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artemis42As a proud rabble rouser who loves the art of conversation deeply, this article, (cut for the saving of friends lists) helped put a voice to the nagging feeling I've had every time I know way more about a particular subject than the person I'm speaking with, yet I find myself listening to absolutely ignorant bullshit spewed all over me as if it were fact, and I should just listen and smile and nod.... and I love how pissed some of these men become when I refuse to sop up their stupidity, and counter with facts, delivered in a reasonable tone.
Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn't Get in Their Way
By Rebecca Solnit
TomDispatch.com
Sunday 13 April 2008
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.
-------
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174918
Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn't Get in Their Way
By Rebecca Solnit
TomDispatch.com
Sunday 13 April 2008
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.
-------
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174918
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 07:54 pm (UTC)I also had (operative word: had) a friend who would never EVER ask questions when a subject came up with which he was unfamiliar, and would ALWAYS pretend to understand the subject even if he was completely clueless. Then he would go on to pretend a knowledge that he didn't have by turning around and taking the speakers words (frequently mine) and using them to lecture other people on the subject (Note: I explained. He lectured. Big difference.). I taught him everything he knew about vegetable gardening and he never picked up a single book on the subject, but I'm sure he's still telling people exactly what he knows that they don't to this day. And most likely in a way to make himself appear to be an expert, when he really doesn't know Thing Two about the subject.
I have always failed to understand this type of guy. Not all guys are like this. Especially ones in the younger geek community, thankfully. It always catches in my craw that they can, balls-out, confidently tell me I'm 100% wrong when I'm not, and that I've been conditioned to doubt myself and wonder if I could be wrong even when I know I'm not. It's not an easy issue to get past because it's such a horrible horrible conditioned response. Not that I want to become the fake know-it-all asshole, but I'd like to de-condition out the self-doubt.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 11:13 pm (UTC)I agree that there are exceptions as well as prime examples of the point, and hopefully as our conditioned notions of masculine/feminine roles continually get tossed out the window by the young(or not so young) and hip, men and women will get better at actually listening to one another, with respect.
It doesn't help that occasionally people use their knowledge as a bludgeon to make them feel better than others, or a coin to buy a kind of superiority, instead of asking questions and sharing information respectfully to enrich everyone around them, raising the discourse.
Mmm. psychology.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-16 03:40 am (UTC)Patriarchal male psychology has never made any sense to me. I'm not sure how, but I feel like I was born a feminist. I certainly didn't get it from my Dad.
I think one reason that I like online, written communication, is that you can't be silenced by people spouting off. It's a great equalizer. Everyone gets their say.