It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about.
Yes, it’s true that guys like this pick on other men’s books, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow, or an elephant turd on the carpet. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless - for a moment, before he began holding forth again.
And then, as if in a 19th century novel, he went ashen. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway.īut he just continued on his way.
Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, including a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me with my infinitely generous younger brother with splendid male friends.
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