Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit

“In the myth of Pandora, the usual emphasis is on the dangerous curiosity of the woman who opened the jar… and thereby let all the ills out into the world. Sometimes the emphasis is on what state in the jar: hope. But what’s interesting to me right now is that, like the genie’s, or powerful spirits, in the Arabic stories, the forces Pandora lets out don’t go back into the bottle. Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge and they are never ignorant again…. There’s no going back. You can abolish the reproductive rights women gained in 1973, with Roe v. Wade, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion— or rather ruled that women had a right to privacy over their own bodies that precluded the banning of abortion. But you can’t so easily abolish the idea that women have certain inalienable rights.”