Men
Explain Things to Me
Rebecca
Solnit (2014, Haymarket Books)
The
title essay of Rebecca Solnit's collection, Men
Explain Things To Me, has been circulating on the Internet since
2008. It did not originate the term 'mansplaining', but it might well
serve as the index case. The essay describes a 2003 conversation with
an arrogant man who held forth to her about a book which not only had
he not read, but which she had actually written. If this could happen
to Solnit, who by that time was the author of several books, how much
more can women be silenced who face the loss of livelihood or life if
they insist on speaking up.
Mind
you, Solnit was not complaining about men explaining things when they
actually know more about a subject than she does, just the ones who
talk over her about things they know nothing of. She's a little leery
of the broad net that 'mansplaining' seems to cast, because she knows
plenty of modest men, and some patronizing women, too. But the
overall pattern describes something real: a power differential that's
expressed on a continuum from social awkwardness to economic
injustice to rape and violence. Solnit's project in this collection
of essays is to make the connections between these things clear.
This
is inevitably a historical project, at least to some degree, but the
treatment is deft and light-handed (or as much so as it can be, when
the material is so outrageous.) The mothers of disappeared Argentines
who protested in the Plaza de Mayo; the hotel maid who accused
Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault; and Anita Hill, who told
the Senate Judiciary Committee about Clarence Thomas's behavior as
her boss, all made important and consequential statements in the
world, against great odds. They all faced the near certainty of being
told that they were delusional. Imagine how many women before them
never even had a chance to speak or be heard, let alone to be
believed.
The
internet, in addition to recirculating Solnit's original TomDispatch
piece, has continued to be the venue for women's struggles to be
heard and believed. Google 'academic mansplaining', and you'll come
to a Tumblr archive with a thousand such stories. Feminist bloggers
are routinely threatened with violence, sometimes to the point of
deciding to cancel public appearances. After the 2014 mass shooting
in Isla Vista, California, the Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen appeared
half a million times in two days. Five hundred thousand people said
things like this: "Sure #NotAllMen are misogynists and rapists.
That's not the point. The point is that #YesAllWomen live in fear of
the ones that are." Innocent men feeling wrongly accused may not
be the very first thing we should be concerned about.
Solnit's
essay on Virginia Woolf is in a different vein, a little meditation
on epistemology. To plan, or to remember, we rely on things we can't
possibly know, and it's well to be aware of it. "To me, the
grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next,
and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.
And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated
individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though
how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable."
I
think she's right about that; if pressed to predict, I'd say that
Solnit's writing moves things in the right direction.
Any
Good Books, emailed
June
2016
Posts
