Author Rebecca Solnit and her friend Sallie wish to leave a party they are attending but the host, “an imposing man who’d made a lot of money” (1) insists that they stay so he can talk to her. He patronizingly asks her about her writing and the content of her books. Although she has written books on several diverse subjects, Solnit begins “to speak only of the most recent […] River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West” (2).

The host interrupts her to ask if she has “heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year” and is soon “telling [her] about the very important book—with that smug look [Solnit] know[s] so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority” (2). Sallie has to interrupt him and “say, ‘That’s her book’ three or four times before he finally [takes] it in” (3). This information “confuse[s] the neat categories into which his world [is] sorted” and renders him speechless for a moment “before he [begins] holding forth again” (4).

Solnit declares that the “out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in [her] experience, gendered” (4). It frequently results in women not wishing to speak out or not being heard when they do, “indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world” (4).