***** Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by Rebecca Solnit (2020)
Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by Rebecca Solnit (2020)
Looking Glass House
Chapter 1
In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other. And I was watching myself to see if I could read in the mirror what I could be and whether I was good enough and whether all the things I’d been told about myself were true.
To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once. “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live (3).
Foghorn and Gospel
Chapter 3
I was poor. I scrounged furniture off the street and clothes from thrift stores and housewares from rummage sales; we valued old things then, and aesthetically this method suited me. Most of what I owned was older than me, and I relished that; every object was an anchor to the past. I craved a sense of time, history, mortality, depth, texture that had been absent from my upbringing in a newly built suburban edge of the Bay Area with parents whose immigrant urban backgrounds left them with little sense of lineage, few stories, no heirlooms. My work as a writer was sometimes going to be about restoring lost and forgotten pasts to Western places (33).
I was passing through poverty and I would gradually return to financial ease; in poverty too I was a new stranger but I spent enough years there to grasp a little of how it works and what it does. In another sense poverty as a poverty of the spirit had been all around me since birth. My parents had ingested a deep sense of lack during the Great Depression or out of whatever deprivations their childhoods contained, and they were not interested in sharing their middle-class comfort. I did not trust that they would have bailed me out if something truly horrific had prostrated me, and I was never willing to fall apart enough to find out, so I was not slumming quite the way that a lot of young white people around me were, who could opt out of poverty as easily as they had opted into it. I left it too, but slowly, by my own labors. And as I’d understand better later, by the advantages that had come with my color and my background that made me feel fit, to myself and in the eyes of others, for an education and white-collar work.
I read books standing up in bookstores or got them from libraries or searched for months or years to find the cheapest used copy; I listened to music on the radio and made cassette tapes of albums at friends’ houses; I eyed things and was spurred and pricked and bothered by the promise things make, that this pair of boots or that shirt will make you who you need or want to be, that what is incomplete in you is a hole that can be stuffed with stuff, that the things you have are eclipsed by the things you want, that wanting can be cured by having, beyond having what is essential.
I always wanted something more, something else, and if I got it I wanted the next thing, and there was always something to want. Craving gnawed at me. I wanted things so badly, with a desire that was so sharp it gouged me, and the process of wanting often took up far more time and imaginative space than the actual person, place, or thing, or the imaginary thing possessed more power than the real one. And then once I had something the craving died down-it was the craving that was so alive-and then that craving appeared again, gaping and reaching after the next thing. Of course with lovers and boyfriends, uncertainty could keep craving alive (and with the more reliable and kinder men, that metamorphosed into that other kind of attachment we call love).
More than anything I wanted transformation not of my nature but of my condition. I didn’t have much of a vision of where I wanted to go, but I knew I wanted to distance myself from where I had come from. Perhaps that was not so much a matter of craving as its opposite, aversion and escape, and perhaps it was why walking was so important to me: it felt like I was getting somewhere.
I did have one early vision of what a life worth living could look like. When I read her diaries in my mid-teens, Anaïs Nin’s evocations of her Parisian life between the wars gave me images of spaces that could harbor conversational depths and exploration, of lives that intertwined and cross-pollinated, of the warmth of being wrapped up in passionate friendships. Many years later, after a dinner party of friends gathered around the chrome- legged linoleum table in my kitchen, the radical historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, one of the guests, and I agreed that this was what we had hungered for in our lonely youths. (And many years later I was dismayed to find out that Nin had left her banker husband out of the published diaries, so she presented herself as more hand-to-mouth bohemian than she really was (34-6).)
Life During Wartime
Chapter 1
A friend gave me a desk not long after I moved into the apartment, a woman’s small writing desk or vanity, the one I am writing on now. It’s a dainty Victorian piece of furniture, with four narrow drawers, two on each side and a broader central drawer above the bay in which the sitter’s legs go, and various kinds of ornamentation-doweled legs, each with a knob like a knee, knobby ornaments, scallops on the bottom of the drawers, drawer pulls like tassels or teardrops.
There are two pairs of legs on the front, two on the back, set beneath the side drawers. Despite all the frills, the old desk is fundamentally sturdy, an eight-legged beast of burden whose back has carried many things over the decades, or two beasts of burden side by side, yoked together by the desktop. The desk has moved with me three times. It’s the surface on which I’ve written millions of words: more than twenty books, reviews, essays, love letters, several thousand emails to my friend Tina during the years of our near-daily epistolary exchange, a few hundred thousand other emails, some eulogies and obituaries, including those of both of my parents, a desk at which I did the homework of a student and then a teacher, a portal onto the world and my platform for reaching out and for diving inward.
A year or so before she gave me the desk, my friend was stabbed fifteen times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him. She almost bled to death; she had emergency transfusions; she was left with long scars all over her body, which I saw then without response because whatever capacity to feel had been muffled, maybe when I got habituated to violence at home, maybe because it was something we were supposed to take in stride and be nonchalant about, back when few of us had language to talk about such violence or an audience ready to listen.
She survived; she was blamed for what happened as victims often were then; there were no legal consequences for the would-be murderer; she moved far from where it happened; she worked for a single mother who was evicted, and who gave her the desk in lieu of wages; and then she gave it to me. She moved on and we lost touch for many years, and then reestablished it, and she told me the full story, a story that could make your heart catch fire and the world freeze over.
Someone tried to silence her. Then she gave me a platform for my voice. Now I wonder if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing. All of it has literally arisen from that foundation that is the desktop (43-4).
The writer Bill deBuys began a book with the sentence “A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing one thing, one phenomenon or essence, so clearly and fully that the light of its understanding illuminates the rest of life.” And then he begins with the pine desk at which he’s writing and travels from a description of the grain and color of the wood to trees and forests and keeps going into love, loss, epiphanies of place. It’s a lovely journey. I can imagine many forests into which I’d rather go from my own desk, which was made of trees that must have been cut down before my grandmothers were born, than into the violence against my gender.
But the desk I sit at is a desk given to me by a woman who a man tried to murder, and it seems time to tell what it meant to me to grow up in a society in which many preferred people like me to be dead or silent and how I got a voice and how it eventually came time to use that voice-that voice that was most articulate when I was alone at the desk speaking through my fingers, silently-to try to tell the stories that had gone untold.
Memoirs at their most conventional are stories of overcoming, arcs of eventual triumph, personal problems to be taken care of by personal evolution and resolve. That a lot of men wanted and still want to harm women, especially young women, that a lot of people relished that harm, and a lot more dismissed it, impacted me in profoundly personal ways but the cure for it wasn’t personal. There was no adjustment I could make in my psyche or my life that would make this problem acceptable or nonexistent, and there was nowhere to go to leave it behind.
