Rebecca Solnit: The War Is Over (If You Want It), Feminism and Men

What Makes a Planet Inhabitable

The situation as it has long existed needs to be described bluntly. Let's just say that a significant number of men hate women, whether it's the stranger harassed in the street, the Twitter user threatened into silence online, or the wife who's beaten. Some men believe they are entitled to humiliate, punish, silence, violate, and even annihilate women. As a consequence, women face a startling amount of everyday violence and an atmosphere of menace, as well as a host of smaller insults and aggressions meant to keep us down. It's not surprising, then, that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies some men's rights groups as hate groups.

In this context, consider what we mean by rape culture. It's hate. Those sports-team and fraternity rapes, the ones that sometimes result in young men swapping phone videos that they never seem to recognize as evidence of felonies, are predicated on the idea that violating the rights, dignity, and body of another human being is a cool thing to do. Such group acts are based on a predatory-monster notion of what masculinity is, one to which many men don't subscribe but that affects us all. It's also a problem that men are capable of rectifying in ways women are not.

And maybe this is the answer to the guy in Alaska who asked me last June what feminism had in it for him. Remembering that conversation now, I can't help but think of the slogan that John Lennon and Yoko Ono began to circulate in the Vietnam era: "War is over (if you want it)." It was always assumed to be about the Vietnam War and was revived in the years of George W. Bush's wars, but it could mean any kind of war or every kind of war, including the ones that live in our own hearts and minds.

Hate is an exhausting pursuit with no real victories, and enemies are not a good thing to have. The mind of a rapist must not be a pleasant place to inhabit, and men who can't hear or recognize the humanity of half the population are missing something. If only the war were over! But, guy in Alaska, it would be nice if you could care about the well-being of others without reference to whether it confers advantages on you, too, especially since you have a lot of the advantages we aspire to, like being able to walk around without worrying about being a target.

The other evening, I left a talk on what makes a planet inhabitable -- temperature, atmosphere, distance from a star -- by an astrophysicist I know. I'd thought about asking a young man who was a friend of a friend of mine to accompany me to my car in the very dark park outside the California Academy of Sciences, but the astrophysicist and I fell to talking and walked to the car together without even questioning the necessity of it, and then I drove her to her car.

A couple of weeks earlier, I joined Emma Sulkowicz and a group of young women who were carrying a mattress between classes at Columbia University. You may already know that Sulkowicz is an art major who reported being raped and received nothing that resembled justice either from the campus authorities or the New York Police Department. In response, she is bearing witness to her plight with a performance-art piece that consists of carrying a dorm-room mattress with her whenever she's on campus, wherever she's going.

The media response has been tremendous. A documentary film team was along that day and the middle-aged camerawoman remarked to me that, if campus consent standards had existed when she was young, if the right of women to say no and the obligation of men to respect women's decisions had been recognized, her life would have been utterly different. I thought about it for a moment and realized: so would mine. So much of my energy between the ages of 12 and 30 was given over just to surviving predatory men. The revelation that humiliation, harm, and maybe even death was liable to be inflicted on me by complete strangers and casual acquaintances because of my gender and that I had to be on watch all the time to avoid such a fate -- well, that's part of what made me a feminist.

I care passionately about the inhabitability of our planet from an environmental perspective, but until it's fully inhabitable by women who can walk freely down the street without the constant fear of trouble and danger, we will labor under practical and psychological burdens that impair our full powers. Which is why, as someone who thinks climate is the most important thing in the world right now, I'm still writing about feminism and women's rights. And celebrating the men who have made changing the world slightly more possible or are now part of the great changes underway.

Rebecca Solnit, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of 17 books, including an expanded hardcover version of her paperback indie bestseller Men Explain Things to Me and a newly released anthology of her essays about places from Detroit to Kyoto to the Arctic, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.

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Copyright 2014 Rebecca Solnit