"Men Explain Things to Me." - Every female in the entire world should read this
McSweegan is INSANE
kshe...@calea.org, fit...@gmail.com, patrick.f...@usdoj.gov,
model...@sbcglobal.net, jdr...@nejm.org, let...@courant.com,
Jgerb...@cdc.gov, len...@courant.com, michae...@po.state.ct.us,
con...@po.state.ct.us, executiv...@nytimes.com, managing-
edi...@nytimes.com, news...@nytimes.com, the-...@nytimes.com,
biz...@nytimes.com, for...@nytimes.com, me...@nytimes.com,
nati...@nytimes.com, dv...@cdc.gov, brigidc...@optonline.net,
tr...@hotmail.com, ubi...@courant.com, ma...@concentric.net,
camp...@courant.com, jhorn...@fff.org, thomas...@usdoj.gov,
thoma...@po.state.ct.us, kur...@washpost.com,
georg...@washpost.com, hor...@courant.com,
commissi...@po.state.ct.us, cohen...@aol.com,
FalN...@aol.com, brans...@comcast.net, vts...@comcast.net,
o...@po.state.ct.us, da...@davila-dilzer.com,
scott....@po.state.ct.us, govern...@po.state.ct.us,
attorney...@po.state.ct.us, randall...@usdoj.gov
Cc: fra...@ucia.gov, dr-ahma...@president.ir,
eugener...@washpost.com, hor...@courant.com,
bmi...@newstimes.com, tr...@hotmail.com, rast...@aol.com,
billc...@gmail.com, thomas...@usdoj.gov, amcg...@rms-law.com,
rjmu...@aol.com, paulcrai...@yahoo.com,
sidney_b...@yahoo.com, criminal...@usdoj.gov,
karla.d...@usdoj.gov, christophe...@usdoj.gov
Subject: "Men Explain Things to Me."
Date: Apr 13, 2008 5:12 PM
ARTICLE BELOW
=========================
Yeah, the thing is, we all would like for there to be authorities in
various subjects.
You know; People who understand things and who, um, also *ACT* on
their knowledge
in some way. As in "take responsibility for the knowledge they have
acquired
and in their capacity as a State or Federal employee."
'NEVER HAPPENS.
I have yet to meet an intelligent man, and I say that in full, 100%
sincerity.
Everyone single one of them in some way or another is missing a great
chunk of his
brain. Huge inconsistencies. They can't cross-apply logic and
physics, although
many men I know are scientists. The lab is still like a high school
boys' locker
room, at times. They all still, across the board, indulge in petty,
juvenile behavior.
Men are stupid, is the final, true, not "generalization," but fact.
We would like it to be NOT TRUE that all men are stupid, but it isn't
not true.
And that's an unfortunate thing, since so many women fall into this
trap discussed
below. I guess we can't help it because men are larger and remind us
of our
fathers, who, at one time, actually *did* know more than us.
The only thing that is superior about men is their size, so it's the
biggest
joke of nature. One example: Yale's Eugene Shapiro is a very large
man.
But an idiot who's undergraduate degree is in English Literature.
Who picks English Literature as a major?
Isn't that like majoring in coloring books?
How could that possibly help someone to be an MD?
MD-ism is supposed to be scientific, but so many of them are arrogant
fairies, like
the NeoCons. And for all their arrogant fairy-ness, which one of them
reported
to the FDA or the FBI exactly how "LYMErix and 'Lyme disease'"
are the exact same crime?
http://www.actionlyme.org/CRYMEDISEASE_CHP3.htm
http://www.actionlyme.org/DICKSON_FDA_SUBMISSION_FULL.htm
http://www.actionlyme.org/USDOJ_COMPLAINT_RICO.htm
NOT ONE.
Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/13/8257/
Published on Sunday, April 13, 2008 by TomDispatch.com
Men Explain Things to Me
by Rebecca Solnit
I still don't know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in
the forest slope
above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a
distinguished way,
old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion's young
ladies. The house
was great -- if you like Ralph Lauren-style chalets -- a rugged luxury
cabin at 9,000
feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning
stove. We were
preparing to leave, when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I
can talk
to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money.
He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer
night, and
then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to
me, "So? I hear
you've written a couple of books."
I replied, "Several, actually."
He said, in the way you encourage your friend's seven-year-old to
describe flute
practice, "And what are they about?"
They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or
seven out by then,
but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in
2003, River of
Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book
on the annihilation
of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard
about the very
important Muybridge book that came out this year?"
So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly
willing to
entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had
come out simultaneously
and I'd somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very
important book
-- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes
fixed on the fuzzy
far horizon of his own authority.
Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men,
with a long
succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and
encouraged and published
me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid friends
of whom it
could be said -- like the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales I still
remember from Mr.
Pelen's class on Chaucer -- "gladly would he learn and gladly teach."
Still, there
are these other men, too. So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly
about this
book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's
her book."
Or tried to interrupt him anyway.
But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book"
three or four
times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-
century novel,
he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book
it turned
out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review
a few months
earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was
sorted that he
was stunned speechless -- for a moment, before he began holding forth
again. Being
women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and
we've never
really stopped.
I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky
and hard to
point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an
anaconda that's
eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.
When River of Shadows came out, some pedant wrote a snarky letter to
the New York
Times explaining that, though Muybridge had made improvements in
camera technology,
he had not made any breakthroughs in photographic chemistry. The guy
had no idea
what he was talking about. Both Philip Prodger, in his wonderful book
on Muybridge,
and I had actually researched the subject and made it clear that
Muybridge had done
something obscure but powerful to the wet-plate technology of the time
to speed
it up amazingly, but letters to the editor don't get fact-checked. And
perhaps because
the book was about the virile subjects of cinema and technology, the
Men Who Knew
came out of the woodwork.
A British academic wrote in to the London Review of Books with all
kinds of nitpicking
corrections and complaints, all of them from outer space. He carped,
for example,
that to aggrandize Muybridge's standing I left out technological
predecessors like
Henry R. Heyl. He'd apparently not read the book all the way to page
202 or checked
the index, since Heyl was there (though his contribution was just not
very significant).
Surely one of these men has died of embarrassment, but not nearly
publicly enough.
The Slippery Slope of Silencings
Yes, guys like this pick on other men's books too, and people of both
genders pop
up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy
theories, but the
out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in
my experience,
gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not
they know what
they're talking about. Some men.
Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that
makes it hard,
at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking
up and from
being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by
indicating,
the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.
It trains us
in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's
unsupported overconfidence.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics
since 2001
was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI woman
who issued
those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was certainly shaped by a
Bush administration
to which you couldn't tell anything, including that Iraq had no links
to al-Qaeda
and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to be a "cakewalk." (Even
male experts
couldn't penetrate the fortress of their smugness.)
Arrogance might have had something to do with the war, but this
syndrome is a war
that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, a
belief in her
superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice
career as a
writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not
entirely freed
me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to let Mr.
Important
and his overweening confidence bowl over my more shaky certainty.
Don't forget that I've had a lot more confirmation of my right to
think and speak
than most women, and I've learned that a certain amount of self-doubt
is a good
tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing --
though too much
is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots, like
the ones
who have governed us since 2001. There's a happy medium between these
poles to which
the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take
where we should
all meet.
More extreme versions of our situation exist in, for example, those
Middle Eastern
countries where women's testimony has no legal standing; so that a
woman can't testify
that she was raped without a male witness to counter the male rapist.
Which there
rarely is.
Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just
beginning to
get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had a
boyfriend whose uncle
was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was telling -- as though it
were a light
and amusing subject -- how a neighbor's wife in his suburban bomb-
making community
had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night
screaming that
her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know that he
wasn't trying
to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable
middle-class people.
Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible
explanation
for her fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill
her. That
she was crazy, on the other hand....
Even getting a restraining order -- a fairly new legal tool -- requires
acquiring
the credibility to convince the courts that some guy is a menace and
then getting
the cops to enforce it. Restraining orders often don't work anyway.
