Words&Dirt

“I think the future of something we may no longer call feminism must include a deeper inquiry into men,” writes Rebecca Solnit in the closing pages of Men Explain Things to Me. “Feminism sought and seeks to change the whole human world; many men are on board with the project, but how it benefits men, and in what ways the status quo damages them as well, could bear far more thought” (150). As a man who considers himself “on board with the project” of feminism, and whose livelihood is directly dependent on two women with whom I share a home, perhaps my reactions to Solnit’s book can make a small contribution to her proposed “inquiry into men.”

The first thing I try to remember when taking up a book like this is that it’s not written for me––or for men more broadly. Although she demonstrates an appropriate disdain for the many loathsome acts committed by men around the world, there’s nothing particularly misandrist about Solnit’s writing. Still, her thoughts come from a highly gendered place that generally speaks much more forcefully to women than to men. And that’s fine, of course. But as a male reader on the borders of a community that I am both a part of (as a feminist) and separate from (as a man), my responses to Solnit are inescapably gendered as well.

So, as a man, I thought this was an interesting and entertaining read. Solnit’s prose is sharp and clean, and she has a great knack for trawling ideas and quotes from different moments in cultural history to flesh out her arguments. Men Explain Things to Me provides a brief but detailed overview of many of the most important moments in feminism in the last few decades.

I think the weakness of this book––again, from a male perspective––is that it’s unlikely to change the minds of men that Solnit and other feminists (myself included) ultimately need to reach if we want large-scale progress. When addressing women’s issues, the essays are quite repetitive, which sometimes helps to drive home a point, but also becomes predictable and canned after a while. I also think Solnit’s acerbic wit, which accounts for some very funny moments, would be off-putting to men who don’t already agree with her. For example:

Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out [by male gamers]…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. (30-1)

I agree entirely with the content of this passage, but think the “Manistan” comment at the end might alienate men who are on the fence about Solnit’s perspective. However, it’s also a clever rhetorical quip that nicely rounds out that section of the essay. So while I don’t think she should necessarily have edited out the “Manistan” reference, she might be limiting her influence by keeping it in. That is totally Solnit’s prerogative, but as a man who would like to see the coarser members of my gender come around to the feminist viewpoint, bits like this would make me think twice about recommending Men Explain Things to Me as an olive branch text. The unfortunate reality is that the worst of us––men who threaten or actually commit violence against women––probably wouldn’t accept even a sugar-coated olive branch (okay, that’s a rather yucky image, but you get what I mean). We’re still left with the problem of how to bridge the gender gap without falling into internecine communication patterns.

Solnit is of course not responsible for solving this timeless problem, and clearly is content to speak her mind exactly the way she sees fit. This attitude is a great asset, and is most prominent in “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable”––by far the most intellectually rich (and, interestingly, the least gender-driven) essay in this collection. “Woolf’s Darkness” is a journey into Virginia Woolf’s suggestion that, “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think” (79).

Solnit interprets “darkness” as “uncertainty” in this context, and fills her essay with keen and heartfelt observations about a wide range of topics, including the psychological experience of darkness, the limits of knowledge and language, the (in)significance of actions with far-reaching consequences, the role of authentic criticism in deepening our understanding of art, and the idea that political and cultural revolutions take shape primarily in the imagination. There are too many luscious passages to count, but here’s my favorite:

My own task these past twenty years or so of living by words has been to try to find or make a language to describe the subtleties, the incalculables, the pleasures and meanings––impossible to categorize––at the heart of things. My friend Chip Ward speaks of ‘the tyranny of the quantifiable,’ of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having.

The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism. Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters. The revolt against this destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favor of subtleties, of pleasures money can’t buy and corporations can’t command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning, of the slow, the meandering, the digressive, the exploratory, the numinous, the uncertain. (97-8)

Although the modern world is a safer and more liberated space––for women as well as men––than perhaps at any other moment in human history, we are still beset by many tyrannys, internal and external. In some senses, the “tyranny of the quantifiable” is a product of culture, but it’s also an inescapable feature of human cognition, which tends to reduce, categorize, and count the world into a corner in order to carve out the slightest notion of what the hell’s going on. Recognizing this innate handicap, those committed to explicating and problematizing the “more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena”––the Rebecca Solnits of the world––are indispensable.

Review: 6/10