The Menace of Men ~ Rebecca Solnit

Aug 15, 2024

*from her essay collection ‘Recollections of My Non-Existence’, and worth reading – the collection and this extract. Enjoy(?).

It felt ubiquitous then. It still does. You could be harmed a little—by insults and threats that reminded you you were not safe and free and endowed with certain inalienable rights—or more by a rape, or more by a rape-kidnapping-torture-imprisonment-mutilation, more yet by murder, and the possibility of death always hung over the other aggressions. You could be erased a little so that there was less of you, less confidence, less freedom, or your rights could be eroded, your body invaded so that it was less and less yours, you could be rubbed out altogether, and none of those possibilities seemed particularly remote. All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence.

My friend Heather Smith remarked to me recently that young women are urged to “never stop picturing their murder.” From childhood onward, we were instructed to not do things—not go here, not work there, not go out at this hour or talk to those people or wear this dress or drink this drink or partake of adventure, independence, solitude; refraining was the only form of safety offered from the slaughter. During those years at the end of my teens and the beginning of my twenties, I was constantly sexually harassed on the street and sometimes elsewhere, though harassed doesn’t convey the menace that was often present.

The former Marine David J. Morris, author of a book on post-traumatic stress disorder, notes that the disorder is far more common and far more rarely addressed among rape survivors than combat veterans. He wrote me, “The science on the subject is pretty clear: according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat. Think about that for a moment—being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater.”

In war the people who try to kill you are usually on the other side. In femicide, they’re husbands, boyfriends, friends, friends of friends, guys on the street, guys at work, guys at the party or the dorm, and, the week I write this, the guy who called a Lyft and stabbed the pregnant driver to death and the guy who went into a bank and shot five women and the guy who shot the young woman who took him in when his parents kicked him out, to name a few examples of the carnage that made it into the news. Morris calls PTSD “living at the whim of your worst memories.” But he also suggests that war, as an atmosphere in which you live in fear of attack, mangling, annihilation, and in which people around you suffer those afflictions, can traumatize you even if you are physically untouched, and the fears can follow you long after what gave rise to them. Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it’s described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddenly fell into the water, but what if you’re swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?

I felt hemmed in, hunted. Over and over, women and girls were attacked not for what they’d done but because they were at hand when a man wished to—to punish is the word that comes to mind, though for what might linger as a question. Not for who but for what they were. We were. But really for who he was, a man who had the desire and believed he had the right to harm women. To demonstrate that his power was as boundless as her powerlessness. In the arts, the torture and death of a beautiful woman or a young woman or both was forever being portrayed as erotic, exciting, satisfying, so despite the insistence by politicians and news media that the violent crimes were the acts of outliers, the desire was enshrined in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, in so many horror movies, so many other films and novels and then video games and graphic novels where a murder in lurid detail or a dead female body was a standard plot device and an aesthetic object. Her annihilation was his realization. For the intended audience, it was apparently erotic, because in life women kept getting murdered in the course of sex crimes, and the fear of assault, of rape, was also a fear of violent death.

Which was a reminder that I was, we were, not the intended audience for so much art, including the stuff lauded as masterpieces and upheld as canonical. Sometimes the male protagonists protected women, particularly beautiful young white women, from other men, and protector was one face of their power, but destroyer was still the other face, and either one put your fate in their hands. They protected what was theirs to protect or destroy, and sometimes the plot was about his grief that he’d failed to protect, or his revenge against other men, and sometimes he destroyed her himself, and the story was still about him.

She was dead even before she was a corpse; she was a surface, a satellite, an accessory. In comics, the violent death of a woman as a plot device in a story focused on a man was so common that women coined a term for it, fridging, after the 1999 website Women in Refrigerators documenting the plethora of gruesome endings for female characters. In the video gaming world, young women who criticized the misogyny in video games were for years harassed with doxing and death and rape threats. Some, after grisly and detailed threats of harm, had to leave their homes and take extraordinary security precautions; that is, they had to disappear. Protecting women from online surveillance, threats, and harassment became an avocation for feminist cybersecurity experts.

That men on the margins should be punished for sexual violence, especially against white women, and that privileged and powerful men should not reinforces a hierarchy of relative value. It’s one in which what is being protected is not women per se, but who has property rights over which women (which was explicit in earlier laws that treated rape as trespass or damage of another man’s property and, into the 1980s in the USA, that reserved a husband’s right to rape his wife, and that almost never punished white men for raping women of color).

Feminists of an earlier era insisted that rape is about power, not erotic pleasure, though there are men for whom their own power or a woman’s powerlessness is the most erotic thing imaginable. For some women too, so we learn that our helplessness and peril is erotic, and accept or reject or struggle with the sense of self and stories that come with them. Jacqueline Rose wrote in 2018, “Sexual harassment is the great male performative, the act through which a man aims to convince his target not only that he is the one with the power—which is true—but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing.”

Though each incident I experienced was treated as somehow isolated and deviant, there were countless incidents, and they were of the status quo, not against or outside it. Talking about it made people uncomfortable, and mostly they responded by telling me what I was doing wrong. Some men told me they wished someone would sexually harass them, because they seemed to be unable to imagine it as anything but pleasant invitations from attractive people. No one was offering the help of recognizing what I was experiencing and agreeing that I had the right to be safe and free.

It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war—I am tempted to say that it made me crazy, but women are so often accused of being crazy, as a way of undermining their capacity to bear witness and the reality of what they testify to. Besides, in these cases, crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering. So it didn’t make me crazy; it made me unbearably anxious, preoccupied, indignant, and exhausted.