The problems were embedded in the society and maybe the world in which I found myself, and the work to survive it was also work to understand it and eventually work to transform it for everyone, not for myself alone. There were, however, ways of breaking the silence that was part of the affliction, and that was rebellion, and a coming to life, and a coming into power to tell stories, my own and others’. A forest of stories rather than trees and the writing a charting of some paths through it (46-7).
Chapter 2
Feminists of an earlier era insisted that rape is about power, not erotic pleasure, though there are men for whom their own power or a woman’s powerlessness is the most erotic thing imaginable. For some women too, so we learn that our helplessness and peril is erotic, and accept or reject or struggle with the sense of self and stories that come with them. Jacqueline Rose wrote in 2018, “Sexual harassment is the great male performative, the act through which a man aims to convince his target not only that he is the one with the power-which is true-but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing (52).”
One thing that makes people crazy is being told that the experiences they have did not actually happen, that the circumstances that hem them in are imaginary, that the problems are all in their head, and that if they are distressed it is a sign of their failure, when success would be to shut up or to cease to know what they know. Out of this unbearable predicament come the rebels who choose failure and risk and the prisoners who choose compliance (53).
Chapter 3
I had never been safe, but I think some of the horror that hit me was because for a few years I had thought that maybe I could be, that male violence had been contained in the home I grew up in, and so I could leave it behind. I wrote once that I grew up in an inside-out world where everywhere but the house was safe, and everyplace else had seemed safe enough as a child in a subdivision on the edge of the country, where I roamed freely into town or into the hills that were both right out the door. I’d yearned to leave home and planned to do so since I was a child in single digits making lists of what to take to run away. Once I left home I was almost never in danger inside my home again, but by then home often felt like the only place I was safe (57).
We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don’t remember how it happened. It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn’t occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse (57).
Even with other people around, I was alone: I was harassed more than once on the bus home while everyone pretended nothing was happening, perhaps because a man in a rage intimidated them too, perhaps because in those days people more often considered it none of their business or blamed the woman. Men would make proposals, demands, endeavor to strike up conversations and the endeavors quickly turned into fury. I knew of no way to say No, I’m not interested, that would not be inflammatory, and so there was nothing to say. There was no work words could do for me, and so I had no words.
Usually I’d look down, say nothing, avoid eye contact, do my best to be as absent, unobtrusive, insignificant as possible-invisible as well as inaudible-since I was afraid of that escalation. Even my eyes had to learn deferential limits. I erased myself as much as possible, because to be was to be a target. Those men conducted a conversation, sometimes a shouting match, with my silence. They shouted I owed them words, obedience, deference, sexual services. But the time I told off a man-a well-dressed white man-who was following me, in the same kind of profanity-laced language he was using to me, he was genuinely shocked and then threatened to kill me. It was daytime in a tourist district, so he probably wasn’t going to try, but it was a frightening reminder of what speaking up achieved (59).
I was often told that I was imagining things, or exaggerating, that I was not believable, and this lack of credibility, this distrust of my capacity to represent myself and interpret the world, was part of the erosion of the space in which I could exist and of my confidence in myself and the possibility that there was a place for me in the world and that I had something to say that might be heeded. When no one else seems to trust you, it’s hard to trust yourself, and if you do, you pit yourself against them all; either of those options can make you feel crazy and get called crazy. Not everyone has the backbone for it. When your body is not your own and the truth is not your own, what is (60-1)?
Chapter 4
There’s a passage in Sohaila Abdulali’s book on surviving rape about a kind of voice-“a way of telling the story in a smooth arc; matter-of-factly, with intonation but no real emotion. . . . No matter how many details we share, we leave out the unbearable ones that nobody wants to hear (67).”
Disappearing Acts
Chapter 3 >
My skeleton was not far from the surface. My iliac crests jutted out so that people sometimes thought I was carrying something in the front pockets of my jeans. I thought of them as pearl-handled revolvers. When I let the bathwater drain out while I lay in the tub a pool formed on my hollow belly. My ribs showed. I had a waist so small a gay man once quipped that I did not have a torso but, like a wasp or a bee, an abdomen and a thorax. It was my friend David Dashiell, and he used the word thorax, and we were friends partly because we could banter like that.
There is a picture taken by the man who was walking with us while I sang “Ready for War” shortly after I moved into the apartment. It’s of me in a gray 1940s suit I wore constantly as my dress-up outfit, or rather of me wearing the suit’s pencil skirt and a man’s vest turned backward and belted into a sort of backless top, without the jacket. I have my back to the camera, I’m pressed up against the wall with its rectangles of molding, head turned to the right, a little hat with a veil over a face that still looks childish, a back that looks vulnerable, unformed, and elbow-length black gloves on. I’m trying to take shelter in my shadow.
The clothing speaks of an attempt to be elegant, sophisticated, to be an adult, to be ready for the world and find a world ready for me, a portrait of all those aspirations of youth. The posture speaks of an attempt to elude and melt away. I’m trying to appear and to disappear at once. The waist of that skirt I measured before I gave it away when I was pretty sure it would never fit again unless I became deathly ill; it was twenty inches (81-2).
Femininity at its most brutally conventional is a perpetual disappearing act, an erasure and a silencing to make more room for men, one in which your existence is considered an aggression and your nonexistence a form of gracious compliance (85).
Freely at Night
Chapter 1
When I wrote my book on walking almost twenty years later, I quoted Sylvia Plath, who declared when she was nineteen, “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars-to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording-all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.” Reading the passage long after I’d put it in the book, I wondered about who she might have been if she’d had the freedom of the city, as they used to call it, and of the hills, and of the night, of how her suicide in her kitchen at thirty must have been in part from the confinement of women in domestic spaces and definitions (99).
Chapter 4
After graduation, I had realized that though I had learned to read, I had not learned to write, or to do anything better than sales and service work for a living. In those days before nonfiction was considered creative and taught in writing programs, I applied to the only place that I could afford and that made sense to me, the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and was admitted. The writing sample I submitted was a blithely amusing (but laboriously typed) account of an encounter with a group of women at a punk club when I was eighteen or nineteen.
The women had invited me to audition for a movie that turned out to be an attempt to repeat the process whereby they and the quadriplegic man who’d be the film’s director had groomed a teenage girl via sex work to obey him. They wanted to repeat the process only with a movie camera and with me; sex with him, the women explained, was part of the deal, and he chimed in by spelling out “show me your tits” on his communication board with his pointer. Servitude and obedience were described, of course, as liberation.
The Pygmalion myth, whereby a woman is turned from insensate sculpture into a living being, happens much more frequently in reverse, as a story of women who don’t need help being fully alive and aware confronted with the people who want to reduce them to something less. Perhaps in turning the encounter into an essay, I had affirmed my capacity to think, judge, speak, decide, and maybe thereby to make myself. I was going to graduate school to get better at those things (116-7).
