Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

“You were not just raped,” your rapist may say, and then if you persist there may be death threats, because killing people is the easy way to be the only voice in the room.

So much of feminism has been women speaking up about hitherto unacknowledged experiences, and so much of antifeminism has been men telling them these things don’t happen. I coined a term a while ago, privelobliviousness, to try to describe the way that being the advantaged one, the represented one, often means being the one who doesn’t need to be aware and, often, isn’t. The rest of us get used to the transgendering and cross-racializing of our identities as we invest in protagonists like Ishmael or Dirty Harry or Holden Caulfield.

This is a problem straight white men suffer from especially, because the western world has held up a mirror to them for so long-and turns compliant women into mirrors reflecting them back twice life size, Virginia Woolf noted. This can happen if he’s been insufficiently exposed to the fact that there are also other people who have other experiences, and that they too were created equal, with certain inalienable rights, and that consciousness thing that is so interesting and troubling is also going on inside their heads. It isn’t a fact universally acknowledged that a person who mistakes his opinions for facts may also mistake himself for God. Sometimes they also seem to think that they are in charge, of me as well of facts. Well, actually, no it isn’t, but who doesn’t love riffing on Jane Austen? The answer is: lots of people, because we’re all different and some of us haven’t even read Pride and Prejudice dozens of times, but the main point is that I’ve been performing interesting experiments in proffering my opinions and finding that some of the men out there respond on the grounds that my opinion is wrong, while theirs is right because they are convinced that their opinion is a fact, while mine is a delusion.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction.

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit