Adventures at Midlife

I was so impressed with this article from the LATimes that I read it twice, not that I would likely pick up any of Rebecca Solnit’s books for a quick read, but because of the universality of what she was describing.

While she and a friend were at an upscale dinner party, some jerk began to expound on her lack of knowledge on a topic, only to be told that the book he was citing to silence her was HERS.

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. 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.

This syndrome is something nearly every woman faces every day, 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 believe Mr. Very Important and his overweening confidence over my more shaky certainty.

I don’t know about “every woman,” but I certainly have found myself cut off in mid-sentence and sometimes silenced by some macho moron’s need to be superior. (And it’s only afterward, in my office or my car or my house, licking my wounds, that I come up with the perfect thing to say.)

Having public standing as a writer of history has helped me stand my ground, [says Solnit] but few women get that boost, and billions of women are out there on this 6-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.

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled 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 mention 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.

While I’ll admit that I’ve had this experience with a few Women Who Explain Things, the majority of the perpetrators have been men. I even remember one embarrassing exchange with a particularly smug guy in a Sunday School class! (Pious Men Who Explain Things are in a sanctimonious class of their own.)

I’ve become better at speaking up over the years, but I still find the whole thing distasteful. I don’t have to be right all the time, but I DO have to be taken seriously, to be included in the conversation. Most women tend to look for common ground in a discussion, I find, while too many men look for ways to win, to have the last word. Why is that? Testosterone? Conditioning? Bringing the sports field into the board room?

Maybe this is making me itchy all over because, for the past week, I’ve been watching those sad FLDS women from the compound in Texas, with their upswept hair and pioneer dresses and soft, soft voices. They outnumber the men in the compound by more than two to one, but I’ll wager they have been the victims of Men Who Explain Things their entire lives.

(Update. Someone takes a swing at Solnit.)

This entry was posted on April 22, 2008 at 6:42 am and is filed under Religion, Women.

Tags: Add new tag, FLDS, FLDS women, men, Women