Chapter 5
Though I was browsing at City Lights bookstore and researching the Beat poets for that thesis, and interviewing some of them, I encountered my fellow San Franciscan Diane di Prima’s work only later, including her declaration “You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology.” Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.
It formalizes the process everyone goes through, of making the self who will speak, of settling on what values and interests and priorities will shape your path and your persona. You have to find out what kind of tone you are going to take, how you pitch your words, whether you’re going to be funny or grim or both. Often what emerges is not what you intended; it turns out you’re someone else who has other things to say and other ways to say them (what gets called “a voice” is at the outset like some person you don’t know very well arriving at the front door with a different focus and tone than you expected). You discover what ethics are implicit or explicit in how you describe the world, what ideas of beauty you are going to pursue, what your subjects are, which means what you care about, all those things labeled style and voice and tone behind which lies a question of self (122).
The voice that came out of me when I spoke in social settings and often even to a single friend wore a thousand pounds of armor and was incapable of saying anything direct about emotions, which I was barely feeling or feeling through so many filters I hardly knew what was spinning me around. But the voice: it was the voice I’d grown up around and learned to emulate and then to promulgate, a voice that strove to be clever, cool, sharp, and amused, to shoot arrows with precision and duck the arrows that came back or pretend they hadn’t stung. It relied on jokes and quips that were often cruel in a game where anyone who was hurt or offended by those jabs was supposed to be lacking in humor or strength or other admirable qualities. I didn’t understand what I was doing, because I didn’t understand that there were other ways to do it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t mean-spirited at times. (Later, I discovered that scathing and mocking reviews were the easiest and most fun kind to write, but I tried to write them only about much-lauded successes.)
There was another kind of humor, or rather a ponderous wit, that was convoluted, full of citations and puns and plays on existing phrases, of circling around, far around, what was happening and what you were feeling. It was as though the more indirect and referential your statement, the further away from your immediate and authentic reaction, the better. It would take me a long time to understand what a limitation cleverness can be, and to understand how much unkindness damaged not just the other person but the possibilities for you yourself, the speaker, and what courage it took to speak from the heart. What I had then was a voice that leaned hard on irony, on saying the opposite of what I meant, a voice in which I often said things to one person to impress other people, a voice in which I didn’t really know much about what I thought and felt because the logic of the game determined the moves. It was a hard voice on a short leash.
That voice isn’t just in your conversations, it’s inside your head: you don’t say that hurt, or I feel sad; you run angry tirades about why the other party is a terrible person over and over, and you layer on anger to avoid whatever’s hurt or frightened underneath, until it’s certain that you don’t know yourself or your weather, or that it’s you who’s telling the story that’s feeding the fire. You generally don’t know other people either, except as they impinge on you; it’s a failure of imagination going in and reaching out (123-4).
Some Uses of Edges
Chapter 1
It’s written in pencil on a large sheet of now-yellowed newsprint whose bottom half has the wide-ruled lines for beginning writers, and I’m pretty sure it’s my first essay, from first grade. In its entirety, it reads, “When I grow up I will never get married.” The illustration on the top half shows a man in a red shirt whose black hair wraps like a nimbus around his circular head and a yellow-haired woman in a flounced purple skirt. “Get married with me,” he says in a cartoon balloon, and she says, “No, no.”
It’s comic and horrible, a sign that I was looking at my mother’s life and thinking that whatever I did, I would try to not do what she did, because she so clearly felt trapped and powerless in a violently miserable marriage. I am the offspring of a victim and her victimizer, of a story that couldn’t be told at the time. Most conventional stories for girls and young women ended in marriage. Women vanished into it. The end. And then what happened and who were they? The fairy tale “Bluebeard” is about a woman who finds out, by disobeying his orders and using the forbidden key to unlock the torture chamber full of her predecessors’ corpses, that she’s married a serial killer, whose intent to kill her is whetted by her knowledge. It’s an unusual fairy tale in that she survives and he does not.
I’d just rejected the principal story for women, and I’d soon elect to try to put myself in charge of stories. That is, the same first year of literacy, after a brief period when I wanted to be a librarian because they spent their days with books, I realized someone actually wrote each book, and decided that that’s what I wanted to do. Such an unwavering goal from early on simplified my path, though the task of writing is never simple. Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life: to become conscious of what the overarching stories are and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value.
But when it comes to writing, every chapter you write is surrounded by those you don’t, every confession by what remains secret or indescribable or unremembered, and only so much of the chaos and fluidity of experience can be sifted and herded onto pages, whatever your intentions and even your themes (129-30).
I am endlessly thankful that my path to writing detoured through visual art. It was an arena in which artists were asking questions that went down to the very foundations and reached in all directions. Art could be almost anything, which meant that every premise was open to question, every problem to exploration, every situation to intervention, and I came to understand visual art as a kind of philosophical inquiry by other means. I learned from paying attention to the work of some artists, from conversations with others, and from collaborations with yet others, and from wandering through the texts often then referenced in the art world, the French philosophers and feminists, the postmodernists, and other dense things from which useful ideas could be gathered (131).
Chapter 2
My father had died while traveling on the other side of the world in the first days of 1987, and with his death it became safe enough to thaw out a little and to open up what had been closed. I was finally having emotions in response to events from long before, as if they had been something frozen into the ice in that bleak earlier era, and because I could finally classify the events on my own terms as cruel and wrong (140).
Diving Into the Wreck
Chapter 3
Across the United States and elsewhere are people who imagine and desire and sometimes demand homogeneity as a right, who claim coexistence compromises or menaces them. I wonder about them, about what it must be like to be the kind of person who expected to dominate a country and culture forever and to find safety in homogeneity and danger-mostly imagined, or of a metaphysical variety-in heterogeneous society. I was white, but I grew up the daughter of a liberal Irish Catholic and a Russian Jew in a conservative and sometimes anti-Semitic neighborhood, a book-besotted kid in an anti-intellectual town, a girl in a family of boys. I didn’t think there were a lot of people exactly like me or that they would ever amount to a majority population anywhere. In a homogeneous environment, I always felt I stuck out in ways that might be punished; to be in a mixed crowd was safer as well as more rewarding. And living in a white-minority city, I came to think “like me” meant people who loved the same things or held the same ideals (179).
Audibility, Credibility, Consequence
Chapter 3
The essay poured out with ease or rather tumbled out seemingly of its own accord. When this happens it means that the thoughts have long been gestating and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that your job is to get out of its way (216).
