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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
challenging
informative
medium-paced
This book has not aged very well. Solnit seems so concerned with those who say she’s going too far in her critiques to let/make herself go far enough. There are glimmers of this in the text - caveats acknowledging the cis, white, middle classed privilege of her takes - but she plows right past these asides to luxuriate in exactly those takes.
Some of the poor aging of the book is no fault of her own - she has a cautious optimism for the future that is unfortunately depressing looking back over the last several years.
But other parts - like the men she chooses to trust (Louis CK & F Scott Fitzgerald both get warm shoutouts!!) are just plain under researched and require a benefit of the doubt and incredibly low bar for a certain type of white man and undermine her authority in a big way.
Some of the poor aging of the book is no fault of her own - she has a cautious optimism for the future that is unfortunately depressing looking back over the last several years.
But other parts - like the men she chooses to trust (Louis CK & F Scott Fitzgerald both get warm shoutouts!!) are just plain under researched and require a benefit of the doubt and incredibly low bar for a certain type of white man and undermine her authority in a big way.
Heavy. Smart. Necessary. So good. Honestly, not really sure that I can even articulate how great this was. So, as usual, leaving some of my favorite lines (which is difficult because I really just want to save all of the paragraphs).
5: Some people want kids but don't have them for various private reasons, medical, emotional, financial, professional; others don't want kids, and that's not anyone's business either. Just because the question can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked. The interviewer's question to me was indecent, because it presumed that women should have children, and that a woman's reproductive activities were naturally public business. More fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live.
6: Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row—spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences—even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.
8: I have done what I set out to do in my life, and what I set out to do was not what my mother or the interviewer presumed. I set out to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have great adventures. Men—romances, flings, and long-term relationships—have been some of those adventures, and so have remote deserts, arctic seas, mountaintops, uprisings and disasters, and the exploration of ideas, archives, records, and lives.
28-29: Masculinity is a great renunciation. The color pink is a small thing, but emotions, expressiveness, receptiveness, a whole array of possibilities get renounced by successful boys and men in everyday life, and often for me who inhabit masculine realms—sports, the military, the police, all-male workforces in construction or resource extraction—even more must be renounced to belong. Women get to keep a wider range of emotional possibility, though they are discouraged or stigmatized for expressing some of the fiercer ones, the feelings that aren't ladylike and deferential, and so much else—ambition, critical intelligence, independent analysis, dissent, anger. That is to say, silence is a pervasive force, distributed differently to different categories of people.
45: What we call politeness often means training that other people's comfort matters more. You should not disturb it, and you are in the wrong to do so, whatever is happening.
49: But such films are not described as boys' or men's films, but as films for all of us, while films with a similarly unequal amount of time allocated to female characters would inevitably be regarded as girls' or women's films. Men are not expected to engage in the emphatic extension of identifying with a different gender, just as white people are not asked, the way people of color are, to identify with other races. Being dominant means seeing yourself and not seeing others; privilege often limits or obstructs imagination.
52: The revolution is for free movement of everyone, everywhere. It is not finished; it is under way,; it has changed all the maps; they will change more.
53: [Woolf] describes the internalized instructions to women to be pleasant, gracious, flattering, that can silence a real voice and real thoughts: a real self. She indicates that there are ways to speak that are silence's white noise: the platitudes and reassurances, the politenesses and denials that lubricate a system that perpetuates silence. You speak for others, not for yourself.
54: Monroe can stand in for any woman, all women who silence, hide, disguise, or dismiss aspects of themselves and their self-expression in pursuing male pleasure, approval, comfort, reinforcement. This is not only erotic business: it's how a woman in the workplace or the classroom or on the street may have learned to navigate around male expectations, knowing if she is too confident, commanding, or self-contained she may be punished.
56: What gets called second-wave feminism is full of accounts of revelations about oppressions that were not previously named or described, and of the joy in recognizing even oppression: diagnosis is the first step toward cure and recovery. To speak of, to find definitions for what afflicted them brought women out of isolation and into power. The writings of the 1960s and 1970s are a literature of exploration, even revelation: people stumble forward, not sure what they are encountering, describing it awkwardly, reaching for new language for things that have not been described before, seeing the new undermine assumptions about the familiar, becoming people who belong to this new territory as much or more than to the old one, crossing over to a world being invented as they go.
