Rebecca Solnit: ‘It’s encouraging that Trump and the manosphere push back so much on the accomplishments of feminism’

Some authors achieve a rare immortality by coining a term in their work that winds up in the common lexicon. On this list we find Virginia Woolf and her “room of one’s own,” Joseph Heller’s unsolvable “catch-22” and George Orwell with his “newspeak,” that chilling tool of totalitarian control. And though the exact word “mansplaining” does not appear in Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit, 63, she and her book most certainly deserves inclusion in this pantheon for having legitimized the articulation of a long-standing yet unnamed condescension.

Solnit is one of the most prominent feminists in the United States. She is the author of a couple dozen books on subjects that range from walking (Wanderlust), the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, motion-picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge and the city of San Francisco, where she moved at the end of the 1970s. Not all explicitly focus on feminism like the aforementioned Men Explain Things to Me and her formative memoir Recollections of My Non-Existence, but each one, in addition to her columns for the U.K.’s The Guardian, is impacted by its beliefs.

Solnit recently spoke to EL PAÍS about why the United States has voted a second time to have a consummate misogynist direct its destiny; about last week’s commemoration of International Women’s Day, which could have been the first with a woman president in the White House; about attacks on women’s autonomy and abortion rights; and on the sexist proclivities of the internet’s darkest corners. From the hardly original question with which the conversation began (“How are you doing?”), the writer makes it clear that she’s not the kind of person to keep her thoughts to herself. “Everything’s fine,” she said. “But, you know, for the fact that my country’s in a deep crisis.”

Question. As someone who has written extensively about hope and who signs her emails with the Walter Benjamin quote, “It is only for those without hope that hope is given,” are you able to maintain hope these days?

Answer. Hope, for me, is radically different than optimism. Optimism is the sense that everything is going to be fine. Hope is the sense that there are possibilities, and if we seize them, if we do our utmost, we might be able to realize those possibilities. As for the status of women, it doesn’t feel good in the United States, which yes, took down national protection for abortion. But this is not a global downturn. If you look at Ireland, Spain, Mexico, Argentina [before the election of far-right President Javier Milei], all are granting women reproductive rights. I was born in 1961, and the world I was born into was not only lacking so many rights women have now — we didn’t even have a language to talk about the radical inequality of women, how much we were not allowed access to power, not allowed roles in public life, not allowed equality in marriage or the workplace or education or the legal system. Feminism has done an astonishing job in my lifetime of changing that. In the United States of Amnesia, it’s hard to get people to remember things from two weeks ago, let alone two decades ago. The fact that we haven’t changed 2,500 years of patriarchy, perfectly and completely in 60 years, does not dismay me.

Q. When the #MeToo movement erupted in 2017, it felt like there was no turning back. Yet eight years later, Trump — who during the campaign vowed to protect women “whether they like it or not” — is president once again. This International Women’s Day could have marked the first with a woman in the Oval Office.

A. I never believed that anything was inevitable. Every advance needs to be protected and defended and for me, part of the way you do that is with the memory that we didn’t always have these rights. We could lose them. And what I what I find encouraging is looking at how Trump, the Republican Party, the international wave of misogyny led by what we call the “manosphere” and the most reactionary internet push back on trans rights, gay rights, racial justice. You can read that as them saying, “You changed the world in ways we don’t like, and we want to reverse what you did.” It’s literally trying to make history run backwards. It’s terrible, it’s miserable, it’s scary, but at the same time, it can be taken as a reminder that we accomplished a lot.

Q. Do you understand what exactly they’re so afraid of?

A. They’ve created a cult in this country of people who are shockingly obedient when it comes to hating and being afraid of whatever they’re told to be afraid of this week. Nobody was thinking this way about trans kids five years ago. I forget who they hated five years ago, but I know 10 years ago, it was Muslims. It really feels Orwellian in the sense of “the hate of the week.” It is also a reminder that this is all manipulable, and they’re pretty good at that. But Trump is doing a beautiful job of building what may be the broadest, deepest opposition against him we’ve ever seen.

Q. The victory of Trump was also the victory of traditional views on gender roles, which the president himself confirmed on his first day in office with an executive order establishing the existence of just two genders, male and female. Did that surprise you?

A. It did. I thought we were going in another direction. I was really impressed by a study that came out shortly [after the election] that said the more misinformed you were about crime, immigration and the economy, the more inclined you were to vote for Trump. Trump is a symptom of a disease of disinformation, and a social media manipulated by Elon Musk [X] and Mark Zuckerberg [Meta] is one source. Right-wing media is another. I felt that the mainstream media did a horrific job of covering Donald Trump last year, normalizing him, downplaying the very open threats they were making and that are now being carried out. I feel enough doesn’t get said about how Elon Musk, Donald Trump and [vice-president] J.D. Vance are really stupid. Musk displays his stupidity on Twitter — I know I’m supposed to call it X, but whatever — falling into really dumb conspiracy theories. Even his own Grok AI tool will point out that he’s a major source of disinformation. I used to be proud of being from the Bay Area for most of my life, the land of gay liberation and experimental poetry and the birth of a global environmental movement. Now we’re Silicon Valley, which causes harm, not just across the U.S., but across the world, and does so intentionally, because It’s profitable to promulgate hate, misinformation, conspiracy theories.

Q. You’ve been surrounded by these guys from Silicon Valley for many years. Did their rightward shift and Mark Zuckerberg talking about “masculine energy” come as a surprise?

A. Silicon Valley has always been dudes, and dudes with poor social skills, is the most polite way to put it. There’s a history of discrimination around sex and race in Silicon Valley. This new obsession with masculinity you can see in Jeff Bezos as well as Mark Zuckerberg is a sign that these people who manipulate information are also being manipulated by it. It was actually kind of shocking to see the Trumps welcome Andrew Tate [the influencer who has been accused of rape and human trafficking in Romania] and his brother to the United States. But, exciting to see that Florida’s attorney general immediately looked into prosecuting them.