And I am a woman who became a writer and through it gained some standing while writing about other things from art to war, and sometimes tried to put that standing to work to try to open up space for others’ voices. I am a woman who one morning wrote an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me” that is about the way that the mild disparagement of having your subject of expertise explained to you by a fool who does not know that he does not know what he’s talking about or who he’s talking to is on a spectrum, and that the other end of the spectrum is full of violent death (219).
It prompted an anonymous commenter at the website LiveJournal to coin the word mansplaining soon after it first appeared, a word that caught on, that entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014, that is now widely known and used in English, exists in dozens of languages, and has begat a host of variations such as whitesplaining (and that’s often credited to me, though I did not coin it). It also provided some encouragement I’m proud of. A very famous woman writer, soon after the essay appeared, sent it to a well-known pundit, a bellicose misogynist, with this message: “Reading this wonderful essay by Rebecca Solnit reminded me of something I have been meaning to say to you for a long, long time. Go fuck yourself,” and it prompted one young woman I met to get divorced (219-20).
Chapter 4
A writer’s voice is supposed to be hers alone. It’s what makes someone distinct and recognizable, and it’s not quite style and not just tone or subject; it’s something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for. But the feminist themes that became a major part of my work after “Men Explain Things to Me” is for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival (221).
Works of art that had an impact in their time sometimes look dated or obvious because what was fresh and even insurrectionary about them has become the ordinary way things are, how we edit films or see history or nature or sexuality or understand rights and their violations. Thus the vision of one or of a few becomes the perspective of many. They have been rendered obsolete by their success-which makes the relevance of even much nineteenth-century feminist writing a grim reminder that though we’ve come far, it’s not far enough (221-2).
It’s often assumed that anger drives such work, but most activism is driven by love, a life among activists has convinced me. Too, though the remedies for trauma most often proffered in our privatized society are personal, doing something for and with others, something to change the circumstances under which you were harmed, is often an experience of connection and power that overcomes that sense of isolation and powerlessness central to trauma.
Writing about sexual assault and misogyny has been the easiest writing I’ve ever done, perhaps because what drives me is a force harder to stop than to start. It requires a deep immersion in hideous crimes; for many years, over and over, I have read about rape at breakfast and beatings and stalkings at lunch and had murder for dinner, taken in many thousands of such stories, and yet because all this is coming to light in a new way, and because there is some possibility of transforming the situations and shifting the power, this ferocious drive overwhelms the horror and the terror and is perhaps the first thing that has (225).
Chapter 5
It took me ten years and dozens of feminist essays from that morning I wrote “Men Explain Things to Me” to realize that I was not talking and writing, after all, about violence against women, though I was reading about it incessantly. I was writing about what it means not to have a voice and making the case for a redistribution of that vital power. The crucial sentence in “Men Explain Things to Me” is “Credibility is a basic survival tool.” But I was wrong that it’s a tool. You hold a tool in your own hands, and you use it yourself. What it does is up to you.
Your credibility arises in part from how your society perceives people like you, and we have seen over and over again that no matter how credible some women are by supposedly objective standards reinforced by evidence and witnesses and well-documented patterns, they will not be believed by people committed to protecting men and their privileges. The very definition of women under patriarchy is designed to justify inequality, including inequality of credibility.
Though patriarchy often claims a monopoly on rationality and reason, those committed to it will discount the most verifiable, coherent, ordinary story told by a woman and accept any fantastical account by a man, will pretend sexual violence is rare and false accusations common, and so forth. Why tell stories if they will only bring forth a new round of punishment or disparagement? Or if they will be ignored as if they meant nothing? This is how preemptive silencing works.
To have a voice means not just the animal capacity to utter sounds but the ability to participate fully in the conversations that shape your society, your relations to others, and your own life. There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence.
Audibility means that you can be heard, that you have not been pressed into silence or kept out of the arenas in which you can speak or write (or denied the education to do so-or, in the age of social media, harassed and threatened and driven off the platform, as so many have).
Credibility means that when you get into those arenas, people are willing to believe you, by which I don’t mean that women never lie, but that stories should be measured on their own terms and context, rather than patriarchy’s insistence that women are categorically unqualified to speak, emotional rather than rational, vindictive, incoherent, delusional, manipulative, unfit to be heeded-those things often shouted over a woman in the process of saying something challenging (though now death threats are used as a shortcut, and some of those threats are carried out, notably with women who leave their abusers, because silencing can be conversational or it can be premeditated murder).
To be a person of consequence is to matter. If you matter, you have rights, and your words serve those rights and give you the power to bear witness, make agreements, set boundaries. If you have consequence, your words possess the authority to determine what does and does not happen to you, the power that underlies the concept of consent as part of equality and self-determination (228-30).
Women have been injured on all three fronts-as have men of color and nonwhite women doubly so. Not allowed to speak or punished for speaking or excluded from the arenas-courts, universities, legislatures, newsrooms-where decisions are made. Mocked or disbelieved or threatened if they do find a place in which to speak, and routinely categorized as inherently deceitful, spiteful, delusional, confused, or just unqualified. Or they speak up and it is no different than remaining silent; they have told their stories and nothing happens, because their rights and their capacity to bear witness don’t matter, so their voices are just sounds that blow away on the wind.
Gender violence is made possible by this lack of audibility, credibility, and consequence. We live inside an enormous contradiction: a society that by law and preening self-regard insists it is against such violence has by innumerable strategies allowed that violence to continue unchecked; better and far more frequently protected perpetrators than victims; and routinely punished, humiliated, and intimidated victims for speaking up, from workplace harassment cases to campus rape cases to domestic violence cases. The result makes crimes invisible and victims inaudible people of no consequence.
The disregard for a woman’s voice that underlies sexual violence is inseparable from the disregard afterward if a woman goes to the police, the university authorities, her family, her church, the courts, to the hospital for a rape kit, and is ignored, discredited, blamed, shamed, disbelieved. They are both assaults on the full humanity and membership of a person in her society, and the devaluation in the latter arena enables the former. Sexual assault can only thrive in situations of unequal audibility, credibility, and consequence. This, far more than any other disparity, is the precondition for epidemic gender violence.
Changing who has a voice with all its power and attributes doesn’t fix everything, but it changes the rules, notably the rules about what stories will be told and heard and who decides. One of the measures of this change is the many cases that were ignored, disbelieved, dismissed, or found in favor of the perpetrator years ago that have had a different outcome in the present, because the women or children who testified have more audibility, credibility, and consequence now than they did before. The impact of this epochal shift that will be hardest to measure will be all the crimes that won’t happen because the rules have changed.
Behind that change are transformations in whose rights matter and whose voice will be heard and who decides. Amplifying and reinforcing those voices and furthering that change was one of the tasks to which I put the voice I’d gained as a writer, and seeing that what I and others wrote and said was helping to change the world was satisfying in many ways to me as a writer and as a survivor (230-1).
