“Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined.”
Category Archives: Gender Equality
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“… The emphasis colleges have put on telling female students how to box themselves in safely— don’t go here, don’t do that— rather than telling male students not to rape: this is part of rape culture.”
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.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“Most people are afraid of the dark. Literally when it comes to children, while many adults fear, above all, the darkness that is the unknown, the unseeable, the obscure. And yet the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“…the youngest of my three female companions had her bottom groped by a man about Strauss-Kahn’s age. At first, she thought he had simply bumped into her. That was before she felt her buttock being cupped and said something to me, as young women often do, tentatively, quietly, as though it were perhaps not happening or perhaps not quite a problem.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“If the term confuses you take out the word “sexual” and just focus on “assault,” on violence, on the refusal to treat someone as a human being, on the denial of the most basic of human rights, the right to bodily integrity and self-determination. “The rights of man” was one of the great phrases of the French Revolution, but it’s always been questionable whether it included the rights of women.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-some game, only one gender as a time could be free and powerful. But are we free together or slaves together. Surely the mindset of those who think they need to win, to dominate, to punish, to reign supreme, must be terrible and far from free, and giving up this unachievable pursuit would be liberatory.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“Increasingly men are becoming good allies— and there always have been some. Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“…a graphic has been circulating on the Internet called Ten Top Tips to End Rape, the kind of thing young women get often enough, but this one had a subversive twist. It offered advice like this: “Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone ‘by accident’ you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can call for help.” While funny, the piece points out something terrible: the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on potential victims, treating the violence as a given. There is no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“Last summer someone wrote to me to describe a college class in which the students were asked to what they do to stay safe from rape. The young women described the intricate ways they stayed alert, limited their access to the world, took precautions, and essentially thought about rape all the time (while the young men in the class, he added, gaped in astonishment).”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“Of the sixty-two mass shootings in the United States in three decades, only one was by a woman, because when you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns and not about men— and by the way, nearly two-thirds of all women killed by guns are killed by their partner or ex-partner.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
Here I want to say one thing: though virtually all the perpetrators of such crimes are men, that doesn’t mean all men are violent. Most are not, in addition, men obviously also suffer violence, largely at the hands of other men, and every violent death, every assault is terrible. Women can and do engage in intimate partner violence, but recent studies state that these acts don’t often result in significant injury, let alone death; on the other hand, men murdered by their partners are often killed in self-defense, and intimate violence sends a lot of women to the hospital and the grave.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty. I’m grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn’t really a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women then pointed out that, in insisting on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do. (For the record, I do believe that women have explained things in patronizing ways, to men among others. But that’s not indicative of the massive power differential that takes far more sinister forms as well or of the broad pattern of how gender works in our society.)”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“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 human beings. Things have 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.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“But explaining men still assume that 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.”
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
“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. 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.”
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