57: [From Audre Lorde's "The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action"] My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
61: A master saying, "I want food" to a slave is giving an order, the slave uttering the same words is making an appeal; the power each holds has everything to do with what their words mean and do. Or cannot do.
62: Elsewhere [Peggy Orenstein, in her book Girls and Sex] notes, "Male and female college students who report recent porn use have been repeatedly found to be more likely than others to believe 'rape myths'; that only strangers commit sexual assault or that the victim 'asked for it'... female porn users are less likely than others to intervene when seeing another woman being threatened or assaulted and are slower to recognize when they're in danger themselves." That is pornography had become instructional to women as well as men, and the instructions can deafen them to the voices of women, even to their own voices.
63: Silence and shame are contagious; so are courage and speech.
65: There is always something unsaid and yet to be said, always someone struggling to find the words and the will to tell her story. Every day each of us invents the world and the self who meets that world, opens up or closes down space for others within that. Silence is forever being broken, and then like waves lapping over the footprints, the sandcastles and washed-up shells and seaweed, silence rises again.
66: It is work that involves the smallest everyday gestures and exchanges and the changing of laws, beliefs, politics, and culture at the national and international scale; often the latter arises from the cumulative impact of the former.
The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks. It's how we make the world.
71: I was given advice about how to modify or limit my own life—rather than an affirmation that this was wrong and should change.
It is, and still is, a sort of blame-the-victim framework, this insistence that women modify their presence in public space, or just give up and stay in, rather than that we transform public space (or men) so that women have the right to walk down the street unharrassed.
73: It's the breaking loose of cumulative tension, the exhaustion of patience, the work of rage at what has been and the hope that there can be, must be, something better.
79: As we argued after the Isla Vista mass shooting, perpetrators of violence against women aren't anomalies or exceptional. They're epidemic.
80: In other words, the world has changed enough to change the odds for victims and perpetrators. Women have voices now.
...
Rape is an assault not only on the victim's body but also on their rights, their humanity, and their voice. The right to say no, to self-determination, is taken away; shame perpetuates this silencing.
83: The histrionic response to California's "Yes Means Yes" campus consent law shows that some heterosexual men are alarmed that they will now have to negotiate their erotic and social interactions with human beings who have voices and rights backed up by law.
85: ... part of an unprecedented wave of men actively engaging with what's usually called "women's issues," though violence and discrimination against women are only women's issues because they're things done to women—mostly by men, so maybe they should always have been "men's issues."
88: To which I'd like to append a variation on Lewis's Law ("all comments on feminism justify feminism"): the plethora of men attacking women and anyone who stands up for women in order to prove that women are not under attack and feminism has no basis in reality are apparently unaware that they're handily proving the opposite.
91: Actual instances in which women have untruthfully claimed a rape occurred simply to malign some guy are extremely uncommon. The most reliable studies suggest that about 2 percent of rape reports are false, which means that 98 percent are real. Even that statistic doesn't mean that 2 percent are false rape accusations, because saying you were raped if you weren't isn't the same thing as claiming a specific person raped you when he didn't. ...
Here's what such accusations sound like in translation:
Her: There's an epidemic afflicting my people!
Him: I'm worried about this incredibly rare disease I heard about (but didn't research) that could possibly afflict a member of my tribe!
96: I care passionately about the inhabitability of our planet from an environmental perspective, but until it's fully inhabitable by women who can walk freely down the street without the constant fear of trouble and danger, we will labor under practical and psychological burdens that impair our full powers.
102: There's entitlement or authoritarianism in all violence. We say a murderer took another's life. To takeis to take possession of. It's to steal, to assume the privilege of an owner, to dispose of someone else's life itself as though it were yours to do so. It never is.
118: Not only were men not the sole providers of food,t hey weren't even the sole providers of meat. Which is not to say that men didn't bring home meat or that they weren't important. IT's just that everyone brought home food, even kids. It was all important.
