A man who likes to preach

I still don't know why Sally and I bothered to go to that party on a forested slope outside Aspen. The people at the party were old and surprisingly boring, so much so that we, in our 40s, were the "young ladies" of the event. The house is nice -- if you like a Ralph Laurentian log cabin -- a sturdy, luxurious one 9,000 feet above sea level, complete with elk antlers, Kilim floral blankets and a wood-burning stove. Just as we were about to leave, the host said, "No, just wait a minute. We can talk." He was a strong man who made a lot of money.

He asked us to wait until the rest of the guests had drifted away in the summer evening before we sat down at his solid wood table. He said, "Well, I hear you've written two books."

"Several, actually," I replied.

He sounded as if he were eagerly encouraging a friend's 17-year-old daughter to describe her flute practice: "What's it about?"

The six or seven books I had published by then were about very different things, but I started talking about the one closest to that summer night in 2003, "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Old West." Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West), on the annihilation of time and space, and the industrialization of daily life. Before I could get to Muybridge, he interrupted: "Did you hear about that very important new book on Muybridge that just came out this year?"

Having been forced into the role of the ignorant girl, I was perfectly willing to embrace the possibility that another book on the same subject had just been published and that I had somehow missed it. He was already talking about this very important book, with that smug expression I know all too well: a man who talks, his eyes fixed on the distant, fuzzy horizon that is his own authority.

At this point, let me make it clear that I have had many lovely men in my life, including many editors who have been willing to listen and encourage me and publish my work since I was young, my incredibly generous brother, and other wonderful friends -- like the bachelor of Oxford in The Canterbury Tales. I remember Mr. Peran's Chaucer lesson, "he would teach it with pleasure, he would learn it with pleasure." But there are other men out there. So Mr. Very Important continues to talk smugly about the book I should have heard until Sally interrupts him, or tries to: "It's her book."

But he went on with his story. Sally had to say "It's her book" three or four times before he finally got it. Then, as they say in 19th-century novels, his face went white. I did but he didn't actually read very important to the author of the book, just before he saw a review on the New York times book review, the fact that his world was clear rules has become so confusing, he surprised and speechless now - but just speechless for a moment, he soon began to gush. As women, we try to be polite and wait until we are out of earshot to burst out laughing and never really stop. I love the interludes when some normally sneaky, indistinguishable force slips through the grass, as obvious as, say, a boa constrictor that swallowed a cow, or elephant poop on the carpet.

The slippery slope of silence

Yes, both men and women may spout at events about trivial matters and conspiracy theories, but in my experience that mix of downright confrontational confidence and total ignorance is gendered. Men explain things to me and other women, whether they know what they're talking about or not. Some men.

Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's an assumption that often makes it harder for any woman in any field; It makes women afraid to speak up, or unable to be heard when they do; Like street harassment, it silences young women by suggesting that "this is not their world." It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation, while fuelling unsupported overconfidence in men.

I wouldn't be surprised if the failure to hear the voice of Coleen Rowley, the female F.B.I. agent who first raised the alarm about al Qaeda, shaped the trajectory of American politics since 2001 in part. Anyway, a Bush administration that didn't listen to anything -- that there were no links between Iraq and al Qaeda or weapons of mass destruction, or that war wouldn't be "a piece of cake" -- surely shaped our political trajectory (even the voices of male pundits couldn't penetrate their bastions of self-righteousness).

Ego may have something to do with that war, but this syndrome is a battle that almost every woman faces every day, and it's the battle within her, the belief in her own excess, the silent solicitation. Even a decent career as a writer (and the proper application of a lot of research and facts) did not completely liberate me from this war. After all, there was a moment when my shaky sense of certainty was almost willing to surrender in the face of Mr Very Important and his overconfidence.

Don't forget, I already have more affirmation of my right to think and speak than most women, and I also know that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for improving, understanding, listening, and progressing. But excessive doubt can paralyze action, while blind confidence can create egotistical fools, like those who have ruled us since 2001. There is a happy midpoint between the poles to which the two sexes are pushed, a warm equatorial belt between giving and taking, where we should all meet.

For example, even more extreme versions of our situation are present in some Middle Eastern countries. There, a woman's testimony has no legal force, so a woman cannot prove to the court that she was raped by a male rapist without a male witness. There were very few male witnesses.

Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just beginning to learn what feminism was and why it was needed, I had a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, in a light-hearted entertainment theme, he recounted how a neighbor's wife in the suburban neighborhood where they had built the bomb had run out of her house naked in the middle of the night, screaming that her husband was going to kill her. I said, how do you know he wasn't really trying to kill her? He patiently explained that they were both middle-class people who deserved respect. So "her husband tried to kill her" is simply not a plausible reason for her to rush out of the house Shouting that her husband was going to kill her. And "she's crazy" is...

