Press: One summer night in 2003, American writer Rebecca Solnitt experienced a "mansplaining." At a party in the forest outside Aspen, a man invited Solnitt to talk about his book, but he never wanted to listen carefully to what the woman had to say, just waiting for an opportunity to interject and present himself. He interrupted Solnitt and began to gush his thoughts on a recently published "important book" to her, until he was repeatedly reminded that the woman in front of him was the author of the "important book," and he paused for a moment from his smug tirade.
In Solnitt's life with all women, there are countless moments when they are slighted and interrupted by "male preaching". When they speak openly about these unpleasant experiences, there are always men who are provoked (of course, there are also some women who love "male preaching") to question everything they say in their stories, and even the most irrelevant details will be singled out by these condescending detectives to carry out a deductive reasoning to prove that women's accounts are full of loopholes, and their emotions, experiences, and memories are not worth believing.
"If a man's code of conduct is that you have no right to speak and no right to define what's going on, then it can be interrupting your speech at the dinner table and in meetings, or telling you to shut up, or threatening you when you speak, or beating you up because you speak up, or killing you to keep you silent forever." In The Preachy Man, Solnit points out that behind "male preaching," misogynistic language, domestic violence, and rape is the repression of women's voices over the years. Men have long occupied the "truth", they tell women what is true and what should be felt, they have no right to everyday speech, and therefore no right to their own experiences, opinions, or even bodies. From "male preaching" to rape and murder, it is a "silent slippery slope" that continues to fall.
The mythical Cassandra is cursed for rejecting Apollo's courtship, and she can predict the truth, but is seen as a madman. Cassandra-esque curses lie not only in the fact that what is said is left unspared, but also in the denial and destruction of women's "narrative" abilities by concentric circles of self-repression, doubt, confusion, shame, and external violence. With the permission of the People's Literature Publishing House, Interface Culture (ID: Booksandfun) excerpted chapters from The Preachy Man about the impact of the "Cassandra Curse" and the feminist response to it in order to share it with readers.
<h3>Cassandra Dancing with Wolves (excerpt</h3>).
Text | [American] Rebecca Solnit translated | Zhang Chenchen
Cassandra is the woman who tells the truth but no one believes it. In our culture, her story is far less widely circulated than the "wolf came" story— the boy who kept telling the same lies until he was no longer believed. Maybe more people should know about her. As the daughter of the Trojan king, Cassandra was cursed with the ability to accurately predict the future but no one believed it. Her people considered her a lunatic and a liar, and in some versions of the story, people even imprisoned her until Agamemnon took her captive as a trophy. She was eventually killed haphazardly with him.
As we navigate the rough seas of the gender wars, I always think of Cassandra. For credibility is such an important fundamental power in those wars that women are always perceived as having some decisive lack there in this regard.
When a woman accuses a man, especially a man at the center of the existing order, especially if it is related to sex, the common response is often not only to question the facts of her accusations, but also to her ability to speak and her rights. Generations of women have been told that they are either dreaming, or being too confused, or setting up tricks, plotting to frame them, or lying, or all of the above.
What I find interesting is the urge to refuse to take a woman's words seriously, and how often that impulse descends into contradiction and hysteria – these happen to be the traits that women are always accused of.
The word "hysteria" derives from the Greek word for "uterus", since it was once thought that the emotional state indicated by the word came from an unstable uterus, and men were naturally exempt from such a diagnosis. Now the term generally refers to contradiction, excessive nervousness, or confusion. In the late 19th century, hysteria was a condition that was often diagnosed. Sigmund Freud's teacher, Jean-Martin Charcot, has publicly demonstrated the suffering of a "woman with hysteria." In some cases, these women diagnosed with hysteria also experience abuse, psychological trauma caused by abuse, and inability to express the cause of the trauma.
Young Freud had had patients whose problems seemed to stem from sexual abuse they had in childhood. In a sense, they are telling the unspeakable: even today, the most brutal wounds of war and family life are so contrary to social morality and so deeply hurt the souls of the victims that merely telling them is a torture. Sexual assault, like torture, is an attack on the victim's right to physical integrity, self-determination and self-expression. It seeks to completely erase the victim's voice and rights, and she must rise from annihilation to speak out.
Telling a story, having a story, and having the narrator recognized and respected is still one of the best ways to overcome trauma that we know. Amazingly, Freud's patients were once able to tell their misfortunes, and he first heard them. He wrote in 1896: "I therefore argue that behind every case of hysteria there is one or more childhood sexual experiences. But he later dismissed his own views, writing instead that if he chose to believe his patients, then "in all cases you have to accuse your father, not excluding my own father, as a pervert."
In her book Trauma and Recovery, the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman writes, "His correspondence makes it clear that the significant potential social implications of his hypothesis are increasingly unsettling him... Because of this dilemma, he no longer listens to his female patients. "If what they say is true, he has to challenge the entire system of patriarchal authority to support them." Herman adds, "A stubborn insistence that led him to obsess over the development of increasingly complex theories, insisting that the women were fantasizing and longing for the sexual abuse experiences they complained about." "For all the authorities that overstep the rules and the male offenders who violate women, this is like a convenient alibi." That was what she wanted. She imagined it. She didn't know what she was talking about.
