Rebecca Solnit
From this interview: I saw something on social media yesterday that was just a graph of Japanese people recording when the first cherry blossoms bloomed going back, I think, to the 10th century. You can’t chart change if you don’t have what scientists call a baseline, a starting point. What were things like then? And I often feel when we talk about where we are, people don’t really have a baseline. I’ve been told half my life that feminism didn’t do anything, or feminism failed, by people who have no idea how bleak, marginalized, repressed, excluded, the condition of women was in the world into which I was born. And I’m 64, so I’m a little older than second-wave feminism. And my God, the world I was born into no longer exists.
So a lot of what I wanted to do with this book is give people back the baselines, first to see that we have changed the world profoundly, the we that believes in universal human rights, the rights of nature, inclusion, equality. I might as well say DEI, although that’s become such an acronym. Can we do JEDI, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, which is a much more fun acronym? And something that I think isn’t visible if you don’t have the baselines is what the right is basically doing internationally, and especially with Trumpism in the USA, is trying to make history run backwards. I always picture old men trying to push the rewind button on a video cassette player, because that seems like the right technology for them.
Because if you listen to what MAGA, and Trumpism, and the right is saying, they’re telling us five things. The last two will sound super familiar to everyone, but I don’t think people are hearing the first three clearly enough. So here’s my little list. You all are very powerful, number one. Two, you’ve changed everything. Three, all those different things you do are actually all connected. All the queer rights, human rights, anti-racism, feminism, environmental, climate, anti-colonialism, et cetera. Those are the things we don’t hear clearly enough, maybe because they’re shouting so loudly, “You did all those things and we fucking hate it,” that’s four. And, “We want to change it all back.”
Because if you look at what their agenda is, well, I’ve said for a long time that Make America Great Again really means make America 1958 again, and sometimes 1858 again. They really want to return to their gilded, fantasy version of a world in which queer people, people of color, women, are not equal to white men, especially straight white Christian men. They want to go back and forget everything we’ve learned since Rachel Carson about the natural world, that everything we do has consequences, that nothing we do goes away. There is always downwind and downstream bioaccumulation, and all the rest, so that they can pollute and destroy nature unhindered.
And I don’t think that’s a successful program. There is no rewind button on history. And once people have power and agency, and have seen what it’s like to have rights, voting rights, reproductive rights, they’re not interested in going back. And we are the majority. So we’re in this epic struggle. And in the short term, we have lost a lot of things. Roe v. Wade could be an example, but in the long term, it’s all pushback against what we’ve gained, including Roe v. Wade. Women had no reproductive rights, pretty much. In that world I was born into, people forget, for example, that Griswold v. Connecticut gave not all women, just married couples, the right to use birth control. More struggle had to happen for single women to have access to birth control not interfered with by the state. Roe v. Wade came about in 1973, because abortion rights were not among our rights.
So we have changed the world profoundly. They want to change it back. Our job is to not let them, partly by remembering how powerful and successful we’ve been in changing it. By celebrating our victories, our heroes, understanding the forces of change, and that begins with having a baseline.
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If you don’t have a thousand years of when cherry blossoms bloom, you don’t know that they bloom earlier now because of climate change. If you don’t know what things were like then, you don’t know how we’ve changed them. I love that you brought up marriage equality, because something I find incredibly exciting, first that we liberate each other, that all these movements as the right believes and we sometimes forget are related. I think the reason why marriage equality, as in equal access to marriage for same-sex couples or couples of whatever gender was possible, is because feminists had in the decades before transformed marriage itself from a legally and culturally instituted, unequal relationship in which the husband was essentially the master, the wife, essentially the chattel, servant, subordinate.
And that came to me when I was thinking, “Why is the right so upset about what we call marriage equality?” And I was like, “Oh, they don’t want marriage equality of the kind that we officially talk about, because they’re deeply committed to marriage inequality, which is a subordinate wife and a dominant husband.” And I think that marriage equality in the legal sense was made possible by feminists creating marriage equality in the sense of equal relationships. There was this glorious moment when Terry Gross asked Gloria Steinem this question. She said, “So, you didn’t get married until your 60s?” And Gloria Steinem laughs and says, “Yeah, first I had to reinvent the institution of marriage.” And then she describes, if she had gotten married when she was young in the 1960s, she would have given away so many of her rights, including bodily self-control. Marital rape only became illegal in all 50 states in this country in 1993, when the last one did that. And there’s still some caveats, but wives had so little jurisdiction over their own property, their bodies, et cetera.
People are constantly coughing up the credit card thing, and it’s like credit cards, yeah. But there’s so much more, and there’s so much more beyond the law that was just culturally normal, including domestic violence, and the kind of infantilization of women that changed. And my mom had a friend a little older than her, who took a job on the other side of the country and then told his wife that they were moving. And I don’t think a lot of people can imagine a woman not participating in deciding what part of the world she would live in, and just being expected to suck it up and obey. And that was the normal world of the 1950s. So, we changed it. And I think it laid the groundwork for marriage equality because marriage could be imagined as a freely negotiated relationship between equals who weren’t necessarily traditional male, female, because it had been transformed for traditional marriage between men and women. We liberate each other.
I grew up in San Francisco and gay men have liberated me, a tragically heterosexual woman, by just modeling as all the queer and trans people in San Francisco did. As they like to say, “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag,” that there’s so many ways to be human, so many ways to be sexual, so many ways to be attracted to other people or not. And that rules are there to be broken, in those cases.
As for the state of misogyny, I think it’s really important we pay attention to the backlash, to the manosphere, to the attempt internationally in the countries that have gone right-wing, like Russia and Hungary and Argentina as well as the US, to roll back women’s rights. But roll back, because we rolled them forward. But something that I think is equally important is, there’s a very astroturf attempt to convert young men to a much more sexist, misogynist worldview, and it’s pretty successful, but it’s very astroturf. It’s very much about the manipulative technologies of the internet, about people making money off it, about the way the tech oligarchs allow a lot of deep fake porn and misogyny, hate, and harassment to live on the internet because it slightly increases the profit margins of the already richest men in the world.
And yet at the same time, I think it’s really important to notice that, yes, we have to pay attention to the new misogyny in the manosphere. But quietly, most men across much of the world have become feminists without really knowing it. The way that men behave around women in public, in the workplace, in families and relationships, is very, very different than what was considered normal and acceptable when I was young and sexist jokes, grabbing somebody’s ass, wolf whistles, sexual harassment in the workplace — and sexual harassment was named by feminists. The term had to be coined, and then laws were passed. And then Anita Hill, in 1991 at the Clarence Thomas hearings, really gave the public a huge education in what it is and how it happens, and what the limited options were at that point to respond to it.
But you just see, in so many heterosexual marriages, that men are much more involved in child raising. And they may not be doing their equal share with kids, or domestic work, but the expectations and the norms are radically different than they were. Women have entered the workplace and are earning their own livings in many cases, and sometimes they’re earning more. And part of the manosphere crisis is, women don’t have to put up with men because we are not economically dependent the way we were when we were not supposed to work at all, stay home, or were not even eligible or encouraged to become doctors and lawyers and professors, and all those more high-paid positions. And because we’re not dependent, we partner when somebody actually meets our needs, including our needs for respect. And that seemed like it should be a lovely thing for everyone concerned, but the manosphere backlash has tried to convince men it’s a crisis.
[From Interview Culture & Media :: Hope Is Not Naive: Rebecca Solnit on Backlash, Power, and Political Memory]
“What if changing the world looked more like care than like war,” asks writer Rebecca Solnit.
