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The Ground Under Our Feet
The crucial sentence in “Men Explain Things to Me” is “credibility is a basic survival tool.” But I was wrong that it’s a tool. You hold a tool in your own hands, and you use it yourself. What it does is up to you. Your credibility arises in part from how your society perceives people like you, and we have seen over and over again that no matter how credible some women are by supposedly objective standards reinforced by evidence and witnesses and well-documented patterns, they will not be believed by people committed to protecting men and their privileges….
Until a few decades ago, wives throughout much of the world, including the United States, lacked the right to make contracts and financial decisions or even to exercise jurisdiction over their own bodies that overrode their husbands’ ability to do so; in some parts of the world, a wife is still property under the law, and others choose her husband. To be a person of no consequence, to speak without power, is a bewilderingly awful condition, as though you were a ghost, a beast, as though words died in your mouth, as though sound no longer traveled. It is almost worse to say something and have it not matter than to be silent….
— from Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit
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“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other…
