Ces hommes qui m'expliquent la vie

When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university
and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go
out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women,
confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a
poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus
after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being
asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all
because of the violence of one man. It is easy to name the disappearances of
the Dirty War as crimes, but what do we call the millennia of
disappearances of women, from the public sphere, from genealogy, from
legal standing, from voice, from life? According to the project Ferite a
Morte (Wounded to Death), organized by the Italian actress Serena Dandino
and her colleagues, about sixty-six thousand women are killed by men
annually, worldwide, in the specific circumstances they began to call
“femicide.” Most of them are killed by lovers, husbands, former partners,
seeking the most extreme form of containment, the ultimate form of
erasure, silencing, disappearance. Such deaths often come after years or
decades of being silenced and erased in the home, in daily life, by threat
and violence. Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once.
Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that
would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her
story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man,
the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is
already a victory, already a revolt.

Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as
threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they
attempt to control some women, and fear of that violence limits most
women in ways they’ve gotten so used to they hardly notice—and we
hardly address. There are exceptions: last summer someone wrote to me to
describe a college class in which the students were asked 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). The chasm between their worlds
had briefly and suddenly become visible.
Mostly, however, we don’t talk about it—though 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’s 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.
Threats of sexual assault now seem to take place online regularly. In late
2011, British columnist Laurie Penny wrote,
An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet. Having one and flaunting it is
somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell
you how they’d like to rape, kill, and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly
slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and
the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received,
and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation, and abuse.
Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened,
and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented
such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a
journalist, “another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal
threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took
the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita’s
image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts
would appear on her image.” The difference between these online gamers
and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder fourteen-year-old
Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to
education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for
claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.

But maybe you’re tired of statistics, so let’s just talk about a single incident
that happened in my city while I was researching this essay in January
2013, one of many local incidents that made the local papers that month in
which men assaulted women:
A woman was stabbed after she rebuffed a man’s sexual advances while she walked in
San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood late Monday night, a police spokesman said
today. The 33-year-old victim was walking down the street when a stranger approached
her and propositioned her, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said. When she
rejected him, the man became very upset and slashed the victim in the face and stabbed
her in the arm, Esparza said.
The man, in other words, framed the situation as one in which his chosen
victim had no rights and liberties, while he had the right to control and
punish her. This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It
begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.
Murder is the extreme version of that authoritarianism, where the
murderer asserts he has the right to decide whether you live or die, the
ultimate means of controlling someone. This may be true even if you are
obedient, because the desire to control comes out of a rage that obedience
can’t assuage. Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie
such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict
suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator
and the victims.
As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many
versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving
death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches
a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will
likely be rebuffed. The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted
together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos,
love into death, sometimes literally.
It’s a system of control. It’s why so many intimate-partner murders are of
women who dared to break up with those partners. As a result, it imprisons
a lot of women, and though you could say that the Tenderloin attacker on
January 7, or a brutal would-be-rapist near my own neighborhood on
January 5, or another rapist here on January 12, or the San Franciscan who
on January 6 set his girlfriend on fire for refusing to do his laundry, or the
guy who was just sentenced to 370 years for some particularly violent rapes
in San Francisco in late 2011, were marginal characters, rich, famous, and
privileged guys do it, too.
2013, one of many local incidents that made the local papers that month in
which men assaulted women:
A woman was stabbed after she rebuffed a man’s sexual advances while she walked in
San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood late Monday night, a police spokesman said
today. The 33-year-old victim was walking down the street when a stranger approached
her and propositioned her, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said. When she
rejected him, the man became very upset and slashed the victim in the face and stabbed
her in the arm, Esparza said.
The man, in other words, framed the situation as one in which his chosen
victim had no rights and liberties, while he had the right to control and
punish her. This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It
begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.
Murder is the extreme version of that authoritarianism, where the
murderer asserts he has the right to decide whether you live or die, the
ultimate means of controlling someone. This may be true even if you are
obedient, because the desire to control comes out of a rage that obedience
can’t assuage. Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie
such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict
suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator
and the victims.
As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many
versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving
death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches
a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will
likely be rebuffed. The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted
together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos,
love into death, sometimes literally.
It’s a system of control. It’s why so many intimate-partner murders are of
women who dared to break up with those partners. As a result, it imprisons
a lot of women, and though you could say that the Tenderloin attacker on
January 7, or a brutal would-be-rapist near my own neighborhood on
January 5, or another rapist here on January 12, or the San Franciscan who
on January 6 set his girlfriend on fire for refusing to do his laundry, or the
guy who was just sentenced to 370 years for some particularly violent rapes
in San Francisco in late 2011, were marginal characters, rich, famous, and
privileged guys do it, too.
The Japanese vice-consul in San Francisco was charged with twelve
felony counts of spousal abuse and assault with a deadly weapon in
September 2012, the same month that, in the same town, the ex-girlfriend of
Mason Mayer (brother of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer) testified in court:
“He ripped out my earrings, tore my eyelashes off, while spitting in my face
and telling me how unlovable I am . . . I was on the ground in the fetal
position, and when I tried to move, he squeezed both knees tighter into my
sides to restrain me and slapped me.” According to San Francisco
Chronicle reporter Vivian Ho, she also testified that “Mayer slammed her
head onto the floor repeatedly and pulled out clumps of her hair, telling her
that the only way she was leaving the apartment alive was if he drove her to
the Golden Gate Bridge ‘where you can jump off or I will push you off.’”
Mason Mayer got probation.

Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant
things and conspiracy theories, but 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.
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.
I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics since
2001 was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI
woman who issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was
certainly shaped by a Bush administration to which you couldn’t tell
anything, including that Iraq had no links to al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or
that the war was not going to be a “cakewalk.” (Even male experts couldn’t
penetrate the fortress of its smugness.)
Arrogance might have had something to do with the war, but this
syndrome is a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within
herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from
which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts
correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment
there when I was willing to let Mr. Important and his overweening
confidence bowl over my more shaky certainty.
Don’t forget that I’ve had a lot more confirmation of my right to think
and speak than most women, and I’ve learned that a certain amount of self-
doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and
progressing—though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence
produces arrogant idiots. There’s a happy medium between these poles to
which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and
take where we should all meet.
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.
Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just
beginning to get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had
a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was
telling—as though it were a light and amusing subject—how a neighbor’s
wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her
house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was
trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know that he wasn’t trying to kill
her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class
people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible
explanation for her fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to
kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand....
Even getting a restraining order—a fairly new legal tool—requires
acquiring the credibility to convince the courts that some guy is a menace
and then getting the cops to enforce it. Restraining orders often don’t work
anyway. Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their
credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. 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.
I tend to believe that women acquired the status of human beings when
these kinds of acts started to be taken seriously, when the big things that
stop us and kill us were addressed legally from the mid-1970s on; well
after, that is, my birth. And for anyone about to argue that workplace sexual
intimidation isn’t a life-or-death issue, remember that Marine Lance
Corporal Maria Lauterbach, age twenty, was apparently killed by her
higher-ranking colleague one winter’s night while she was waiting to testify
that he raped her. The burned remains of her pregnant body were found in
the fire pit in his backyard.
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. After my book Wanderlust
came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of
my own perceptions and interpretations. 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.
Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having
public standing as a writer of history helped me stand my ground, but few
women get that boost, and billions of women must be out there on this
seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to
their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever. This goes
way beyond Men Explaining Things, but it’s part of the same archipelago of
arrogance.
Men 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.

Les universités n'ont aucune bonne raison (mais beaucoup de mauvaises) de passer plus de temps à dire aux femmes comment survivre aux prédateurs plutôt que d'expliquer à l'autre moitié de leurs étudiants comment ne pas se comporter en prédateurs.