Violence is
one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility,
to assert
your right to control over their right to exist. About three women a
day are murdered
by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. It's one of the main causes
of death in
pregnant women in the U.S. At the heart of the struggle of feminism to
give rape,
date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual
harassment legal
standing as crimes has been the necessity of making women credible and
audible.
I tend to believe that women acquired the status of human beings when
these kinds
of acts started to be taken seriously, when the big things that stop
us and kill
us were addressed legally from the mid-1970s on; well after, that is,
my birth.
And for anyone about to argue that workplace sexual intimidation isn't
a life or
death issue, remember that Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach, age
20, was apparently
killed by her higher-ranking colleague last winter while she was
waiting to testify
that he raped her. The burned remains of her pregnant body were found
in the fire
pit in his backyard in December.
Being told that, categorically, he knows what he's talking about and
she doesn't,
however minor a part of any given conversation, perpetuates the
ugliness of this
world and holds back its light. After my book Wanderlust came out in
2000, I found
myself better able to resist being bullied out of my own perceptions
and interpretations.
On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a
man, only to
be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I
was subjective,
delusional, overwrought, dishonest -- in a nutshell, female.
Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having
public standing
as a writer of history helped me stand my ground, but few women get
that boost,
and billions of women must be out there on this six-billion-person
planet being
told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the
truth is
not their property, now or ever. This goes way beyond Men Explaining
Things, but
it's part of the same archipelago of arrogance.
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for
explaining,
wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to
the actuarial
tables, I may have another forty-something years to live, more or
less, so it could
happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.
Women Fighting on Two Fronts
A few years after the idiot in Aspen, I was in Berlin giving a talk
when the Marxist
writer Tariq Ali invited me out to a dinner that included a male
writer and translator
and three women a little younger than me who would remain deferential
and mostly
silent throughout the dinner. Tariq was great. Perhaps the translator
was peeved
that I insisted on playing a modest role in the conversation, but when
I said something
about how Women Strike for Peace, the extraordinary, little-known
antinuclear and
antiwar group founded in 1961, helped bring down the communist-hunting
House Committee
on Un-American Activities, HUAC, Mr. Very Important II sneered at me.
HUAC, he insisted,
didn't exist by the early 1960s and, anyway, no women's group played
such a role
in HUAC's downfall. His scorn was so withering, his confidence so
aggressive, that
arguing with him seemed a scary exercise in futility and an invitation
to more insult.
I think I was at nine books at that point, including one that drew
from primary
documents and interviews about Women Strike for Peace. But explaining
men still
assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty
vessel to be
filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know
what they
have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch -- even
if you can
write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about
the subtle
subjugation of women in the snow with your willie. Back in my hotel
room, I Googled
a bit and found that Eric Bentley in his definitive history of the
House Committee
on Un-American Activities credits Women Strike for Peace with
"striking the crucial
blow in the fall of HUAC's Bastille." In the early 1960s.
So I opened an essay for the Nation with this interchange, in part as
a shout-out
to one of the more unpleasant men who have explained things to me:
Dude, if you're
reading this, you're a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an
obstacle to civilization.
Feel the shame.
The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women --
of my generation,
of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan
and Bolivia
and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and
were not allowed
into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the
revolution, or
even the category called human.
After all, Women Strike for Peace was founded by women who were tired
of making
the coffee and doing the typing and not having any voice or decision-
making role
in the antinuclear movement of the 1950s. Most women fight wars on two
fronts, one
for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to
speak, to have
ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to
have value,
to be a human being. Things have certainly gotten better, but this war
won't end
in my lifetime. I'm still fighting it, for myself certainly, but also
for all those
younger women who have something to say, in the hope that they will
get to say it.
So many men, so little time; Rebecca Solnit left out hundreds more
anecdotes of
her own and her friends' experiences of being hectored to craft this
tirade, which
should in no way be taken as an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. She is
on chapter
eighteen of her next book.
(c) Copyright 2008 Rebecca Solnit