122: There are givens in our biology, and there are particularly common patterns in our past. But we are not necessarily who we once were, and who we once were is not necessarily what the "just-so" stories say. The present is not at all like the past recounted in those just-so stories, but neither was the past. We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.
126: Any individual woman is liable to be treated as a walking referendum on women—are we all emotional, scheming, math-averse?—while men are relatively free of being thus measured. ... To be free of discrimination is to be allowed to be an individual assessed on the merits. but this becomes a form of freedom that can allow important data to fall through the cracks. For example, the thing that until very recently was almost never said about modern mass shootings is that almost all of them have been by men, and most of the men have been white.
136: Scanning the list... I was reminded that though it's hard to be a woman it's harder in many ways to be a man, that gender that's supposed to be incessantly defended and demonstrated through acts of manliness. I look at that list and all unbidden the thought arose, No wonder there are so many mass murders. Which are the extreme expression of being a man when the job is framed this way, though, happily, many men have more graceful, empathic ways of being in the world.
138: As Jacqueline Rose noted recently in the London Review of Books, "Patriarchy thrives by encouraging women to feel contempt for themselves.
141: Is it a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction. Well, actually, no it isn't, but who doesn't love riffing on Jane Austen and her famous opening sentence? The answer is: lots of people, because we're all different and some of us haven't even read Pride and Prejudice dozens of times, but the main point is that I've been performing interesting experiments in proffering my opinions and finding that some of the people out there, particularly men, respond on the grounds that my opinion is wrong, while theirs is right because they are convinced that their opinion is a fact, while mine is a delusion. Sometimes they also seem to think that they are in charge, of me as well of facts.
It isn't a fact universally acknowledged that a person who mistakes his opinions for facts may also mistake himself for God. This can happen if he's been insufficiently exposed to the fact that there are also other people who have other experiences, and they too were created equal, with certain inalienable rights, and that consciousnesses thing that is so interesting and troubling is also going on inside these other people's head.s This is a problem straight white men suffer from especially, because the Western world has held up a mirror to them for so long—and turns compliant women into mirrors reflecting them back twice life size, Virginia Woolf noted. ... I coined a term a while ago, privelobliviousness, to try to describe the way that being the advantaged one, the represented one, often means being the one who doesn't need to be aware and, often, isn't.
142: This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, or listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. ... Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and comic books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination.
143: But seriously, you know who can't take a joke? White guys. Not if it implicates them and their universe, and when you see the rage or get the threats, you're seeing people who really expected to get their own way and be told they're wonderful all through the days.
145: The omniprescence of men raping female children as a literary subject... along with real-life accounts... can have the cumulative effect of reminding women that we spend a lot of our lives quietly, strategically trying not to get raped, which takes a huge toll on our lives and affects our sense of self.
147: Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams wrote recently that we live in a matriarchy because "access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman." Meaning that you don't get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you, which, if we say it without any gender pronouns, sound completely reasonable. You don't get to share some's sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you, and that's not a form of oppression either. You probably learned that in kindergarten.
But if you assume that sex with a female body is a right that heterosexual men have, then women are just these crazy illegitimate gatekeepers always trying to get in between you and your rights. Which means you have failed to recognize that women are people...
153: The antiabortion narrative is often about depraved women having sex for the hell of it and devil take the consequences; the fact that they cannot be having this risk-of-pregnancy type sex in the absence of men is the freaky part of it, a freakiness that is covered up by its familiarity.
154: Seriously, we know why men are absented from these narratives: it absolves them from responsibility for pregnancies, including the unfortunate and accidental variety, and then it absolves them from producing that phenomenon for which so many poor women have been excoriated for so long: fatherless children. The fathers of the fatherless are legion.
You can imagine a parallel universe of non-misogyny, in which men are told that they carry around this dangerous stuff that can blow a woman up into nine months of pregnancy and the production of other human beings, and that they are irresponsible, immoral, and lacking something or other—what is it that women or lacking?—when they go around putting that stuff in impregnatable people without consent, planning, or care for long-term consequences.