Silence, like Dante's hell, consists of several concentric circles. The first is the inner repression, self-doubt, inhibition, confusion, and shame that make it difficult or even impossible to speak up. Then there is fear, the fear of being punished and ostracized for speaking out. Susan Brison, the current chair of philosophy at Dartmouth College, was raped by a strange man in 1990. He called her a "bitch", told her to shut up, then grabbed her by the neck, stoned her head, and finally threw her to the side of the road to die. Later, she found it difficult to tell her story: "It's one thing to make up your mind to tell and write about the rape I experienced, but it's another thing to find the voice to tell." Even after my ruptured trachea healed, I still had trouble speaking. I've never lost my voice completely, but I often get into what my friends call 'fractured speech.' When I'm sick, I stutter and can't string words together into a simple sentence, and those words are scattered like broken necklaces. ”
Beyond this ring are the external forces that seek to silence those who are going to speak out anyway through humiliation, bullying, or outright violence, including lethal violence. Today, the circle threatens rape victims in many high schools and colleges. These young women are often harassed or threatened for vocalization; some become suicidal as a result; many potential crimes go uninvestigated or prosecuted; and many American universities continue to graduate countless unpunished rapists.
Finally, the outermost silent concentric circle is when the story is finally told, when the narrator is not directly silenced, and the credibility of the story and the narrator is questioned. The hostility in this field is so strong that you can probably call the brief moments that Freud chose to trust his patients a false dawn. Especially when women speak out about sexual crimes, their right and ability to speak is attacked. To this day this reaction is almost a conditioned reflex, with a clear pattern that has a long history.
This model was first fully challenged in the 1980s. We've heard too many stories about the 1960s, but the revolutionary changes that were heard in the 1980s are often overlooked and forgotten—not just in the overthrown regimes around the world, but also in the bedroom, in the classroom, in the workplace, on the streets, and even in the organizational forms of politics (beginning to adopt the principle of consensuality under the influence of feminism and other anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian organizational techniques). It was an explosive time. Feminism of that era is often today often considered cold anti-sexualism because feminism points to sex as a field of power, and power tends to abuse and abuse, also because it describes the nature of that abuse.
Feminists have not only pushed for legislation, but since the mid-1970s they have defined and named many categories of violations of the law that had never been recognized before. By definition and naming, they declare that the abuse of power is a serious problem, and that the authority of men, bosses, husbands, fathers — and adults in general — needs to be questioned. They have created a narrative framework and support network for stories of incest, child sexual assault, rape and domestic violence. These stories can be a narrative flashpoint in our time, because too many people who have been silent have decided to tell their stories.
On October 11, 1991, a law professor was summoned by the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify. President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice on the occasion of a confirmation hearing in the Senate appointing justices. The testifier was named Anita Hill. In previous private interviews and at hearings, Hill recounted a series of events that took place while Thomas was her boss. He forced Hill to listen to him talk about the movies he had watched and his sexual fantasies, and pressured her to try to date her. When she refused, Hill said "he can't accept the validity of my explanation," as if "no" itself wasn't a valid answer.
While she was criticized for not taking action at the time, we have to remember that feminists only recently coined the term "sexual harassment" and defined its concept. It wasn't until 1986, after the experience she described, that the Supreme Court recognized such behavior in the workplace as illegal. When Hill finally spoke up in 1991, she was attacked relentlessly. The people who questioned her were all men, and the republican lawmakers' questions were particularly comical, extremely skeptical and ridiculous. Senator Arlen Spector questioned a witness who testified based on a number of brief meetings that Hill had sexual illusions about him. Spockett asked, "Do you think it's possible that Professor Hill imagined or fantasized about what she accused Thomas of?" Again, a Freudian framework: if she claims that something disgusting has happened, then she actually wants it to happen, or she simply cannot separate the two.
The whole country is thrown into a clamor, a civil war, because many women know too well what sexual harassment in their daily lives looks like, too aware that there are many unpleasant consequences for reporting this kind of thing, but many men don't know. In the short term, Hill suffered a variety of humiliations, and Thomas was eventually appointed to the rank of justice. The harshest accusations came from conservative journalist David Brock, who first published an article and then an entire book to discredit Hill. Ten years later, Brock, remorseful of his attacks on Hill and his right-wing stance, wrote: "I resorted to a casual and aimless attack in order to ruin Hill's credibility. I collected and mixed almost all the accusations from Thomas's camp that slandered her, which were often contradictory, and then smashed her head... In my words at the time, she was 'a little crazy and a little debauched'. ”
In the long run, "I believe in you, Anita" became a feminist slogan, and Hill is credited with kicking off a revolution in acknowledging and responding to sexual harassment in the workplace. A month after the hearing, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which provides that victims of sexual harassment can sue their employers for damages and wage arrears. When people finally had access to prosecute sexual harassment in the workplace, the number of related cases surged. The 1992 election year, dubbed the "Year of women," was the year carol Mosley Braun became the first black woman to be elected to the Senate, which had more women in the Senate and Congress than ever before.