Looking Glass House
Chapter 1
In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other. And I was watching myself to see if I could read in the mirror what I could be and whether I was good enough and whether all the things I’d been told about myself were true.
To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once. “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live (3).
Foghorn and Gospel
Chapter 3
I was poor. I scrounged furniture off the street and clothes from thrift stores and housewares from rummage sales; we valued old things then, and aesthetically this method suited me. Most of what I owned was older than me, and I relished that; every object was an anchor to the past. I craved a sense of time, history, mortality, depth, texture that had been absent from my upbringing in a newly built suburban edge of the Bay Area with parents whose immigrant urban backgrounds left them with little sense of lineage, few stories, no heirlooms. My work as a writer was sometimes going to be about restoring lost and forgotten pasts to Western places (33).
I was passing through poverty and I would gradually return to financial ease; in poverty too I was a new stranger but I spent enough years there to grasp a little of how it works and what it does. In another sense poverty as a poverty of the spirit had been all around me since birth. My parents had ingested a deep sense of lack during the Great Depression or out of whatever deprivations their childhoods contained, and they were not interested in sharing their middle-class comfort. I did not trust that they would have bailed me out if something truly horrific had prostrated me, and I was never willing to fall apart enough to find out, so I was not slumming quite the way that a lot of young white people around me were, who could opt out of poverty as easily as they had opted into it. I left it too, but slowly, by my own labors. And as I’d understand better later, by the advantages that had come with my color and my background that made me feel fit, to myself and in the eyes of others, for an education and white-collar work.
I read books standing up in bookstores or got them from libraries or searched for months or years to find the cheapest used copy; I listened to music on the radio and made cassette tapes of albums at friends’ houses; I eyed things and was spurred and pricked and bothered by the promise things make, that this pair of boots or that shirt will make you who you need or want to be, that what is incomplete in you is a hole that can be stuffed with stuff, that the things you have are eclipsed by the things you want, that wanting can be cured by having, beyond having what is essential.
I always wanted something more, something else, and if I got it I wanted the next thing, and there was always something to want. Craving gnawed at me. I wanted things so badly, with a desire that was so sharp it gouged me, and the process of wanting often took up far more time and imaginative space than the actual person, place, or thing, or the imaginary thing possessed more power than the real one. And then once I had something the craving died down-it was the craving that was so alive-and then that craving appeared again, gaping and reaching after the next thing. Of course with lovers and boyfriends, uncertainty could keep craving alive (and with the more reliable and kinder men, that metamorphosed into that other kind of attachment we call love).
More than anything I wanted transformation not of my nature but of my condition. I didn’t have much of a vision of where I wanted to go, but I knew I wanted to distance myself from where I had come from. Perhaps that was not so much a matter of craving as its opposite, aversion and escape, and perhaps it was why walking was so important to me: it felt like I was getting somewhere.
I did have one early vision of what a life worth living could look like. When I read her diaries in my mid-teens, Anaïs Nin’s evocations of her Parisian life between the wars gave me images of spaces that could harbor conversational depths and exploration, of lives that intertwined and cross-pollinated, of the warmth of being wrapped up in passionate friendships. Many years later, after a dinner party of friends gathered around the chrome- legged linoleum table in my kitchen, the radical historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, one of the guests, and I agreed that this was what we had hungered for in our lonely youths. (And many years later I was dismayed to find out that Nin had left her banker husband out of the published diaries, so she presented herself as more hand-to-mouth bohemian than she really was (34-6).)
Life During Wartime
Chapter 1
A friend gave me a desk not long after I moved into the apartment, a woman’s small writing desk or vanity, the one I am writing on now. It’s a dainty Victorian piece of furniture, with four narrow drawers, two on each side and a broader central drawer above the bay in which the sitter’s legs go, and various kinds of ornamentation-doweled legs, each with a knob like a knee, knobby ornaments, scallops on the bottom of the drawers, drawer pulls like tassels or teardrops.
There are two pairs of legs on the front, two on the back, set beneath the side drawers. Despite all the frills, the old desk is fundamentally sturdy, an eight-legged beast of burden whose back has carried many things over the decades, or two beasts of burden side by side, yoked together by the desktop. The desk has moved with me three times. It’s the surface on which I’ve written millions of words: more than twenty books, reviews, essays, love letters, several thousand emails to my friend Tina during the years of our near-daily epistolary exchange, a few hundred thousand other emails, some eulogies and obituaries, including those of both of my parents, a desk at which I did the homework of a student and then a teacher, a portal onto the world and my platform for reaching out and for diving inward.
A year or so before she gave me the desk, my friend was stabbed fifteen times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him. She almost bled to death; she had emergency transfusions; she was left with long scars all over her body, which I saw then without response because whatever capacity to feel had been muffled, maybe when I got habituated to violence at home, maybe because it was something we were supposed to take in stride and be nonchalant about, back when few of us had language to talk about such violence or an audience ready to listen.
She survived; she was blamed for what happened as victims often were then; there were no legal consequences for the would-be murderer; she moved far from where it happened; she worked for a single mother who was evicted, and who gave her the desk in lieu of wages; and then she gave it to me. She moved on and we lost touch for many years, and then reestablished it, and she told me the full story, a story that could make your heart catch fire and the world freeze over.
Someone tried to silence her. Then she gave me a platform for my voice. Now I wonder if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing. All of it has literally arisen from that foundation that is the desktop (43-4).
The writer Bill deBuys began a book with the sentence “A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing one thing, one phenomenon or essence, so clearly and fully that the light of its understanding illuminates the rest of life.” And then he begins with the pine desk at which he’s writing and travels from a description of the grain and color of the wood to trees and forests and keeps going into love, loss, epiphanies of place. It’s a lovely journey. I can imagine many forests into which I’d rather go from my own desk, which was made of trees that must have been cut down before my grandmothers were born, than into the violence against my gender.
But the desk I sit at is a desk given to me by a woman who a man tried to murder, and it seems time to tell what it meant to me to grow up in a society in which many preferred people like me to be dead or silent and how I got a voice and how it eventually came time to use that voice-that voice that was most articulate when I was alone at the desk speaking through my fingers, silently-to try to tell the stories that had gone untold.
Memoirs at their most conventional are stories of overcoming, arcs of eventual triumph, personal problems to be taken care of by personal evolution and resolve. That a lot of men wanted and still want to harm women, especially young women, that a lot of people relished that harm, and a lot more dismissed it, impacted me in profoundly personal ways but the cure for it wasn’t personal. There was no adjustment I could make in my psyche or my life that would make this problem acceptable or nonexistent, and there was nowhere to go to leave it behind.