156: Language matters. We've had a big struggle over the language about rape so that people would stop blaming victims. The epithet that put it concisely is: rapists cause rape. Not what women wear or consume, where they go, and the rest, because when you regard women as at fault you enter into another one of our anti-detective novels or another chapter of the mystery of the missing protagonist. Rape is a willful act: the actor is a rapist.And yet you'd think that young women on college campuses in particular were raping themselves, so absent have young men on campuses been from the mystifictional narratives. Men are abstracted into a sort of weather, an ambient natural force, an inevitability that cannot be governed or held accountable. Individual men disappear in this narrative, and rape, assault, pregnancy just become weather conditions to which women have to adapt. If those things happen to them, the failure is theirs.
157: Maybe the CDC should jump to the chase and issue warnings about men. After all, men are the main source of violence against women (and, for that matter, the main source of violence against men). Imagine the language! "Use of a man may result in pregnancy or injury; men should be used with caution. Assess each man carefully for potential risks. BE careful about using men with alcohol."
164: "You knew I was a proud unpleasant girl when you married me,"...
167: It would propose that kings should not be deposed. This film postulates the opposite: the king has fallen... and everything is fine.
5: Some people want kids but don't have them for various private reasons, medical, emotional, financial, professional; others don't want kids, and that's not anyone's business either. Just because the question can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked. The interviewer's question to me was indecent, because it presumed that women should have children, and that a woman's reproductive activities were naturally public business. More fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live.
6: Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row—spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences—even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.
8: I have done what I set out to do in my life, and what I set out to do was not what my mother or the interviewer presumed. I set out to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have great adventures. Men—romances, flings, and long-term relationships—have been some of those adventures, and so have remote deserts, arctic seas, mountaintops, uprisings and disasters, and the exploration of ideas, archives, records, and lives.
28-29: Masculinity is a great renunciation. The color pink is a small thing, but emotions, expressiveness, receptiveness, a whole array of possibilities get renounced by successful boys and men in everyday life, and often for me who inhabit masculine realms—sports, the military, the police, all-male workforces in construction or resource extraction—even more must be renounced to belong. Women get to keep a wider range of emotional possibility, though they are discouraged or stigmatized for expressing some of the fiercer ones, the feelings that aren't ladylike and deferential, and so much else—ambition, critical intelligence, independent analysis, dissent, anger. That is to say, silence is a pervasive force, distributed differently to different categories of people.
45: What we call politeness often means training that other people's comfort matters more. You should not disturb it, and you are in the wrong to do so, whatever is happening.
49: But such films are not described as boys' or men's films, but as films for all of us, while films with a similarly unequal amount of time allocated to female characters would inevitably be regarded as girls' or women's films. Men are not expected to engage in the emphatic extension of identifying with a different gender, just as white people are not asked, the way people of color are, to identify with other races. Being dominant means seeing yourself and not seeing others; privilege often limits or obstructs imagination.
52: The revolution is for free movement of everyone, everywhere. It is not finished; it is under way,; it has changed all the maps; they will change more.
53: [Woolf] describes the internalized instructions to women to be pleasant, gracious, flattering, that can silence a real voice and real thoughts: a real self. She indicates that there are ways to speak that are silence's white noise: the platitudes and reassurances, the politenesses and denials that lubricate a system that perpetuates silence. You speak for others, not for yourself.
54: Monroe can stand in for any woman, all women who silence, hide, disguise, or dismiss aspects of themselves and their self-expression in pursuing male pleasure, approval, comfort, reinforcement. This is not only erotic business: it's how a woman in the workplace or the classroom or on the street may have learned to navigate around male expectations, knowing if she is too confident, commanding, or self-contained she may be punished.
56: What gets called second-wave feminism is full of accounts of revelations about oppressions that were not previously named or described, and of the joy in recognizing even oppression: diagnosis is the first step toward cure and recovery. To speak of, to find definitions for what afflicted them brought women out of isolation and into power. The writings of the 1960s and 1970s are a literature of exploration, even revelation: people stumble forward, not sure what they are encountering, describing it awkwardly, reaching for new language for things that have not been described before, seeing the new undermine assumptions about the familiar, becoming people who belong to this new territory as much or more than to the old one, crossing over to a world being invented as they go.
