Men Explain Things To Me

The theme of gender roles is central to the discussion of marriage equality in Essay 4. The essay begins by suggesting that, instead of denying that marriage equality is a threat to traditional marriage, advocates should “celebrate that threat” (59). Specifically, she believes that they should celebrate its threat to the rigid gender roles that traditional marriage reinforces. To demonstrate this idea, she reframes marriage equality as a meaning “marriage […] between equals” (60). From here, she asserts that this is “not what traditional marriage was” for most of Western history because “laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession” (60). It is this reinforcing of traditional gender roles that marriage equality challenges.

In another brief allusion to feminist progress, she notes that, in its challenges to legislation, attitudes, and gender roles, feminism has already done “so much to transform a hierarchical relationship into an egalitarian one” and so has helped to make “same-sex marriage possible” (62). Gay men and lesbians have also challenged legislation, attitudes, and gender roles, “open[ing] up the question of what qualities and roles are male and female in ways that can be liberating for straight people” (62). Same-sex marriage continues this process so that “the meaning of marriage is likewise opened up” (62), providing a further challenge to restrictive gender roles. Solnit suggests that “American conservatives are frightened by this egalitarianism, or maybe just appalled by it” (63). However, she also notes that they fail to honestly raise a key reason for this: their wish to maintain the restrictive roles placed on men and women. Solnit makes this explicit when she observes that conservatives truly “wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles” (64).

Silencing women returns as a key motif in Essay 5 and is explored in a number of symbolic forms. The first is the white sheet in Ana Teresa Fernandez’s painting. The painting depicts a woman hanging washing on a line: “The white sheet hangs in front of her, but the wind blows it against her body, revealing her contours” (69). Thus, the woman “both exists and is obliterated” (70). That is to say, she both exists and is potentially silenced, covered, and denied. Such “obliteration” or the silencing of women’s experiences, voices, and lives, appears in numerous forms, including the failure to include any women on a “family tree [that] has been traced back a thousand years” (70) or the practice of women taking their husbands’ names upon marriage. These practices deny “a woman’s genealogy and even her existence” (73), retroactively silencing women by ensuring there is no record of them. Returning to the symbolic sheet, Solnit suggests that, in traditional marriage, this silencing is akin to a woman’s husband “cover[ing] her like a sheet, like a shroud, like a screen” (74). She goes on to draw a parallel with cultural practices of women wearing veils and “disappear[ing] from view” (74). Traditionally, such veiling has served as “a kind of wall of privacy, the marker of a woman for one man, a portable architecture of confinement” (74), again potentially causing the woman to be subsumed by the man, silencing her own voice and lived experience.

The theme of violence against women returns with Solnit’s recollection of a time from her past when “women were raped on the campus of a great university” and women were advised not to go out and effectively to “[g]et in the house” (77). This incident is another example of silencing, not only through the violence itself as an act of abuse and control but also through the institutional response of telling women to hide themselves away, silence themselves, and limit their presence if they do not wish to be harmed by men. The alternative proposal “that all men be excluded from campus after dark” reinforces Solnit’s point: the very fact that “men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate” (77) highlights the degree to which the notion that women should be silent and hidden is normalized and conforms to traditional gender roles. In situations such as these, where silencing women is normalized and condoned, the “ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt” (78).

Solnit closes with another symbol: the spider’s web. Although Fernandez’s painting is untitled, it comes from a series titled “Telarañ. Spiderweb” (81). Solnit understands this as the “spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught” and “the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven” (81). She uses this to look at other connections between women, spiders, and weaving. She looks at Native American stories and the myths of the Ancient Greeks, finding rich cultural meanings. Her own contribution to the symbolic meaning of spiders’ webs challenges the single narrative of patrilineage and the silencing of women’s voices and stories, suggesting that it represents “the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats” (81). She then subverts the sheet, previously symbolic of women’s eradication, turning it is into “banners” that she hangs “on the laundry line” (82). These banners become empowering rather than silencing, celebrating the ability to “spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as grandfathers” (82).