Rebecca Solnit

“And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”

with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

“That’s her book.”

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. 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.

More extreme versions of our situation exist in, for example, those Middle Eastern countries where women’s testimony has no legal standing: so that a woman can’t testify that she was raped without a male witness to counter the male rapist. Which there rarely is.

About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. It’s one of the main causes of death for pregnant women in the United States. At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes has been the necessity of making women credible and audible.

explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another forty-something years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I’m not holding my breath.

Dude, if you’re reading this, you’re a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.

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.

thought that being patronized was an experience a woman chooses to have, or could choose not to have—and so the fault was all mine.