Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,76
about or who he’s talking to is on a spectrum, and that the other end of the spectrum is full of violent death.
I had a version of the essay printed out to put on the breakfast table with Marina’s coffee and my tea a couple of hours later, and at 10:42 that morning I sent thirteen friends, including Tina, the essay in an email also titled MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME. That morning’s version had a little superfluous ornamentation weeded out before publication, including, to my surprise when I look now, an epigraph from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” but it is very close to the essay I published online and, in truncated version, in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks later.
I had written about my own experiences and perceptions, and they had turned out to have a lot in common with other women’s experiences and perceptions. It went viral immediately and got millions of hits at the website Guernica over the years because the experiences and situations I described were so brutally common and so inadequately acknowledged. It has most likely had more impact than anything else I’ve done, this essay I wrote in one sitting that morning. As the title essay of a 2014 anthology of my feminist essays, it became a bestseller in South Korea and stayed that way for years in the United States, and it appeared in several other languages from Danish to Spanish to Farsi.
It prompted an anonymous commenter at the website LiveJournal to coin the word mansplaining soon after it first appeared, a word that caught on, that entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014, that is now widely known and used in English, exists in dozens of languages, and has begat a host of variations such as whitesplaining (and that’s often credited to me, though I did not coin it). It also provided some encouragement I’m proud of. A very famous woman writer, soon after the essay appeared, sent it to a well-known pundit, a bellicose misogynist, with this message: “Reading this wonderful essay by Rebecca Solnit reminded me of something I have been meaning to say to you for a long, long time. Go fuck yourself,” and it prompted one young woman I met to get divorced.
I have been thrilled and moved by the young women who came up to me to say that something I’ve written helped them locate their power and their value and reject their subjugation. You don’t really know what you do when you write, because it depends on how people read, and there are ways that knowing their appetites and interests can guide you down familiar paths and ways that not knowing can take you to appetites and interests you didn’t know existed and sometimes your readers didn’t either. There’s a Buddhist phrase about the work of bodhisattvas: “the liberation of all beings.” I see feminism as a subset of that work.
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A writer’s voice is supposed to be hers alone. It’s what makes someone distinct and recognizable, and it’s not quite style and not just tone or subject; it’s something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for. But the feminist themes that became a major part of my work after “Men Explain Things to Me” is for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival.
That work of mine sometimes included a chorus and sometimes joined one. When you pursue creative work, immortality is often held up as an ideal. You’re supposed to aspire to make something that will be recognized and that will, as they say, “keep your name alive,” and it’s true that words are alive when they’re read or heard. But I learned from the artists I researched and wrote about and the movements that changed the culture that there are two ways of making contributions that matter. One is to make work that stays visible before people’s eyes; the other is to make work that is so deeply absorbed that it ceases to be what people see and becomes how they see. It is no longer in front of them; it’s inside them. It is no longer the artist; it’s the people who are no longer only the audience.