57: [From Audre Lorde's "The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action"] My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
61: A master saying, "I want food" to a slave is giving an order, the slave uttering the same words is making an appeal; the power each holds has everything to do with what their words mean and do. Or cannot do.
62: Elsewhere [Peggy Orenstein, in her book Girls and Sex] notes, "Male and female college students who report recent porn use have been repeatedly found to be more likely than others to believe 'rape myths'; that only strangers commit sexual assault or that the victim 'asked for it'... female porn users are less likely than others to intervene when seeing another woman being threatened or assaulted and are slower to recognize when they're in danger themselves." That is pornography had become instructional to women as well as men, and the instructions can deafen them to the voices of women, even to their own voices.
63: Silence and shame are contagious; so are courage and speech.
65: There is always something unsaid and yet to be said, always someone struggling to find the words and the will to tell her story. Every day each of us invents the world and the self who meets that world, opens up or closes down space for others within that. Silence is forever being broken, and then like waves lapping over the footprints, the sandcastles and washed-up shells and seaweed, silence rises again.
66: It is work that involves the smallest everyday gestures and exchanges and the changing of laws, beliefs, politics, and culture at the national and international scale; often the latter arises from the cumulative impact of the former.
The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks. It's how we make the world.
71: I was given advice about how to modify or limit my own life—rather than an affirmation that this was wrong and should change.
It is, and still is, a sort of blame-the-victim framework, this insistence that women modify their presence in public space, or just give up and stay in, rather than that we transform public space (or men) so that women have the right to walk down the street unharrassed.
73: It's the breaking loose of cumulative tension, the exhaustion of patience, the work of rage at what has been and the hope that there can be, must be, something better.
79: As we argued after the Isla Vista mass shooting, perpetrators of violence against women aren't anomalies or exceptional. They're epidemic.
80: In other words, the world has changed enough to change the odds for victims and perpetrators. Women have voices now.
...
Rape is an assault not only on the victim's body but also on their rights, their humanity, and their voice. The right to say no, to self-determination, is taken away; shame perpetuates this silencing.
83: The histrionic response to California's "Yes Means Yes" campus consent law shows that some heterosexual men are alarmed that they will now have to negotiate their erotic and social interactions with human beings who have voices and rights backed up by law.
85: ... part of an unprecedented wave of men actively engaging with what's usually called "women's issues," though violence and discrimination against women are only women's issues because they're things done to women—mostly by men, so maybe they should always have been "men's issues."
88: To which I'd like to append a variation on Lewis's Law ("all comments on feminism justify feminism"): the plethora of men attacking women and anyone who stands up for women in order to prove that women are not under attack and feminism has no basis in reality are apparently unaware that they're handily proving the opposite.
91: Actual instances in which women have untruthfully claimed a rape occurred simply to malign some guy are extremely uncommon. The most reliable studies suggest that about 2 percent of rape reports are false, which means that 98 percent are real. Even that statistic doesn't mean that 2 percent are false rape accusations, because saying you were raped if you weren't isn't the same thing as claiming a specific person raped you when he didn't. ...
Here's what such accusations sound like in translation:
Her: There's an epidemic afflicting my people!
Him: I'm worried about this incredibly rare disease I heard about (but didn't research) that could possibly afflict a member of my tribe!
96: I care passionately about the inhabitability of our planet from an environmental perspective, but until it's fully inhabitable by women who can walk freely down the street without the constant fear of trouble and danger, we will labor under practical and psychological burdens that impair our full powers.
102: There's entitlement or authoritarianism in all violence. We say a murderer took another's life. To takeis to take possession of. It's to steal, to assume the privilege of an owner, to dispose of someone else's life itself as though it were yours to do so. It never is.
118: Not only were men not the sole providers of food,t hey weren't even the sole providers of meat. Which is not to say that men didn't bring home meat or that they weren't important. IT's just that everyone brought home food, even kids. It was all important.
122: There are givens in our biology, and there are particularly common patterns in our past. But we are not necessarily who we once were, and who we once were is not necessarily what the "just-so" stories say. The present is not at all like the past recounted in those just-so stories, but neither was the past. We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.
