Rebecca Solnit, author of “Hope in the Dark”, has a new essay up on TomDispatch.com. Rebecca started writing on TomDispatch back in May of 2003 and the essay she posted actually turned into the above mentioned “Hope in the Dark.” Her latest essay deals with gender and begins with a hilarious anecdote in which she has to almost convince “a very important man” that she is actually the author the “important book” he is talking about:

So, Mr. 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.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. 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. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped. [TomDispatch.com]

She goes on discuss women and gender in a way that I found refreshing. She addresses how men interact with women and why it’s a problem:

Yes, guys like this pick on other men’s books too, 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. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. 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. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence. [TomDispatch.com]

You should really read the entire thing. Just click on over to TomDispatch.com to do so.

And to learn about the National Organization for Women (NOW) and their campaign for women-friendly workplaces.