Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Subtleties of Power

Power tends to hide itself as a defense against any potential challenge to its existence. So democracy, it is said, is government ‘of the people’ not of the autocratic head of the local council. The greedy CEO is forced by his position to act in the interests of the corporate shareholder, or so he says. And men commit intellectual, and emotional, as well as physical violence against women because it is claimed to be their nature; besides, the world would be less organized, less innovative, and less safe for women and other living things if men were not so aggressive..

The camouflage is effective; even those wielding power feel themselves constrained as powerless. The council leader can’t impose his development plan; he must cajole, and argue, and compromise. The CEO fights a continuous battle with his senior managers about whether cost, or innovation, or marketing is the priority of the moment - with the consequence that he can never get entirely what he wants. And men perceive themselves as nagged, put upon, and having to endure unappreciated economic peonage within a family life they never imagined and didn’t sign up for. Victims all, if you press them hard enough.

This ‘power hiding as victim’ tactic is a central theme of Men Explain Things To Me. It is such a common ploy that it seems almost trivial to point it out. Except it is undoubtedly the most important source of the most prevalent injustice everywhere in human civilization - the oppression of females by males. The rationale of absence of power is a substantial component of what Rebecca Solnit calls “the archipelago of arrogance,” that pattern of subtle and quotidian male dominance which is an extension of the more visible, because more overtly violent, male crime against women.

There is reportedly a female as well as a male reaction against such apparent female gender prejudice - movements like Incel, #WomenAgainstFeminism, Concerned Women of America, the National Coalition for Men and many other organizations have claimed that Solnit’s arguments demonize men. She repeatedly points out this is not her intention; but also cites the raw statistics to show that “Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.” It is after all, for example, men who constitute almost 19 of every 20 inmates in American prisons; who are the leading cause by far for deaths of pregnant women, who executed all but one of the sixty-two mass shootings in the US at the time of her publication, and who are responsible for the overwhelming majority of cases of domestic abuse.

The male attempt at control, of course, is a generic and cultural trait. Like racial prejudice, it isn’t really captured in statistics but is viscerally experiences in the existential reality of women. Solnit has to be considered representatively credible when she makes claims like “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.” The fact that many men do it to other men while almost no women do so, in my own experience, is personal confirmation of her thesis.

This attempt at control is routinized and normalized often by law; but most commonly it is exerted through the informal mores of civilized society. The pervasive didactic male attitude “is one way that, in polite discourse, power is expressed—the same power that in impolite discourse and in physical acts of intimidation and violence, and very often in how the world is organized—silences and erases and annihilates women, as equals, as participants, as human beings with rights, and far too often as living beings.”

You either get it or you don’t. But if you don’t, your world us a very strange and probably threatening place indeed. Gender dominance is a training ground for other forms of control in society from racism to mass political and commercial manipulation. The subtleties of male superiority establish an implicit right to power which “comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict suffering and even death on other people.” It is this entitlement as an attitude as well as a cultural fact that Solnit is attacking, not men. “We are free together or slaves together,” she says; to me, quite sensibly.

Nancy Pelosi appears to be giving this basic lesson to Donald Trump as I write. Good luck Nancy.

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