That physical diminution has its equivalents in how we live and move and act and speak or withdraw from doing so. Lacy M. Johnson writes of a relationship so controlling that, when she left him, the man built a padded room in which to rape and murder her and from which she escaped after the former and before the latter: “I tried diminishing myself in such a way that I wouldn’t provoke him, wouldn’t anger him, tried to bend myself according to his pleasure so that he would like everything I did and said and thought. It didn’t matter, because no matter what I did, it was never enough. I kept at it anyway, until there was almost nothing left of me, of the person I had been. And that person I became, who was barely a person of her own, is the version of me he liked best.”
Femininity at its most brutally conventional is a perpetual disappearing act, an erasure and a silencing to make more room for men, one in which your existence is considered an aggression and your nonexistence a form of gracious compliance. It’s built into the culture in so many ways. Your mother’s maiden name is often requested as the answer to a security question by banks and credit card companies, because it’s assumed her original name is secret, erased, lost as she took on the name of a husband. It’s no longer universal for women to give up their names but still rare to pass them on if they’re married, one of the ways women vanish or never appear.
So much was so absent that its absence was rarely noted, the lack built into the current arrangements and the possibility that things could be otherwise. Many lists of the missing have been augmented in my lifetime; we still fail to perceive voices, assumptions, positions that we will recognize in times to come. We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak, or we say disappeared, which presumes that the person, place, or thing first appeared. But there are so many things that were never murmured, never showed up, were not allowed to enter rather than forced to exit. And there are people who showed up and spoke up who were not seen or heard; they were not silent, not invisible, but their testimony fell on deaf ears, their presence was not noted.
When I was young, human beings were routinely described as mankind, and mankind could be described as a singular man, and he, and even men in liberation movements—Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin—fell back on this language, because the absence of women was so absent from our imaginations that few noted that it even could, let alone should, be otherwise. The 1950s brought books like The Family of Man and LIFE’s Picture History of Western Man; the 1960s a conference and book titled Man the Hunter that all but wrote women out of evolutionary history; by the 1970s we got a long BBC series about The Ascent of Man. The current online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “Man was considered until the 20th cent. to include women by implication, though referring primarily to males. It is now frequently understood to exclude women.”
This had real consequences. They are endless but a few come to mind: heart attacks were described by how they affected men, so that women’s symptoms were less likely to be recognized and treated, a situation from which many women died; crash test dummies replicated male bodies, meaning that vehicular safety design favored male survival, and women died at higher rates. The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 presumed that the behavior of young men at an elite university could be universalized to stand for that of all humanity, and William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of younger British schoolboys, was also often cited as an example of how humans behave. If men were everyone, then women were no one.
When I was young, nearly everyone who held power and made news was male, and pro sports, TV sports, meant men’s sports, and many newspapers had a women’s section about domesticity and style and shopping that implied that everything else—the news section, the sports pages, the business section—were men’s sections. Public life was for men, and women were consigned to private life, and wife beating was described as a private business though it was legally a crime and crimes were the public’s business and the law’s. Andrea Dworkin, whose radical feminism was shaped in part by an early marriage to a murderously violent man, said, “I remember the pure and consuming madness of being invisible and unreal, and every blow making me more invisible and more unreal, as the worst desperation I have ever known.”
It is so normal for places to be named after men (mostly white men) and not women that I didn’t notice it until, in 2015, I made a map renaming places after women and realized I’d grown up in a country where almost everything named after a person—mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, buildings, states, parks—was named after a man, and nearly all the statues were of men. Women were allegorical figures—liberty and justice—but not actual people. A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways. The names of women were absent, and these absences were absent from our imaginations. It was no wonder we were supposed to be so slender as to shade into nonexistence.
4
I carried other weight. I had and still sometimes have a sense of dread that held down my sense of hope and possibility, a sinking feeling that was a real sensation of heaviness in the chest, as though my heart were encased in lead, as though I were on some planet whose gravity made every step a struggle and the lifting of limbs an onerous exercise and going out among other people an exhausting prospect.
It was a feeling in the present that arose from a vision of a future that was no future, one with no way forward, from a conviction that what is terrible will always be terrible, that now is a flat, featureless plain that goes on forever, with no forests relieving it, no mountains rising from it, no doorways inviting you out of it—the dread that nothing will change that somehow coexists with the dread that something terrible is going to happen, that what is joyous cannot be trusted, and what is feared is lying in wait for you. If there’s a gravity to this feeling, there’s also a geography, that low place in the earth that we call a depression. It seemed to be made out of logic and a real assessment of the situation, but it was weather, and it would disperse like clouds, and gather again like clouds.
If later on I wrote about hope, it was to pass along the ladders of logic and narratives with which I got myself out of these low places I know well.
I had since childhood imagined interrogations in which lacking the right answers was punished, sometimes unto death, interrogations that must have gotten something of their format from quiz shows seen in early childhood as well as the mockery that comes or came with getting something wrong in school or at the dinner table. I set myself exams and races and tests—if I saw a blue car before the bus came, if a bird flew by before I arrived, if I reached the middle of the crosswalk before the first person in the crowd on the other side of the street—like variations on the children’s game of “step on a crack/break your mother’s back.” I set a lot of imaginary parameters that would determine unrelated outcomes; it was an anxious reflex, a distraction, perhaps sometimes a reassurance when the bird flew by, when I got to the far side of the bridge before I let out my breath.