The problems were embedded in the society and maybe the world in which I found myself, and the work to survive it was also work to understand it and eventually work to transform it for everyone, not for myself alone. There were, however, ways of breaking the silence that was part of the affliction, and that was rebellion, and a coming to life, and a coming into power to tell stories, my own and others’. A forest of stories rather than trees and the writing a charting of some paths through it (46-7).
Chapter 2
Feminists of an earlier era insisted that rape is about power, not erotic pleasure, though there are men for whom their own power or a woman’s powerlessness is the most erotic thing imaginable. For some women too, so we learn that our helplessness and peril is erotic, and accept or reject or struggle with the sense of self and stories that come with them. Jacqueline Rose wrote in 2018, “Sexual harassment is the great male performative, the act through which a man aims to convince his target not only that he is the one with the power-which is true-but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing (52).”
One thing that makes people crazy is being told that the experiences they have did not actually happen, that the circumstances that hem them in are imaginary, that the problems are all in their head, and that if they are distressed it is a sign of their failure, when success would be to shut up or to cease to know what they know. Out of this unbearable predicament come the rebels who choose failure and risk and the prisoners who choose compliance (53).
Chapter 3
I had never been safe, but I think some of the horror that hit me was because for a few years I had thought that maybe I could be, that male violence had been contained in the home I grew up in, and so I could leave it behind. I wrote once that I grew up in an inside-out world where everywhere but the house was safe, and everyplace else had seemed safe enough as a child in a subdivision on the edge of the country, where I roamed freely into town or into the hills that were both right out the door. I’d yearned to leave home and planned to do so since I was a child in single digits making lists of what to take to run away. Once I left home I was almost never in danger inside my home again, but by then home often felt like the only place I was safe (57).
We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don’t remember how it happened. It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn’t occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse (57).
Even with other people around, I was alone: I was harassed more than once on the bus home while everyone pretended nothing was happening, perhaps because a man in a rage intimidated them too, perhaps because in those days people more often considered it none of their business or blamed the woman. Men would make proposals, demands, endeavor to strike up conversations and the endeavors quickly turned into fury. I knew of no way to say No, I’m not interested, that would not be inflammatory, and so there was nothing to say. There was no work words could do for me, and so I had no words.
Usually I’d look down, say nothing, avoid eye contact, do my best to be as absent, unobtrusive, insignificant as possible-invisible as well as inaudible-since I was afraid of that escalation. Even my eyes had to learn deferential limits. I erased myself as much as possible, because to be was to be a target. Those men conducted a conversation, sometimes a shouting match, with my silence. They shouted I owed them words, obedience, deference, sexual services. But the time I told off a man-a well-dressed white man-who was following me, in the same kind of profanity-laced language he was using to me, he was genuinely shocked and then threatened to kill me. It was daytime in a tourist district, so he probably wasn’t going to try, but it was a frightening reminder of what speaking up achieved (59).
I was often told that I was imagining things, or exaggerating, that I was not believable, and this lack of credibility, this distrust of my capacity to represent myself and interpret the world, was part of the erosion of the space in which I could exist and of my confidence in myself and the possibility that there was a place for me in the world and that I had something to say that might be heeded. When no one else seems to trust you, it’s hard to trust yourself, and if you do, you pit yourself against them all; either of those options can make you feel crazy and get called crazy. Not everyone has the backbone for it. When your body is not your own and the truth is not your own, what is (60-1)?
Chapter 4
There’s a passage in Sohaila Abdulali’s book on surviving rape about a kind of voice-“a way of telling the story in a smooth arc; matter-of-factly, with intonation but no real emotion. . . . No matter how many details we share, we leave out the unbearable ones that nobody wants to hear (67).”
Disappearing Acts
Chapter 3 >
My skeleton was not far from the surface. My iliac crests jutted out so that people sometimes thought I was carrying something in the front pockets of my jeans. I thought of them as pearl-handled revolvers. When I let the bathwater drain out while I lay in the tub a pool formed on my hollow belly. My ribs showed. I had a waist so small a gay man once quipped that I did not have a torso but, like a wasp or a bee, an abdomen and a thorax. It was my friend David Dashiell, and he used the word thorax, and we were friends partly because we could banter like that.
There is a picture taken by the man who was walking with us while I sang “Ready for War” shortly after I moved into the apartment. It’s of me in a gray 1940s suit I wore constantly as my dress-up outfit, or rather of me wearing the suit’s pencil skirt and a man’s vest turned backward and belted into a sort of backless top, without the jacket. I have my back to the camera, I’m pressed up against the wall with its rectangles of molding, head turned to the right, a little hat with a veil over a face that still looks childish, a back that looks vulnerable, unformed, and elbow-length black gloves on. I’m trying to take shelter in my shadow.
The clothing speaks of an attempt to be elegant, sophisticated, to be an adult, to be ready for the world and find a world ready for me, a portrait of all those aspirations of youth. The posture speaks of an attempt to elude and melt away. I’m trying to appear and to disappear at once. The waist of that skirt I measured before I gave it away when I was pretty sure it would never fit again unless I became deathly ill; it was twenty inches (81-2).
Femininity at its most brutally conventional is a perpetual disappearing act, an erasure and a silencing to make more room for men, one in which your existence is considered an aggression and your nonexistence a form of gracious compliance (85).
Freely at Night
Chapter 1
When I wrote my book on walking almost twenty years later, I quoted Sylvia Plath, who declared when she was nineteen, “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars-to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording-all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.” Reading the passage long after I’d put it in the book, I wondered about who she might have been if she’d had the freedom of the city, as they used to call it, and of the hills, and of the night, of how her suicide in her kitchen at thirty must have been in part from the confinement of women in domestic spaces and definitions (99).
Chapter 4
After graduation, I had realized that though I had learned to read, I had not learned to write, or to do anything better than sales and service work for a living. In those days before nonfiction was considered creative and taught in writing programs, I applied to the only place that I could afford and that made sense to me, the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and was admitted. The writing sample I submitted was a blithely amusing (but laboriously typed) account of an encounter with a group of women at a punk club when I was eighteen or nineteen.
The women had invited me to audition for a movie that turned out to be an attempt to repeat the process whereby they and the quadriplegic man who’d be the film’s director had groomed a teenage girl via sex work to obey him. They wanted to repeat the process only with a movie camera and with me; sex with him, the women explained, was part of the deal, and he chimed in by spelling out “show me your tits” on his communication board with his pointer. Servitude and obedience were described, of course, as liberation.
The Pygmalion myth, whereby a woman is turned from insensate sculpture into a living being, happens much more frequently in reverse, as a story of women who don’t need help being fully alive and aware confronted with the people who want to reduce them to something less. Perhaps in turning the encounter into an essay, I had affirmed my capacity to think, judge, speak, decide, and maybe thereby to make myself. I was going to graduate school to get better at those things (116-7).