126: Any individual woman is liable to be treated as a walking referendum on women—are we all emotional, scheming, math-averse?—while men are relatively free of being thus measured. ... To be free of discrimination is to be allowed to be an individual assessed on the merits. but this becomes a form of freedom that can allow important data to fall through the cracks. For example, the thing that until very recently was almost never said about modern mass shootings is that almost all of them have been by men, and most of the men have been white.
136: Scanning the list... I was reminded that though it's hard to be a woman it's harder in many ways to be a man, that gender that's supposed to be incessantly defended and demonstrated through acts of manliness. I look at that list and all unbidden the thought arose, No wonder there are so many mass murders. Which are the extreme expression of being a man when the job is framed this way, though, happily, many men have more graceful, empathic ways of being in the world.
138: As Jacqueline Rose noted recently in the London Review of Books, "Patriarchy thrives by encouraging women to feel contempt for themselves.
141: Is it a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction. Well, actually, no it isn't, but who doesn't love riffing on Jane Austen and her famous opening sentence? The answer is: lots of people, because we're all different and some of us haven't even read Pride and Prejudice dozens of times, but the main point is that I've been performing interesting experiments in proffering my opinions and finding that some of the people out there, particularly men, respond on the grounds that my opinion is wrong, while theirs is right because they are convinced that their opinion is a fact, while mine is a delusion. Sometimes they also seem to think that they are in charge, of me as well of facts.
It isn't a fact universally acknowledged that a person who mistakes his opinions for facts may also mistake himself for God. This can happen if he's been insufficiently exposed to the fact that there are also other people who have other experiences, and they too were created equal, with certain inalienable rights, and that consciousnesses thing that is so interesting and troubling is also going on inside these other people's head.s This is a problem straight white men suffer from especially, because the Western world has held up a mirror to them for so long—and turns compliant women into mirrors reflecting them back twice life size, Virginia Woolf noted. ... I coined a term a while ago, privelobliviousness, to try to describe the way that being the advantaged one, the represented one, often means being the one who doesn't need to be aware and, often, isn't.
142: This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, or listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. ... Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and comic books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination.
143: But seriously, you know who can't take a joke? White guys. Not if it implicates them and their universe, and when you see the rage or get the threats, you're seeing people who really expected to get their own way and be told they're wonderful all through the days.
145: The omniprescence of men raping female children as a literary subject... along with real-life accounts... can have the cumulative effect of reminding women that we spend a lot of our lives quietly, strategically trying not to get raped, which takes a huge toll on our lives and affects our sense of self.
147: Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams wrote recently that we live in a matriarchy because "access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman." Meaning that you don't get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you, which, if we say it without any gender pronouns, sound completely reasonable. You don't get to share some's sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you, and that's not a form of oppression either. You probably learned that in kindergarten.
But if you assume that sex with a female body is a right that heterosexual men have, then women are just these crazy illegitimate gatekeepers always trying to get in between you and your rights. Which means you have failed to recognize that women are people...
153: The antiabortion narrative is often about depraved women having sex for the hell of it and devil take the consequences; the fact that they cannot be having this risk-of-pregnancy type sex in the absence of men is the freaky part of it, a freakiness that is covered up by its familiarity.
154: Seriously, we know why men are absented from these narratives: it absolves them from responsibility for pregnancies, including the unfortunate and accidental variety, and then it absolves them from producing that phenomenon for which so many poor women have been excoriated for so long: fatherless children. The fathers of the fatherless are legion.
You can imagine a parallel universe of non-misogyny, in which men are told that they carry around this dangerous stuff that can blow a woman up into nine months of pregnancy and the production of other human beings, and that they are irresponsible, immoral, and lacking something or other—what is it that women or lacking?—when they go around putting that stuff in impregnatable people without consent, planning, or care for long-term consequences.
