IN 2008, author Rebecca Solnit went to a party with a female friend. The event was organised by a well-known and wealthy man. At the end of the party the host approached the author and her friend and asked, in the patronising manner reserved for children being asked about their favourite candy, “What do you do?”

The exchange, and its arrogance and condescension (the man proceeded to lecture her about the content of a book she had written), provoked Solnit to write the essay Men Explain Things to Me. As she says in the opening, “the out and out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is in my opinion gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they are talking about.”

Solnit’s essay caused a stir. Feminists are used to mourning the vast list of gendered violence, exclusion, wage differentials and social controls that are heaped on women around the world. They are less likely to underline and protest what Solnit aptly termed “micro-aggressions”, the small everyday ways in which women are silenced, disciplined and shown condescension.

This, Solnit argued, was the slippery slope of silence, which begins with men believing that they are entitled to and hence always have the superior knowledge to instruct and inform women. In its most egregious cases, it involves the diminution of women to lesser humans. The example she gives is that of Pakistan where, by law, the testimony of women in rape cases does not equal that of a man. The germ of the idea that a woman is less credible and unreliable is here magnified in its most grotesque form.

There are small, everyday ways in which women are silenced, disciplined and shown condescension by men.

The publication of Men Explain Things to Me has in the years since birthed its own vocabulary of contention, challenging this everyday form of male aggression. The term ‘mansplaining’, coined by a pseudonymous blogger and based on Solnit’s ruminations, has since come to stand for the practice when a man chooses to tell how things really are, ignores your opinions or expertise or considers it unworthy of respect. In a more recent iteration, the hashtag ‘Yes All Women’ was coined as a response to what Solnit isolates in the essay as the ‘not all men’ argument.

This is the label for the condition that occurs every time a conversation is begun with a man (or men) regarding gender violence, sexual assault, or any such issue; its direction is immediately diverted by the man or men to his individual innocence rather than the depth or breadth of the problem. The supremacy of the male thus controls the conversation, often determining that the issue in question is not worthy of attention (or worse still, must be discarded as a joke) simply because he is not personally culpable. ‘Not all men’ is dished out often and with little restraint; its consequence, the shutting up of ‘yes all women’.

Solmit’s essay’s particular pertinence to Pakistan also deserves mention. For the few in Pakistan who care, and their numbers dwindle every day, the location of the country as the far recess of women’s emancipation is now no longer a novelty. It is thus little surprise that the continuum of silencing that Solnit mentions marks its farthest point in Pakistan, where, as she mentioned in a recent interview, women are “stoned” on courthouse steps. Indeed, in the face of such large and dark burdens of male domination, should the micro-aggressions, the slippery slopes of silencings as Solnit calls them, even be considered?

The answer is yes and the reasons are simple. Isolating and noting the everyday behaviour in which men routinely silence and patronise women points out the aggressions and entitlements not simply of the men who encase their misogyny in religious garb, but those who otherwise tout their theoretical commitment to gender equity. These men have their own arsenal of intimidation, where respecting women who choose to debate with them is perceived as a request to be automatically denied.

A woman’s engagement with men, they believe, means a tacit acquiescence to being treated poorly, looked down upon, roughed up and toughed up; civility, propriety and all the other rules they would use with other men are hence simply and easily discarded. Such men are the biggest champions of the ‘not all men’ argument, instruments ultimately in ensuring that patriarchy, which they theoretically oppose but daily enjoy, persists forever.

Another reason why such vigilance to ‘mansplaining’ and its misogynistic micro-aggressions is useful in Pakistan is because it connects women in a structural environment committed to disconnecting them from each other and a collective consciousness of gender identity. If the highly educated doctor ‘mansplained’ to by a wealthy businessman, or the lawyer talked down to by the son of the owner of the company can understand just how these behaviours connect to the larger gender-based inequities in Pakistan, then bonds have been created that do not currently exist.

Cumulatively, it takes away the trope that imagines misogyny to be a war that needs to be fought only by the women pelted with acid or imprisoned for adultery, and applies to all the rest whose abilities to contest and challenge may be significantly greater. Solnit’s own words summarise the situation well: “Arrogance might have something to do with the war, but this syndrome is a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, belief in her own superfluity, an invitation to silence.” As Solnit asserts in her conclusion, women everywhere, Pakistan and elsewhere, must thus fight a war on two fronts: one for the right to speak on any particular topic, whether it be war or peace or security or law or medicine; and the other the right to speak at all.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, September 10th, 2014