Quotes by Rebecca Solnit

Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.

Thanks to demographics, that conservative push is not going to work-the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again- and because genies dont go back into bottles and queer people are not going back into the closet and women arent going to surrender. Its a war, but I dont believe were losing it, even if we wont win it anytime soon either; rather, some battles are won, some are engaged, and some women are doing really well while others suffer. And things continue to change in interesting and sometimes even auspicious ways.

The backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning. The world has changed profoundly, and it needs to change far more.

Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what theyre talking about.

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, arent likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairos Tahrir Square, and theres no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers.

Its rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family. Its not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence come from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.

Ive learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing - though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. Theres a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.

That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social minor to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harrassment and intimidation, online at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear). Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, arent likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairos Tahrir Square, and theres no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers.

Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though its almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesnt have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a journalist, another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anitas image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts would appear on her image. The difference between these online gamers and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.

Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even. There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages also fail or how nice or not their bodies are, even the movie-star bodies. They are the gender that commits the great majority of crime, particularly violent crime, and they are the majority of suicides as well. American men are falling behind women in attending college, and have fallen farther in the current economic depression than women, which youd think would make them interesting subjects of inquiry.

When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men.

Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase same-sex marriage for the term marriage equality. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. Thats not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a slave.

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to chose- between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.

Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.

The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.

On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think. Dark, she seems to be saying, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the futures unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. Be again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.