Chapter 5
Though I was browsing at City Lights bookstore and researching the Beat poets for that thesis, and interviewing some of them, I encountered my fellow San Franciscan Diane di Prima’s work only later, including her declaration “You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology.” Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.
It formalizes the process everyone goes through, of making the self who will speak, of settling on what values and interests and priorities will shape your path and your persona. You have to find out what kind of tone you are going to take, how you pitch your words, whether you’re going to be funny or grim or both. Often what emerges is not what you intended; it turns out you’re someone else who has other things to say and other ways to say them (what gets called “a voice” is at the outset like some person you don’t know very well arriving at the front door with a different focus and tone than you expected). You discover what ethics are implicit or explicit in how you describe the world, what ideas of beauty you are going to pursue, what your subjects are, which means what you care about, all those things labeled style and voice and tone behind which lies a question of self (122).
The voice that came out of me when I spoke in social settings and often even to a single friend wore a thousand pounds of armor and was incapable of saying anything direct about emotions, which I was barely feeling or feeling through so many filters I hardly knew what was spinning me around. But the voice: it was the voice I’d grown up around and learned to emulate and then to promulgate, a voice that strove to be clever, cool, sharp, and amused, to shoot arrows with precision and duck the arrows that came back or pretend they hadn’t stung. It relied on jokes and quips that were often cruel in a game where anyone who was hurt or offended by those jabs was supposed to be lacking in humor or strength or other admirable qualities. I didn’t understand what I was doing, because I didn’t understand that there were other ways to do it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t mean-spirited at times. (Later, I discovered that scathing and mocking reviews were the easiest and most fun kind to write, but I tried to write them only about much-lauded successes.)
There was another kind of humor, or rather a ponderous wit, that was convoluted, full of citations and puns and plays on existing phrases, of circling around, far around, what was happening and what you were feeling. It was as though the more indirect and referential your statement, the further away from your immediate and authentic reaction, the better. It would take me a long time to understand what a limitation cleverness can be, and to understand how much unkindness damaged not just the other person but the possibilities for you yourself, the speaker, and what courage it took to speak from the heart. What I had then was a voice that leaned hard on irony, on saying the opposite of what I meant, a voice in which I often said things to one person to impress other people, a voice in which I didn’t really know much about what I thought and felt because the logic of the game determined the moves. It was a hard voice on a short leash.
That voice isn’t just in your conversations, it’s inside your head: you don’t say that hurt, or I feel sad; you run angry tirades about why the other party is a terrible person over and over, and you layer on anger to avoid whatever’s hurt or frightened underneath, until it’s certain that you don’t know yourself or your weather, or that it’s you who’s telling the story that’s feeding the fire. You generally don’t know other people either, except as they impinge on you; it’s a failure of imagination going in and reaching out (123-4).
Some Uses of Edges
Chapter 1
It’s written in pencil on a large sheet of now-yellowed newsprint whose bottom half has the wide-ruled lines for beginning writers, and I’m pretty sure it’s my first essay, from first grade. In its entirety, it reads, “When I grow up I will never get married.” The illustration on the top half shows a man in a red shirt whose black hair wraps like a nimbus around his circular head and a yellow-haired woman in a flounced purple skirt. “Get married with me,” he says in a cartoon balloon, and she says, “No, no.”
It’s comic and horrible, a sign that I was looking at my mother’s life and thinking that whatever I did, I would try to not do what she did, because she so clearly felt trapped and powerless in a violently miserable marriage. I am the offspring of a victim and her victimizer, of a story that couldn’t be told at the time. Most conventional stories for girls and young women ended in marriage. Women vanished into it. The end. And then what happened and who were they? The fairy tale “Bluebeard” is about a woman who finds out, by disobeying his orders and using the forbidden key to unlock the torture chamber full of her predecessors’ corpses, that she’s married a serial killer, whose intent to kill her is whetted by her knowledge. It’s an unusual fairy tale in that she survives and he does not.
I’d just rejected the principal story for women, and I’d soon elect to try to put myself in charge of stories. That is, the same first year of literacy, after a brief period when I wanted to be a librarian because they spent their days with books, I realized someone actually wrote each book, and decided that that’s what I wanted to do. Such an unwavering goal from early on simplified my path, though the task of writing is never simple. Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life: to become conscious of what the overarching stories are and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value.
But when it comes to writing, every chapter you write is surrounded by those you don’t, every confession by what remains secret or indescribable or unremembered, and only so much of the chaos and fluidity of experience can be sifted and herded onto pages, whatever your intentions and even your themes (129-30).
I am endlessly thankful that my path to writing detoured through visual art. It was an arena in which artists were asking questions that went down to the very foundations and reached in all directions. Art could be almost anything, which meant that every premise was open to question, every problem to exploration, every situation to intervention, and I came to understand visual art as a kind of philosophical inquiry by other means. I learned from paying attention to the work of some artists, from conversations with others, and from collaborations with yet others, and from wandering through the texts often then referenced in the art world, the French philosophers and feminists, the postmodernists, and other dense things from which useful ideas could be gathered (131).
Chapter 2
My father had died while traveling on the other side of the world in the first days of 1987, and with his death it became safe enough to thaw out a little and to open up what had been closed. I was finally having emotions in response to events from long before, as if they had been something frozen into the ice in that bleak earlier era, and because I could finally classify the events on my own terms as cruel and wrong (140).
Diving Into the Wreck
Chapter 3
Across the United States and elsewhere are people who imagine and desire and sometimes demand homogeneity as a right, who claim coexistence compromises or menaces them. I wonder about them, about what it must be like to be the kind of person who expected to dominate a country and culture forever and to find safety in homogeneity and danger-mostly imagined, or of a metaphysical variety-in heterogeneous society. I was white, but I grew up the daughter of a liberal Irish Catholic and a Russian Jew in a conservative and sometimes anti-Semitic neighborhood, a book-besotted kid in an anti-intellectual town, a girl in a family of boys. I didn’t think there were a lot of people exactly like me or that they would ever amount to a majority population anywhere. In a homogeneous environment, I always felt I stuck out in ways that might be punished; to be in a mixed crowd was safer as well as more rewarding. And living in a white-minority city, I came to think “like me” meant people who loved the same things or held the same ideals (179).
Audibility, Credibility, Consequence
Chapter 3
The essay poured out with ease or rather tumbled out seemingly of its own accord. When this happens it means that the thoughts have long been gestating and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that your job is to get out of its way (216).