Even to get a court restrictions (Restraining Order), a fairly new law means - you also need to have confidence to convince the court a man after physical threats to their composition, the police can perform. Plus, restraining orders don't work most of the time. Violence is a way of silencing people, denying their voice and their credibility, claiming that you have power over their right to live. About 3 women are killed every day by their spouse or ex-spouse in this country (USA) and it is one of the leading causes of death among pregnant women. At the heart of the feminist fight to legally criminalize rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence and workplace sexual harassment is the need to make women's voices credible and heard.

I tend to believe that only when these actions are taken seriously, when the big things that stop us and kill us have been brought into the legal framework since the mid-1970s (long after I was born), will women truly gain human status. If anyone wants to argue that workplace sexual harassment is not a matter of life and death, remember that Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, then just 20, was killed by her superior officer on a winter's night as she waited to testify against her. Her charred, pregnant remains were later found in a fire pit in his backyard.

No matter how trivial a conversation may be, when someone flatly declares that "he knows without a doubt what he's talking about and she doesn't," it maintains the ugliness of the world and darkens its light. After my book, "Wanderlust: A History of Walking," was published in 2000, I found that I was much more able to resist being bullied for my ideas and interpretations. On two occasions, I protested a man's behavior, only to be told that what I said never happened, that I was too subjective, delusional, fussy, dishonest -- in a word, too feminine.

Most of the time in my life, I would doubt myself and withdraw. My public role as a history writer has helped me stand firm, but few women have been so inspired. On a planet of more than six billion people, there must be a billion women who have been told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is and has never been on their side. This goes well beyond "man lecturing me", but they all belong to the same island of ego.

Men, still, are preaching to me. No man has ever apologized for falsely explaining to me something I know that he doesn't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I have about 40 more years to live, so maybe I will. But I'm not holding my breath.

A woman fighting on two fronts

A few years after I met that idiot in Aspen, I was giving a talk in Berlin. The Marxist writer Tariq Ali invited me to dinner with a male writer and translator, and three women slightly younger than me. The three young women remained respectful and mostly silent throughout the meal. Tariq is great. And the translator probably resented my insistence on playing a modest role in the conversation. When I mentioned how Women Strike for Peace, an unusual but little-known anti-nuclear and anti-war group founded in 1961, had helped to abolish the House Un-American Activities Investigative Committee (HUAC), Mr. Very Important No. 2 sneered at me. He insists that the HUAC did not exist in the early 1960s and that no women's group played a role in its downfall. His disdain was so sharp, his confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seemed like a terrible experience and a futile attempt that would only lead to more humiliation.

I think I'd published nine books by then, including one that drew on first-hand sources and interviews with Women Striking for Peace. But explanatory men still assume, through a subtle, fertile metaphor, that I am a vase to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian might mention what they have and what I lack, but wisdom is not in your crotch -- even if you can write Virginia Woolf's long, smooth, melodious sentences about the delicate subordination of women through your penis in the snow. Back in my hotel room I Googled and found Eric Bentley's definitive book on the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which referred to the "Women's Strike for Peace" as "the fatal blow to the eventual downfall of HUAC."

My subsequent Nation article (about Jane Jacobs, Betty Friedan and Rachel Carson) opened with this experience, in part to shout at the more obnoxious men who had spoken to me in a preachy tone: "Dude, if you're reading this, you're a carbuncle on the face of humanity, an impediment to civilization. Shame on you."

The fight against preachy men has trampled many women -- my generation, the new generation we desperately need, here, in Pakistan, in Bolivia, in Java. Not to mention the millions of women who came before me, who were not allowed to enter laboratories, libraries, conversations, revolutions, or even be included in this category called "human."

After all, the Women's Strike for Peace was founded by women who were tired of making coffee or working as typists, and who didn't want to be left without any voice or decision-making power in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1950s. Most women fight on two fronts: one in their own fields; The other, just for the right to speak, the right to have an opinion, to be recognized that they also have the right to facts and truth, the right to value and the right to be a human being. Things are better than they used to be, but this war is not going to end in my lifetime. I'm still fighting, for me and for the young women out there who have something to say and want to be able to say it.

Afterword.

One evening in March 2008, as I often do, I joked over dinner that I was going to write an article called "Men Explain Things to Me." Every writer has a "horse pen" of ideas that never make it to the racetrack. I sometimes take the pony out for a walk, just for fun. My guest, the brilliant theorist and activist Marina Sterling, insisted that I must write it, because people like her sister Sam needed to read it. Young women, she says, need to know that being looked down upon is not because of their own secret failures, but because of the boring old gender wars that most of us have experienced at some point.

