he repeated it back to me as though it were news to me. I asked him where he had heard that report and he said he thought he heard it "on the radio" . . . !!!
And, yes, there are frightening and sinister situations out there which I'm sure every female meets up with. In many ways we are not far from our sisters in Afghanistan and Iraq --- especially under this administration.
Is there anything more suicidal than patriarchy?
I don't think so ---
Nor their predatory/disaster capitalism --
Sadly, we can't much laugh at this because it is so serious and so sad ---
Just a PS on this . . .
Over my decades in my town, we've had an excellent library run solely by females. About four years ago, there was a quiet change to a male heading up the library. Recently, I commented on this, saying to one of the titled women that "it was a betrayal of women" that they had made such an appointment. She responded that she had never thought about that --- !!! ???
Same with our local L&T department store ---
always run by women --- beautifully ---
And then up pops a manle Manager.
In other words, everywhere, women do the work but when it comes time to wear a flower or garner a title and authority and some power -- then a man gets the job!
Women are betrayed in this way ever day and evidently few think about it --- why?
That particular gender battle seems to be another case of Elite Infighting. Good! There's more than one way to win the class war!
I think this could be applied to Humans in general. Women do this to women and men do this to men.
and I think that Whites do it to Blacks etc.. and even Blacks do this to white etc..
I think we all have lessons to learn on LISTENING and being present more with others.
I will admit that I can be horrible. We are so eager to be heard we think we know so much. We have preconcieved notions of others that cause us to engage in bad actions with others.
WE need to STOP THINKING and listen.
I include myself in this lesson.
Namaste
What is important is that you have found you voice. Your books are read, your ideas are discussed. You meet these negative people and you don't lose anything. You stay true to yourself and you keep talking about your ideas.
Everyone meets resistance in their lives. Discrimination takes many forms. Nobody should feel that they are some kind of special victim or martyr based on who is picking on them or why. That is playing the victim which is always a losing hand.
Just keep writing your excellent books.