Q. What do you make of the fact that the manosphere thing is mainly pushed by very young men, and that according to studies, Gen Z is apparently more divided than any other generation over gender roles?

A. I think it’s due largely to online manipulation. Overall, parents, educators, people who have some role in what the media does, have really failed to talk adequately and meaningfully about online radicalization. In 2016, I spent some time with a cybersecurity expert, and she told me that in the same way that ISIS is recruiting online (which was big news at the time), the right is recruiting young men online through podcasters and influencers and video games. The internet can be toxic for anyone. I know people whose middle-aged parents and elderly grandparents get drawn into conspiracy theories and Covid misinformation. But the internet was made by young men, really, for young white men, and they are particularly vulnerable to what it does.

Q. Do you understand why some of these men say they feel excluded by the feminist agenda?

A. Yes, it is kind of odd. A lot of people not very involved in feminism misinterpret feminism. Some of it is zero-sum thinking; if there’s more for women, surely that means there’s less for me. We are missing a men’s movement that looks at all the ways that patriarchy is actually really destructive and miserable for men. It leads to loneliness, unhappiness, violent death, lack of close relationships, health problems, just the miserableness of trying to prove you’re a man all the time. I was just looking at a study showing that feminists actually like men more than a lot of traditional women do. Feminists are capable of choosing the life they want to have, if they don’t want to be married, if they don’t want to be dependent, if they don’t want to be around abusers. A lot of traditional women are profoundly resentful because they don’t feel free, or because they’re actually not free, to reject abuse.

Q. Do you know about this phenomenon of tradwives, the young influencers who defend traditional family values and child-rearing?

A. I do, and it’s fun every time they get exposed, like the one high-profile trad wife who was pretending to be a happily married mother of some huge number of children, and it turned out she was a single woman living with her parents. The rest is disgusting.

Q. In your book Recollections of My Non-Existence, your self-portrait of a teenaged artist, you talk about the past idealized by these influencers — a time when women were expected to remain invisible, unheard, and unnoticed.

A. There have always been women against women’s rights. We had Phyllis Schafly in the 1970s fighting against the Equal Rights Amendment, who was also anti-abortion. It’s not surprising that some women think serving patriarchy is their best option, or that some women have never really had access to a worldview that isn’t patriarchal. Well-educated people on the coasts [in the United States] don’t really understand what it might be like to be a poor person in a religious community who doesn’t have access to all the nifty information we have access to.

Q. What do you think of the feminists who are against trans rights?

A. If you’re against trans rights, I don’t think you’re a feminist. I wish people would stop letting them claim to be for women’s rights. Trans women are women. There’s a manipulativeness in pretending that if one trans woman has done something bad, all trans women have. I’ve been in San Francisco since I was 18, it’s been 45 years now. San Francisco probably has more trans women than almost any place on Earth. I’ve used a million public bathrooms in theaters and libraries and train stations. Nobody I know has ever had a “trans experience” to report. It’s kind of bizarre that a bunch of high-profile people, a lot of whom think they’re feminists, have really gotten into what feels like another cult of believing that somehow, the greatest threat to cisgender women is trans women, when the greatest threat, if you want to talk about violence and sexual assault, is cisgender heterosexual men. It’s like worrying about a puddle when a tsunami is coming at you, given that violence against women remains the most pervasive violence on Earth.

Q. Would you say that we are going backwards in terms of violence against women?

A. It’s a crisis that’s so normalized because it’s so pervasive. It’s hard to make people treat something as an emergency that’s not new. In the United States, domestic violence has gone way down, partly because police now enforce the laws. It took until the beginning of the 1990s for marital rape to become illegal. The drop in domestic violence numbers is significant. One of the things I didn’t mention when we were talking about the manosphere is porn, which has become more and more extreme in content. My friend Peggy Orenstein did a piece about the prevalence of strangulation among young adults in this country, because strangulation is portrayed as kind of routine part of sex in porn, and of course, it can cause brain damage or death, as well as psychological trauma.

Q. In The Mother of All Questions, an article you wrote for Harper’s that you later used as a title for a collection of essays, you spoke about childless women. In another surprising plot twist, the pro-natalist movement, aided by a certain resurgence of Christianity, appears to be gaining strength in the United States.

A. We’re seeing in a lot of right-wing countries the attempt to try and force women to have children through reduction of rights, more dependence on men. They want to roll the clock backwards to 50 or 75 years ago when women were having three or four children, but we’re in a different economic reality. What actually encourages women to have children would be the kind of economic security that women in Scandinavian countries have. Many women don’t have children because men are unreliable and unsupportive, and single motherhood is really hard, particularly in countries without financial security, like the United States. When countries like South Korea complain about low birth rates, they’re not addressing the reality of why women don’t feel that they’re in a position to have children, the economic difficulty.

Q. And then there’s Elon Musk with his 13, or maybe — it’s not entirely clear — 14 children.

A. Oh, he’s just a sperm donor, while he does have that one male child he totes around like a symbol, or a stuffed animal. He’s probably not feeding that kid, singing him to sleep. He must have a caregiver, probably female, who he hands a child back to when it’s not a prop for his pathetic version of masculinity. There was that moment when he was doing crazy things, when one of the women who had children with him — [the singer] Grimes — was on Twitter, pleading with him to participate in one of their children’s medical crisis. That was a reminder that in English, when you say “mother,” it’s also a verb that means “to take care of,” “Father” just means to beget. And Musk has begotten a lot of children, but he doesn’t seem to be in their lives, for the most part.

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