Recommended reading International Women's Day: 6 new books for 8M
Preview: 'Memories of my nonexistence'
The white table on which Rebecca Solnit has been writing since she was 19 years old was given to her by a friend who her ex tried to kill with 15 stab wounds.
To the ex, by the way, nothing happened to him because, as they say, they
were other times
.
On that table, Solnit has written more than 25 essays.
The most famous and the one that made her one of the most respected voices in feminism today (also the one that cost her the least to write: it came out almost in one sitting, out of sheer rage) is
Men Explain Me
things
, where she recounted how a man repeatedly insisted on explaining a book about the photographer Eadweard Muybridge that she had written herself.
Solnit, the author of the neologism
mansplaining,
just published
The mother of all questions
(Captain Swing) and
some memories,
Memories of my nonexistence
(Lumen
), where she tells how she became the woman she is today.
In her memoirs she speaks of violence against women as an epidemic.
If you admit the enormity of the problem, then you have to assume that it is unacceptable and that something needs to be done about it.
Historically, violence against women has been hidden: shaming victims, discrediting or even blaming them.
One of the things that infuriates me the most is that old story that women who have been raped lie.
Do you know who lies all the time?
The rapists!
Why is there so much reluctance to see it like this?
Because doing so involves undermining the status quo in which men have a voice and women should not be believed because they lie.
There are many who are not yet ready for it.
It is a blind spot in our culture.
In the United States, when a white man commits a crime, they try to present him as someone who was sick or had extreme ideas.
As if it were an exception, when it is the norm.
It says that violence affects all women.
Even not having been raped, I suffered an attempted rape, and although no one has tried to murder me, I know many women who have been tried to kill.
Violence is something that affects all women.
It's our turn.
It reaches us.
Enough of pretending that incidents are isolated, random, insignificant.
What all that violence does is undermine the freedom, dignity, equality and power of all women.
All women live knowing that a man could cross them in the elevator, walking down the street, at his workplace, at home.
Even if it doesn't happen, the possibility is there, all the time.
We live in a world where men are predators and women are prey.
I know that not all men are predators and I myself, who have already turned 60, feel much less prey than at 20, but that experience marks you.
Living in a world where you can be raped and everyone will look the other way or blame you for it means living with terrifying vulnerability.
What would you say to those who think that
#MeToo
Is it a new witch hunt that aims to destroy the careers of powerful men?
Many say it is going too far.
I believe that until sexual harassment stops being an epidemic and having an impact on the lives of women, it will continue.
Men's actions must have consequences, if they do something wrong they should be punished.
It is incredible that something so basic is seen as a desire for revenge from women or something irrational, exaggerated or unjustified.
When a thief is caught stealing and is punished, the thief does not accuse the bank of seeking prominence or revenge.
The case of Taylor Swift is very illustrative.
Refresh it for us.
She complained that a radio host had touched her ass and the station decided to fire her.
He presented himself to the world as a victim because he lost his job and sued her.
She countered him for a dollar.
He did it because he does not need the money and because he has millions of girl followers who he wanted to show that there is no reason to tolerate having your ass touched.
It was he who decided to touch her ass, why would she have to bear the consequences?
And why is the
#MeToo
?
I don't want to live in a world where men have no voice or are silenced.
What I want is to live in a world where there is equality.
But some men are unable to conceive of a world in which they have to share their power with women.
That is why #Metoo rouses them.
It seems that society has moved on but then, when someone like Maradona or Kobe Bryant dies, it gives the feeling that there is a lot of lip service.
The Kobe Bryant case contained all the myths that feminism has been trying to demolish for a decade: the impunity of fame, that idea that men cannot avoid certain behaviors, or that if you are a sexually active woman then it is impossible for them to rape you. because you are supposed to say yes to everything always.
I read the transcript of Bryant's trial and it was shocking, I am convinced that he raped that 19-year-old girl.
She received threats from her fans, she was humiliated for her previous sex life, and everything that was said at the trial, including what he said, suggests that there was a rape.
But because he was famous and wealthy, the misogynistic system and culture of the time exonerated him.
I still find it amazing that a journalist was suspended from salary for mentioning the rape episode the day Bryant died.
There are things that are serious enough that nothing you do afterwards can erase them.
He ended up paying the victim and settled the matter out of court, but I don't think that's justice.
You popularized the term
mansplaining
.
Do you think we will see more new words that describe things that don't have names yet?
Yes, we still need many words to name injustices.
That has been one way of advancing feminism: creating a new language to, as Betty Friedan put it, naming the "problem that has no name."
After writing the essay, I spent a couple of years worried because the word seemed to awaken very delicate emotions in men, until an academic told me: this has happened to all of us all our lives, and we did not know how to talk about it.
The word turns 13 in a few months, so we will celebrate its bar mitzvah.
I have already found a feminist rabbi who will be in charge of the ceremony.
In the memoirs, explain that it happened to you all the time.
Especially when she was young, especially when she was blonde and with blue eyes, nobody expected everything she had read.
He knew too much.
It is not only that men believe that women are ignorant, it is that they believe they have the right to the pleasure that being heard gives, they are too used to hearing from us that: "Wow, really? I didn't know!" .
As a child, she also suffered repeated attempts at abuse and mistreatment, but in her memoirs she deals with that part very superficially.
Harassment and abuse in childhood are very universal experiences, the truth is that so much has been written on the subject that I did not think I had to say something special about it.
The book is about that feeling of permanent street harassment, of chronic fear, of all those times I thought a stranger was going to hurt me.
It doesn't have to happen to you for it to affect you.
It is the story of my friend, who was stabbed 15 times by her ex, or that of my mother and all her children, who suffered the mistreatment of her husband, my father.
One of the keys to feminism is to make what happens to a woman everyone's problem.
Why is credibility so important?
Because violence is a consequence of not having a voice.
If the first woman Harvey Weinstein harassed had reported him and been heard, he would not have been abusing women for decades.
He would have gone to jail.
The fact that he abused more than a hundred women is proof that we live in a world in which the voice of women does not have the same credibility as that of men.
That is why it is so important to be taken into account, not ignored.
It happened to you, your own publisher ignored it.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
He did not greet me for years, even though he edited my books.
Not enough is said about all those niceties and how they undermine you as a person.
What did you think of the assault on the Capitol?
Almost all of the assailants were angry white men exercising patriarchy and white supremacism, as if they had a right to everything and without any consequences.
One of the reasons Joe Biden was elected president is because so many black citizens voted for him, and that is unacceptable for white supremacism.
It was terrifying.
One of the things that fascinates me about the assault is: did they really think they were going to succeed?
What does victory look like in their heads?
Did they really think that by killing a couple of politicians the country would prove them right?
That after hanging the vice president and shooting the speaker of the House of Representatives the powers of the State would tell them: 'ok, guys, Donald Trump is president again'?
It is exactly the type of strategy that works in the
bullying
, but fortunately not in national politics.
It was a lynching.
It was, above all, something stupid.
But what most struck me was the right with which they believed they were imbued to do so.
The security with which they entered.
Yes, it is something that is closely related to violence against women.
In the psychology of the abuser, I have always been shocked by the right that men believe they have to control, punish or take the lives of women.
Most strikingly, there was an overwhelming majority of white males among the assailants.
I do not know of a more whiny and victimizing political segment than that of heterosexual white men, who, by the way, we never include within identity politics when it is clearly a special interest group.
They are actually only a third of the population in the United States, but their vision of reality is presented as if it were universal.
It's time we started talking about heterosexual white male identity politics.
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