Author Note: Meghan Bell

Meghan Bell is the author of the poem "Men Explain" As part of our Author Notes series, Meghan Bell tells us about the influences that shaped her poem “Men Explain (or: an Incomplete List of Things Guys Have Said to Me Since Puberty),” published in The Ex-Puritan: Spring 2018.

“Men Explain” was written shortly after the Harvey Weinstein story broke. I don’t recall the exact timeline, but Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker exposé was open on my laptop behind the Word document as I wrote the first draft. I think this was just after October 10, before the #MeToo movement took off on social media. The title is borrowed from Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me, Haymarket Books, 2014). I started typing quotes (or paraphrases, to the best of my memory) of various things boys and men have said to me over the past 17 or so years, then arranged them loosely by sound and theme. These quotes are not a collection of the worst things that have been said to me, nor do they necessarily reflect the most violent or the most dehumanizing moments of my life, and while the poem reflects experiences I share with many others, it should be contextualized in my privileges as a young, able-bodied, straight-passing, cis, white woman. Many lines were cut because I thought they couldn’t be understood without context, and I didn’t want to write in any context. Most of the quotes are pretty banal; others hint at something more extreme. None of the lines are exceptional.When I read it over, months later, my immediate reaction is still: This is nothing. These stories are nothing. It’s the same instinct that led me to smile or laugh off most of these quotes when they were said. The ethos of personal responsibility was drilled into me as a kid. If someone hurt me, it was my fault if they kept on hurting me because I didn’t fight back. My father’s dismissive voice in my head—then hit him back to show him how much it hurts. If I really wanted it to stop, I would have said or done something, right? I don’t know how many hours I’ve wasted interrogating my own silences. Two weeks after I wrote “Men Explain,” a man grabbed me at a bar while I was dancing with a friend, leaned in and said lewd things into my ear. I froze, and smiled at him when he let me go. My friend froze as well. Once he was gone, she apologized to me for not interfering, and I apologized to her for not standing up for myself, because how could she have known something was wrong when I didn’t react? It’s bizarre to me that our immediate reactions were guilt and shame while the only person who had done something wrong walked casually away. It pisses me off that I’d still behave that way after years of volunteer work with a sexual assault centre, years as the publisher of a feminist magazine, after writing “Me Too” on my Facebook page, after long conversations with other women that let me believe I was somehow powerful. It’s amazing how quickly that feeling can fade. I drank too much a couple months ago and asked a friend if I was complicit in my own sexual harassment because I’ve shrugged so much of it off. What fucked-up place did that question come from? (Later, while sober, I accidentally articulated my drunken fear in a criticism of another person: am I the sort of woman who, by tolerating sexual harassment targeted at me, implicitly gives men permission to treat other women the same way?) It’s not a coincidence that I ended the poem with “You are not / stopping me.” When I turned “Men Explain” into my creative writing workshop at UBC in early November, three of my classmates—all white women, older than me—criticized it for “vilifying” men. “I know lots of wonderful men,” one said, and I replied, “I do too. Some of them are quoted in the poem.” (That being said, many, many shitty men are also quoted in this poem.) She said it was unfair of me to present these quotes out of context. Would you like some of the context I refused to write into the poem? Does it matter that the marriage proposal came from a man I’d been dating for less than two months, who showed up at my apartment drunk out of his mind? Does your empathy shift if I tell you that the guy who pinned me against a wall when I was 15 and said he wouldn’t let me go until I breathed the word “yes” into the recording device in his phone identified as nerdy and was obviously insecure about his attractiveness to women? (Does it shift again if I tell you he also took photos of me in class if I made the mistake of stretching? Or that, as in the poem, when I stood pinned against the wall and shook my head, he told me that articulating my “no” would suit his needs as well as the sound of my voice saying “yes”?) “You don’t have to flirt, your hair flirts for you” came from an ex-boyfriend and I was too infatuated at the time to be anything other than vaguely flattered. The guy whose friend handed me over to him at a bar as a “birthday present?” I dated him for three months when I was 19. “Give me a hug, beautiful” came from two drunk men who grabbed me while I was walking home alone at four in the morning after a friend’s Christmas party (fortunately, it turned out they really did only want hugs). “Some men find it hard to work with strong women” was a boss dismissing my complaint of gendered discrimination from a male supervisor, twisting it into a compliment. “Hateful” was a nickname spread around campus during my first year of university after I rejected a guy and refused to let him sleep in my dorm room after he kissed me when I was drunk, knowing full well I wasn’t interested. Almost every guy who used it insisted the nickname was affectionate, and I cheerfully tutored their whole group in math and statistics while they called me that. There’s probably a good discussion to be had about the privilege of being offered a thousand dollars for a blowjob and turning that down, (I was 14 or 15, and, let’s be honest, I had no idea how blowjobs even worked back then. I’m about 90 percent sure I was still at the stage where I thought they involved blowing) but the contexts of each quote is not the point (at least to me—I buy into the idea that poetry and stories, once published, belong to readers).The point, to me, is the deluge.It’s so easy to normalize or dismiss any one of these incidences—I should know because I have—but can you normalize this when it goes on for three pages without a breath? Can you dismiss this knowing I could have written 20 pages? Knowing that when I think, this is nothing, this is a product of internalized shame and a tough-girl reluctance to admit that I’m vulnerable? It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t silence, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t violence; it means that even now, while writing this note, I have an earnest need to minimize my experiences. This is nothing means I wish I could tell you about my fierceness instead of my compliance; I wish I could tell you that I never loved or encouraged any of the men in this poem, but that wouldn’t be true. This is nothing means that sexism and rape culture are far more oppressive than what made it to my page. This is nothing the way a speck of dust can seem inconsequential in a sandstorm. It’s not nothing, and it’s not okay.