Rebecca Solnit: Men Explain Things To Me

[bibliogramma]

A collection of essays by Solnit, all dealing with aspects of feminism and women's experiences. And all very, very thoughtful pieces well worth reading. The title of the collection comes from an anecdote that Solnit uses to begin the first of the essays in this collection. Solnit records an incident at a party, where she and another woman were approached by a man who, having heard that Solnit was a writer, asked about her work. To quote Solnit:

They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West , my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life. He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?” So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book—with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority. ... 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.

This illustration of the phenomenon of mansplaining leads into discussions of many other ways in which men have in the past and continue today to deny the work, rights, and even lives of women. If you've grown a little weary of the struggle for equality, reading Solnit will reinvigorate you. And hone your rage.