Even today, when a woman says uncomfortable things about male misconduct, she is still told to be gibberish, calculating, lying, a resentful woman who doesn't recognize that it's just a feud, or all of the above. These intensified responses are reminiscent of Freud's joke about breaking a water bottle. A man returned the water bottle he had borrowed to his neighbor, who accused him of breaking it, and the man replied that he had not broken it at all, that the kettle had been broken when it was lent to him, and that he had never used it at all. When a woman accuses a man, he and his defenders fight back so brazenly that she ends up being a broken kettle.
Just this year, when Dylan Farrow repeatedly accused her adoptive father, Woody Allen, of molesting her, she became the most broken water bottle. Attackers flocked to the scene. Allen published a lengthy essay claiming that there was no way he could have molested his adopted daughter in the attic because he had always hated the attic, that Dylan must have been instructed and "brainwashed" by her mother, Mia, who may have been the shadow writer behind Dylan's alleged article, and that Mia "no doubt" came up with the idea because of a song about the attic. There is also a gender distinction here, and many women find the young woman credible because they have all heard similar things, while many men seem to see only examples of false accusations and exaggerate their universality. The specter of McMartin's nursery resurfaced, and those who mentioned it seemed to have false recollections of the trial and its outcome.
Herman's Trauma and Recovery explores rape, child molestation, and war trauma, writing:
Cover-ups and silences are the aggressors' preferred means of defense. If the cover-up does not work, the aggressor will attack the credibility of the victim. If he can't silence her forever, he'll find ways to make sure no one believes her... After every atrocity, one always hears the expected defense that it never happened; that the victim is lying; that the victim is overrepresenting; that the victim is self-inflicted; that, in any case, it's time to forget the past and look forward. The greater the power of the aggressor, the more capable he is to name and define reality, and the more thoroughly his rhetoric will win.
In our time they don't always win. We are still in an age of fighting, a battle about who has the right to speak and who has the right to be believed, and the pressure comes from both sides. The men's rights movement and widespread misinformation have created the notion that baseless allegations of sexual assault are extremely common. "Women as a whole are untrustworthy" and "miscarriages of rape are a serious problem" are used to silence individual women, to avoid discussing sexual violence, and even to portray men as the primary victims. Such logic is like discussing election fraud in the United States — an extremely rare crime in itself that has long had no significant impact on the outcome of the election. But conservatives have claimed election fraud is ubiquitous in recent years and used it as an excuse to strip those who are likely to vote against them: the poor, non-whites, students.
I'm not saying that women and children don't lie. Men, women, and children all lie, but the latter two aren't disproportionately more likely to lie, and men — a group that includes used car salesmen, Baron von Munchhausen and Richard Nixon — aren't particularly honest. What I want to say is that we should understand that this woman's old art of lying and love of a confused mind is still used frequently, and we should see it as it really is.
A friend of mine who was training on sexual harassment at a prestigious university told me that once she was giving a speech at the school's business school, an older male professor asked her, "Why should we investigate just for a woman's report?" She's come across many of these stories, others about how hard it is for women — including students, staff, professors, researchers — to gain trust, especially when their testimonies are directed against high-status aggressors.
This summer, veteran columnist George Will claimed that there was only an "imaginary flood of campus rape" in the world, saying that when universities or feminists or liberals turn victims into privileged, coveted identities, victims will emerge endlessly. Young women responded by tweeting by creating the hashtag #survivorprivilege (survivor privilege): "I didn't realize that living in PTSD, severe anxiety, and depression was a privilege," "# Should I remain silent — because everyone said I was lying when I spoke," their tweets read. Will's column is nothing new at all, just the old cliché of "women are inherently untrustworthy, these rape allegations are actually nothing to pay attention to, we should look ahead" is just the same.
Earlier this year I myself experienced a miniature version of this experience. I posted on social media two passages from an article published a few years ago about the 1970s in California that told some of the events of my life at the time (hippie adults teasing me as a teenager). A stranger — a rich and cultured man — immediately slammed me in a Facebook reply. His anger and unfounded confidence, the confidence that he had the ability to judge the matter, were impressive. He said: "You are exaggerating the facts, and you are giving less 'evidence' than a Fox reporter." You 'think' it's true, so you're just saying it's true, hehe, I call this 'bullshit'. "I have to give evidence, as if it were really possible for you to give evidence of what happened decades ago." I'm a bad guy who distorts the facts. I feel very objective, but in fact very subjective; I think of my "feeling" as if I "think" or "know." These are all too familiar accusations and all too familiar anger.
If we can acknowledge or even name this tactic of attacking credibility, then every time a woman speaks out, we can skip the conversation about a woman's credibility again and again. Another thing about Cassandra: In the most famous version of this myth, her prophecies go unfathoded because she refused to have sex with Apollo, a spell cast on her by the god. Trying to defend the rights of one's body leads to a loss of credibility, and the clue is already there. But the real Cassandra is right among us, and when we make our own decisions about who and why to believe, we can get rid of the spell.
Excerpts from the book "The Man Who Loves Preaching" are published with the authorization of the publishing house, and are abridged from the original text, and may not be reproduced without authorization.