Men Explain Things To Me

The theme of gender roles also runs throughout most of the book’s essays. Again, the theme intersects with other themes and motifs. It is highly relevant to the silencing of women, for example. Discussing the actions of Mr. Very Important I, Solnit notes that the “out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered” (4). That is, his actions are shaped by inculcation into traditional gender roles which teach that men are automatically better informed than women and are entitled to talk over them, even when they do not really know a great deal about the subject at hand. Indeed, gender roles are so central to his behavior that he cannot truly comprehend the fact that Solnit wrote the book about which he is lecturing her. The information “confuse[s] the neat categories into which his world [is] sorted” and renders him speechless for a moment “before he [begins] holding forth again” (4).

Likewise, the playing out of gender roles is central to violence against women. As Solnit observes, “violence doesn’t have a race, class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender” (21). That is to say, it is vital that we recognize that “virtually all the perpetrators of such crimes are men” (21). Only by doing this, and talking “about masculinity or male roles” (23) and “about how masculinity is imagined, about what’s praised and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys” (35) can we begin to challenge the pervasive threat of violence against women. Gender roles are also key to social responses to such violence. This is perhaps most apparent in Solnit’s recollection of an incident from her youth when “women were raped on the campus of a great university,” so all female students were advised not to go out and effectively to “[g]et in the house” (77). When “pranksters” propose the alternative solution “that all men be excluded from campus after dark […] men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate” (77). This is a direct expression of gender roles in action: the assumption that women should be quiet, retiring, and dependent means that telling them to stay indoors does not appear shocking to many men, while the suggestion that men, who are traditionally seen as being entitled to their own independence and autonomy, do the same is met with shock, horror, and anger. 

Finally, we see challenges to gender roles. In part, this comes from women speaking out despite men’s efforts to silence them. In such situations, Solnit asserts, the “ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt” (78). However, we also see it in other places, such as same-sex marriage’s challenge to traditional marriage. Reframing marriage equality as a meaning “marriage […] between equals” (60), Solnit suggests that same-sex marriage “metaphysically” (59) threatens traditional marriage because it subverts the latter’s focus on traditional gender roles. She notes that lesbians and gay men have “opened up the question of what qualities and roles are male and female in ways that can be liberating for straight people” (62) and that same-sex marriage would continue this process so that “the meaning of marriage is likewise opened up” (62), providing a further challenge to restrictive gender roles. Accordingly, Solnit suggests that much of conservative people’s resistance to same-sex marriage comes from a “wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles” (64).

Drawing on the work of Virginia Woolf, Solnit suggests that embracing the unknown and the unknowable is an admirable and important exercise. She argues that, contrary to most people’s responses, “the unknown need not be turned into the known” (86) and that there is much to be gained from taking another approach. Often, she draws on the symbol of darkness to help explore this idea, beginning with a quote from Woolf’s journal: “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think” (85). Solnit lauds this “celebration of darkness,” using it to reframe the unknown as something positive and suggesting that “the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed” (86).

Solnit sees writers as being particularly important to the task of exploring the darkness, suggesting that it is “the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open” (87). Again, she points to Woolf as an exemplar of this, suggesting that she is “unparalleled” (89) in the “the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation” (88-89). She highlights Woolf’s essays in particular, describing them as “models of counter-criticism” (100). Such a “counter” approach to criticism involves embracing the unknown rather than attempting to evade or control “the slipperiness of the work and the ambiguities of the artist’s intent and meaning” (100). In so doing, counter-criticism “seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities” (100-01).

Solnit also looks to the unknown as a source of hope and liberation. She argues that the “grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next […] And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have” (94). Similarly, she returns to Woolf to remark that the writer’s work “is always celebrating a liberation that is not official, institutional, rational, but a matter of going beyond the familiar, the safe, the known into the broader world” (101-102), again presenting the unknown as a site of liberating potential. Applying this to resistance to contemporary oppression, she notes that, because “what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot” (104), “the task of naming and describing” things that are hard to name and describe is “an essential one in any revolt against the status quo under capitalism and consumerism” (105).