156: Language matters. We've had a big struggle over the language about rape so that people would stop blaming victims. The epithet that put it concisely is: rapists cause rape. Not what women wear or consume, where they go, and the rest, because when you regard women as at fault you enter into another one of our anti-detective novels or another chapter of the mystery of the missing protagonist. Rape is a willful act: the actor is a rapist.And yet you'd think that young women on college campuses in particular were raping themselves, so absent have young men on campuses been from the mystifictional narratives. Men are abstracted into a sort of weather, an ambient natural force, an inevitability that cannot be governed or held accountable. Individual men disappear in this narrative, and rape, assault, pregnancy just become weather conditions to which women have to adapt. If those things happen to them, the failure is theirs.
157: Maybe the CDC should jump to the chase and issue warnings about men. After all, men are the main source of violence against women (and, for that matter, the main source of violence against men). Imagine the language! "Use of a man may result in pregnancy or injury; men should be used with caution. Assess each man carefully for potential risks. BE careful about using men with alcohol."
164: "You knew I was a proud unpleasant girl when you married me,"...
167: It would propose that kings should not be deposed. This film postulates the opposite: the king has fallen... and everything is fine.
"There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question."
Rebecca Solnit's The Mother of All Questions (Further Feminisms) is an incredibly smart and sharply written collection of essays exploring the rampant misogyny and sexism in Western society and how, at around the time the essays were written (2014-2016), the Western world was starting to see radical changes in the form of women protesting and raising awareness of their everyday battles with the patriarchy.
The first grouping of essays talk about silence as a major force in women's oppression. The essay "A Short History of Silence" is probably one of the best essays on feminism I've ever read. It explores the idea that to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized, and this silencing is central to women's history. The silencing takes different forms, and even goes so far as to discuss male silencing (how patriarchy also requires silencing of certain aspects of a man's humanity). This silence is constantly being broken, but it requires incessant work to completely break free. Other remarkable essays include "Cassandra Among The Creeps" (laying out the pattern of targeting a woman's credibility to silence her and have her truths dismissed) and "The Short Happy Recent History of the Rape Joke" (the rise of jokes that transfer the shame from the victim to the perpetrator).
In the second set of essays, Rebecca Solnit writes about calling out myths regarding the origins of gender roles, blurring categories in which men and women are pigeonholed in, not allowing for the erasure of the woman, and celebrating their lives and stories, which are breaking through the silence imposed on them. My personal favorite is the "The Case of the Missing Perpetrator", in which she highlights the ways in which men are taken out of the narrative when it comes to violence against women and assault, instead finding other things to blame (ex. women should avoid getting drunk because it may lead to unwanted pregnancy, according to an infographic from the CDC about the dangers of drinking for women, as if it's the alcohol that's causing the unwanted pregnancy/violence/assault).
The main draw for me was Solnit's eloquence- to be able to be succinct, cutting, and clear in the way she expresses her thoughts on subjects that are absolutely enraging if you think about it something I greatly admired (although it may be imperative to point out that she is a highly intelligent white woman, which affords her some degree of privilege that allows her to write thinkpieces like this).
Highly, highly recommend especially for people looking for more feminist texts.
Rebecca Solnit's The Mother of All Questions (Further Feminisms) is an incredibly smart and sharply written collection of essays exploring the rampant misogyny and sexism in Western society and how, at around the time the essays were written (2014-2016), the Western world was starting to see radical changes in the form of women protesting and raising awareness of their everyday battles with the patriarchy.
The first grouping of essays talk about silence as a major force in women's oppression. The essay "A Short History of Silence" is probably one of the best essays on feminism I've ever read. It explores the idea that to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized, and this silencing is central to women's history. The silencing takes different forms, and even goes so far as to discuss male silencing (how patriarchy also requires silencing of certain aspects of a man's humanity). This silence is constantly being broken, but it requires incessant work to completely break free. Other remarkable essays include "Cassandra Among The Creeps" (laying out the pattern of targeting a woman's credibility to silence her and have her truths dismissed) and "The Short Happy Recent History of the Rape Joke" (the rise of jokes that transfer the shame from the victim to the perpetrator).
