one has trouble understanding that.
Since the essay I wrote that morning was published, I’ve heard from lawyers, scientists, doctors, scholars in many fields, athletes and mountaineers, mechanics, builders, film technicians, and other women who’ve had their field of expertise explained to them by men who didn’t have any idea what they were talking about but thought the world was so ordered that knowledge was inherent in them as lack of it was in women, that listening was our natural state and obligation and holding forth their right, perhaps that it is her job to let his sense of self expand as hers shrivels. That asymmetry about who’s in charge of the facts applied to everything from intellectual matters to what just happened a moment ago, and it undermines women’s capacity to do almost anything, including, sometimes, survive.
The essay begins with that funny anecdote about the man who told me about the very important Muybridge book. The essay’s next anecdote from my own life was something else:
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. . . .
The same assumption that you are incompetent in your field of expertise may mean you’re viewed as incompetent to know if someone is trying to kill you. It’s an assumption that has resulted in death for many victims of domestic violence and stalking. This essay headed to places I did not know I was going to go.
I am a woman who when a poet friend spoke to me of an incident with a nun in Catholic school as “the only time anyone ever hit me” was staggered to try to imagine a life as safe and calm as hers in this respect. I am the daughter of a man who considered it his right to hit women and children and did as his father did before him, and of a woman who had or felt she had for two decades no recourse from that man and no place to register a complaint. I am a woman who by the first years of my teens had to learn to squirm and worm and fade away when adult men pursued me because telling them to leave me alone was in that era of my youth inconceivable as something I had the right or even the safety to say and they had the obligation or even inclination to heed. I am a woman who during my youth thought it likely I would be raped and maybe also murdered and all my life have lived in a world where women were raped and murdered by strangers for being women and by men they knew for asserting their rights or just being women and where those rapes and murders were lasciviously lingered on in art. I am a woman who has been told at crucial times that I was not believable and that I was confused and that I was not competent to deal in facts. And in all that I am ordinary. After all, I live in a society where rape kits and campus stalking awareness month and domestic violence shelters in which women and children are supposed to hide from husbands and fathers are normal fixtures.
And I am a woman who became a writer and through it gained some standing while writing about other things from art to war, and sometimes tried to put that standing to work to try to open up space for others’ voices. I am a woman who one morning wrote an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me” that is about the way that the mild disparagement of having your subject of expertise explained to you by a fool who does not know that he does not know what he’s talking