Because Condescension Needed An Explainer

Soraya Chemaly interviews Rebecca Solnit – who coined the term “mansplaining” – about her new essay collection, Men Explain Things to Me:

The term “mansplaining” has resonated with so many women. It shifted the cultural universe ever so slightly (in a good way). Did you expect this response?  

You know, I had a wonderful conversation about a month ago with a young Ph.D candidate at UC Berkeley. I’ve been a little bit squeamish about the word “mansplaining,” because it can seem to imply that men are inherently flawed, rather than that some guys are a little over-privileged, arrogant, and clueless. This young academic said to me, “No, you don’t understand! You need to recognize that until we had the word “mansplained,” so many women had this awful experience and we didn’t even have a language for it. Until we can name something, we can’t share the experience, we can’t describe it, we can’t respond to it. I think that word has been extraordinarily valuable in helping women and men describe something that goes on all the time.”

She really changed my opinion. It’s really useful. I’ve always been interested from how much our problems come from not having the language, not having the framework to think and talk about and address the phenomenon around us.

Looking beyond the titular essay, Sady Doyle praises the volume for its scope and ambition:

It’s rewarding just to see the license Solnit gives herself to explore the territory, to pit Sontag and Woolf against each other in one essay and los desaparecidos against the effacing of women’s matrilineal ancestry in the next. …

A writer’s authority is a strange thing, a hybrid of expertise and sheer arrogance. It helps to have an encyclopedic knowledge of facts. But the key to being a good essayist, rather than a good Wikipedia editor, is the willingness to claim the authority of one’s opinions; to say that you know what matters, and why it matters, and (here’s the tricky part) why everyone should listen to you and (preferably) pay you for the privilege.

The right to that kind of self-confidence has always been denied to women. By allowing herself such a wide range of subject matter and approaching it with such confidence, Solnit suggests that the key to defeating mansplaining is not just identifying the problem or giving it a catchy new name, but insisting on women’s right to do a little explaining themselves.

(Image from the Mansplaining Paul Ryan tumblr)