Feminist Peace Network

After a badly needed week off, the FPN blog is back and I will be doing my best to catch up with the backlog of posts throughout the week. As I’ve been going through the pile, I’ve been wondering where to begin, but then I came across Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things To Me” and knew instantly that this would be the topic with which to re-enter the fray.

As Solnit quite accurately says, there is not a woman who has not been here, sometimes professionally, always in our personal lives. It is the silencing that Tillie Olsen so painstakingly documented, and the damage has been and is truly profound. What Solnit is saying touches me deeply because I came to my work in raising awareness about violence against women through my exploration of the problems of verbal abuse. And invisibilizing and diminishing women’s voices is a blatant kind of verbal abuse. In fact, it is a critical part of the impunity of violence against women because if what women do and say has no value, then there is no need to protect and value their lives.

Below are snippets from Solnit’s essay, but it must be said that this should be required reading in its entirety for men and women alike.

“(T)he 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

Filed under: Uncategorized, Sheroes, Misogyny