And I am a woman who became a writer and through it gained some standing while writing about other things from art to war, and sometimes tried to put that standing to work to try to open up space for others’ voices. I am a woman who one morning wrote an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me” that is about the way that the mild disparagement of having your subject of expertise explained to you by a fool who does not know that he does not know what he’s talking about or who he’s talking to is on a spectrum, and that the other end of the spectrum is full of violent death (219).
It prompted an anonymous commenter at the website LiveJournal to coin the word mansplaining soon after it first appeared, a word that caught on, that entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014, that is now widely known and used in English, exists in dozens of languages, and has begat a host of variations such as whitesplaining (and that’s often credited to me, though I did not coin it). It also provided some encouragement I’m proud of. A very famous woman writer, soon after the essay appeared, sent it to a well-known pundit, a bellicose misogynist, with this message: “Reading this wonderful essay by Rebecca Solnit reminded me of something I have been meaning to say to you for a long, long time. Go fuck yourself,” and it prompted one young woman I met to get divorced (219-20).
Chapter 4
A writer’s voice is supposed to be hers alone. It’s what makes someone distinct and recognizable, and it’s not quite style and not just tone or subject; it’s something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for. But the feminist themes that became a major part of my work after “Men Explain Things to Me” is for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival (221).
Works of art that had an impact in their time sometimes look dated or obvious because what was fresh and even insurrectionary about them has become the ordinary way things are, how we edit films or see history or nature or sexuality or understand rights and their violations. Thus the vision of one or of a few becomes the perspective of many. They have been rendered obsolete by their success-which makes the relevance of even much nineteenth-century feminist writing a grim reminder that though we’ve come far, it’s not far enough (221-2).
It’s often assumed that anger drives such work, but most activism is driven by love, a life among activists has convinced me. Too, though the remedies for trauma most often proffered in our privatized society are personal, doing something for and with others, something to change the circumstances under which you were harmed, is often an experience of connection and power that overcomes that sense of isolation and powerlessness central to trauma.
Writing about sexual assault and misogyny has been the easiest writing I’ve ever done, perhaps because what drives me is a force harder to stop than to start. It requires a deep immersion in hideous crimes; for many years, over and over, I have read about rape at breakfast and beatings and stalkings at lunch and had murder for dinner, taken in many thousands of such stories, and yet because all this is coming to light in a new way, and because there is some possibility of transforming the situations and shifting the power, this ferocious drive overwhelms the horror and the terror and is perhaps the first thing that has (225).
Chapter 5
It took me ten years and dozens of feminist essays from that morning I wrote “Men Explain Things to Me” to realize that I was not talking and writing, after all, about violence against women, though I was reading about it incessantly. I was writing about what it means not to have a voice and making the case for a redistribution of that vital power. The crucial sentence in “Men Explain Things to Me” is “Credibility is a basic survival tool.” But I was wrong that it’s a tool. You hold a tool in your own hands, and you use it yourself. What it does is up to you.
Your credibility arises in part from how your society perceives people like you, and we have seen over and over again that no matter how credible some women are by supposedly objective standards reinforced by evidence and witnesses and well-documented patterns, they will not be believed by people committed to protecting men and their privileges. The very definition of women under patriarchy is designed to justify inequality, including inequality of credibility.
Though patriarchy often claims a monopoly on rationality and reason, those committed to it will discount the most verifiable, coherent, ordinary story told by a woman and accept any fantastical account by a man, will pretend sexual violence is rare and false accusations common, and so forth. Why tell stories if they will only bring forth a new round of punishment or disparagement? Or if they will be ignored as if they meant nothing? This is how preemptive silencing works.
To have a voice means not just the animal capacity to utter sounds but the ability to participate fully in the conversations that shape your society, your relations to others, and your own life. There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence.
Audibility means that you can be heard, that you have not been pressed into silence or kept out of the arenas in which you can speak or write (or denied the education to do so-or, in the age of social media, harassed and threatened and driven off the platform, as so many have).
Credibility means that when you get into those arenas, people are willing to believe you, by which I don’t mean that women never lie, but that stories should be measured on their own terms and context, rather than patriarchy’s insistence that women are categorically unqualified to speak, emotional rather than rational, vindictive, incoherent, delusional, manipulative, unfit to be heeded-those things often shouted over a woman in the process of saying something challenging (though now death threats are used as a shortcut, and some of those threats are carried out, notably with women who leave their abusers, because silencing can be conversational or it can be premeditated murder).
To be a person of consequence is to matter. If you matter, you have rights, and your words serve those rights and give you the power to bear witness, make agreements, set boundaries. If you have consequence, your words possess the authority to determine what does and does not happen to you, the power that underlies the concept of consent as part of equality and self-determination (228-30).
Women have been injured on all three fronts-as have men of color and nonwhite women doubly so. Not allowed to speak or punished for speaking or excluded from the arenas-courts, universities, legislatures, newsrooms-where decisions are made. Mocked or disbelieved or threatened if they do find a place in which to speak, and routinely categorized as inherently deceitful, spiteful, delusional, confused, or just unqualified. Or they speak up and it is no different than remaining silent; they have told their stories and nothing happens, because their rights and their capacity to bear witness don’t matter, so their voices are just sounds that blow away on the wind.
Gender violence is made possible by this lack of audibility, credibility, and consequence. We live inside an enormous contradiction: a society that by law and preening self-regard insists it is against such violence has by innumerable strategies allowed that violence to continue unchecked; better and far more frequently protected perpetrators than victims; and routinely punished, humiliated, and intimidated victims for speaking up, from workplace harassment cases to campus rape cases to domestic violence cases. The result makes crimes invisible and victims inaudible people of no consequence.
The disregard for a woman’s voice that underlies sexual violence is inseparable from the disregard afterward if a woman goes to the police, the university authorities, her family, her church, the courts, to the hospital for a rape kit, and is ignored, discredited, blamed, shamed, disbelieved. They are both assaults on the full humanity and membership of a person in her society, and the devaluation in the latter arena enables the former. Sexual assault can only thrive in situations of unequal audibility, credibility, and consequence. This, far more than any other disparity, is the precondition for epidemic gender violence.
Changing who has a voice with all its power and attributes doesn’t fix everything, but it changes the rules, notably the rules about what stories will be told and heard and who decides. One of the measures of this change is the many cases that were ignored, disbelieved, dismissed, or found in favor of the perpetrator years ago that have had a different outcome in the present, because the women or children who testified have more audibility, credibility, and consequence now than they did before. The impact of this epochal shift that will be hardest to measure will be all the crimes that won’t happen because the rules have changed.
Behind that change are transformations in whose rights matter and whose voice will be heard and who decides. Amplifying and reinforcing those voices and furthering that change was one of the tasks to which I put the voice I’d gained as a writer, and seeing that what I and others wrote and said was helping to change the world was satisfying in many ways to me as a writer and as a survivor (230-1).