The next morning, I sat down and wrote it in one sitting. When words are put together so quickly, it is clear that they have been writing themselves in the depths of my unconscious mind for a long time. It wants to be written; He never sleeps for the racetrack; As soon as I sat down in front of the computer, it went into full gallop. Since Marina was up later than I was at that time, I had the article for breakfast and sent it that day to Tom Inglehart of Tomdispatch, who quickly posted it online. It spread quickly, like all the other articles on Tom's site, and it kept getting reposted, reposted, shared, and commented on. It's more popular than anything I've written before.

It plucked a string. A nerve. The men whose nerves had been dialed started attacking my personality, my experiences, what I stood for, and "What kind of person goes to a swanky party in Aspen" (to which the short answer is a SAN Franciscan visiting Sally in Aspen on a road trip). Also, they attacked the possibility that the playground was not made into a nice flat surface, so the marbles would not roll over. Some also seem to feel that they can bully and humiliate others into admiring the incomparable level of the field (some even enter the "men's power corner", where men are the only victims that matter). I often feel that online comment sections are like an acid bath that dissolves all sounds that aren't made of steel, and most of the time I ignore them. But the comments on the article, like the emails and conversations that followed, were interesting because they pointed to some larger trends, so I put on my armor and took a risk.

Some men explain that men explaining things to women is not a gendered phenomenon. Yet women point out that by insisting on their right not to take a woman's own account of her true experiences seriously, men are again successfully preaching in the manner described above. (Frankly, I do believe that women also explain things in a condescending manner to men and others. But this does not represent a vast power gap, which can take a far more frightening form, or a broader pattern of gender functioning in our society.)

The other men said they got it, no problem. After all, in our day and age, male feminists have made their presence felt, and feminism is more interesting than ever. Not everyone was amused, though. In 2008, I received an email on Tom Express from an older man who lived in Indianapolis. He told me that he had never "looked down on a woman on a personal or professional level," and then proceeded to chide me for not "talking to normal men more, or at least doing my homework first." He also gave me advice on how to live my life and commented on my "inferiority complex." He believes that feeling inferior is an experience that women choose to have, and that women can choose not to have -- so it's all my fault.

A Web site called Academic Men Explain Things to Me has sprung up, and thousands of women who attend or teach at colleges have shared stories of being belittled, ignored, interrupted and the like. Soon after the article was published, the term "Mansplaining" was coining, sometimes credited to me. I didn't actually invent the term, though my writing, and all the men who have embodied it, have provided inspiration for its creation. (I have some doubts about the word itself, so I don't use it much myself. It seems to me that it emphasizes the fault of men's explanations, rather than the fact that some men explain what they shouldn't but don't hear what they should hear. If it's not clear enough in the original text, I'm happy for people to explain to me things they know that I'm interested in but don't know. It's only when they explain to me what I know they don't that the conversation becomes problematic.) By 2012, the term "mansplaining" -- one of the New York Times' 2010 words of the year -- had begun to be used in mainstream political news.

Alas, that's because the word fits our times. In August 2012, Tom Express republished the "Men Explain Things to Me" piece. Coincidentally, almost that same day, Representative Todd Akin made his famous statement about abortion, declaring that a woman who has been raped does not need to have an abortion because "if it's a real rape, the female body has a way of shutting down a whole set of functions." That election season was filled with wild statements from conservative men defending rape and opposing facts, mixed with feminists' explanations of why feminism was needed and why these people were terrible. I was happy to be a voice in that conversation. The article made a comeback.

Plucked strings and nerves: The article continues to spread, with lots of people still tweeting, reposting and linking. The point is never to suggest that I feel particularly oppressed, but to point out that these conversations are like thin edges of wedges that open for men and close for women Spaces to speak, to be heard, to have rights, to participate, to be respected, to be whole and free as human beings. In polite conversation, it is a way of expressing the same kind of power as in impolite conversation and physical threats and violence. The same power is expressed in how our world is organized, how women are silenced, erased and annihilated: as equals, participants, people with rights and even, in many cases, as lives.

The struggle continues for women to be recognized as persons with the right to life, freedom and participation in cultural and political affairs. Sometimes it can be quite a struggle. I was surprised when I wrote this article. It starts with a funny life story and ends with rape and murder. It made it clear to me that the series stretched from minor social annoyances to violent silencing and death. (I think we would have a better understanding of misogyny and violence against women if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole, rather than separate domestic violence from rape, murder, and the harassment and threats that spread online, at home and in the workplace, and on the street. Taken together, the pattern is clear.)

The right to be present and to speak is a fundamental condition of life, dignity and freedom. I am so grateful that after the forced silence of my early years, sometimes because of submission to violence, I have grown as a voice. It makes me forever on the side of the voiceless.