In the second set of essays, Rebecca Solnit writes about calling out myths regarding the origins of gender roles, blurring categories in which men and women are pigeonholed in, not allowing for the erasure of the woman, and celebrating their lives and stories, which are breaking through the silence imposed on them. My personal favorite is the "The Case of the Missing Perpetrator", in which she highlights the ways in which men are taken out of the narrative when it comes to violence against women and assault, instead finding other things to blame (ex. women should avoid getting drunk because it may lead to unwanted pregnancy, according to an infographic from the CDC about the dangers of drinking for women, as if it's the alcohol that's causing the unwanted pregnancy/violence/assault).
The main draw for me was Solnit's eloquence- to be able to be succinct, cutting, and clear in the way she expresses her thoughts on subjects that are absolutely enraging if you think about it something I greatly admired (although it may be imperative to point out that she is a highly intelligent white woman, which affords her some degree of privilege that allows her to write thinkpieces like this).
Highly, highly recommend especially for people looking for more feminist texts.
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
I love Rebecca Solnit's thinking and writing.
The clarity in which she formulates her thoughts is a pleasure to read, it opens portals in my brain that maybe were already there, but I hadn't opened that far yet.
I also find her to be very funny.
The mother of all Questions is a book of essays.
I would love to quote the whole book, but I'll keep it at just some parts I particularly loved.
"I have done what I set out to do in life, and what I set out to do was not what my mother or the interviewer presumed. I set out to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have great adventures"
It is an answer to the question an interviewer asked.
If her abusive father was the reason she failed to find a life partner.
It is one of those questions of which she states that it is one that
"just because it can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked"
The same goes for the forever boring question
"wouldn't a woman be happier with kids?"
"such questions seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51 percent of the human species who are as diverse in their wants and as mysterious in their desires as the other 49 percent, only Woman, who must marry, must bread, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator of the species."
Further in there is an essay about Silence, one that spoke to me a lot.
I too believed that silence is golden, that a quiet person might be a stronger one, the mistake being that there is a difference between quiet and silence.
"Silence is the ocean of the unsaid, the unspeakable, the repressed, the unheard."
"The tranquillity of a quiet place, of quieting once own mind, of a retreat from words and bustle, is acoustically the same as silence, but psychically and politically something entirely different"
Then there is the Essay on Hunter gatherers.
The boring never ending argument used the most in discussions about race or tradition.
"We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy, she still is"
There are so so many good insights in this book.
So I recommend you read it for yourself, listen and learn, and by all means, form your own opinions.
The clarity in which she formulates her thoughts is a pleasure to read, it opens portals in my brain that maybe were already there, but I hadn't opened that far yet.
I also find her to be very funny.
The mother of all Questions is a book of essays.
I would love to quote the whole book, but I'll keep it at just some parts I particularly loved.
"I have done what I set out to do in life, and what I set out to do was not what my mother or the interviewer presumed. I set out to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have great adventures"
It is an answer to the question an interviewer asked.
If her abusive father was the reason she failed to find a life partner.
It is one of those questions of which she states that it is one that
"just because it can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked"
The same goes for the forever boring question
"wouldn't a woman be happier with kids?"
"such questions seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51 percent of the human species who are as diverse in their wants and as mysterious in their desires as the other 49 percent, only Woman, who must marry, must bread, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator of the species."
Further in there is an essay about Silence, one that spoke to me a lot.
I too believed that silence is golden, that a quiet person might be a stronger one, the mistake being that there is a difference between quiet and silence.
"Silence is the ocean of the unsaid, the unspeakable, the repressed, the unheard."
"The tranquillity of a quiet place, of quieting once own mind, of a retreat from words and bustle, is acoustically the same as silence, but psychically and politically something entirely different"
Then there is the Essay on Hunter gatherers.
The boring never ending argument used the most in discussions about race or tradition.
"We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy, she still is"
There are so so many good insights in this book.
So I recommend you read it for yourself, listen and learn, and by all means, form your own opinions.
challenging
informative
reflective
fast-paced
informative
challenging
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Rebecca Solnit always succeeds in making me mad with facts. This essay collection is great. Important even. I’ve had a relatively easy and privileged life here in Finland but still many of these issues effect me daily. How can that be?!? And some have the nerve to say we don’t need feminism and women are already equal 😫 Lol, this has me worked up 😅😎