Men Explain Things to Me in Reader with a Cause

Apr 21, 2017 Olivia rated it liked it

The first and last essays make Men Explain Things to Me worthy of its quick read. But overall, this collected failed to inspire me in the ways I anticipated from its resonant title and its emergence from Solnit, an important contemporary voice in American culture. With that being said, I enjoyed most of the essays and feel that it was the misleading packaging (via title) that spurred my disappointment. This book isn't really about what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women, wit The first and last essays make Men Explain Things to Me worthy of its quick read. But overall, this collected failed to inspire me in the ways I anticipated from its resonant title and its emergence from Solnit, an important contemporary voice in American culture. With that being said, I enjoyed most of the essays and feel that it was the misleading packaging (via title) that spurred my disappointment. This book isn't really about what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women, with the exception of that first essay. The other essays that do directly deal with the relations between women and men hinged very, very strongly on the physical and violent actions taken against women. Her point, a necessary one, is to illuminate the ways in which rape, gang rape, domestic violence, street harassments and the like, are not individual and isolated events but a cultural and almost structural pattern that needs to be addressed as such. Certainly the essays, individually and collectively, and not light reads. They speak truths that are often silenced, brushed under the rug. I'm appreciative of her highlighting these things, but simultaneously wish that she had intertwined more of the positive aspects of being a woman, of which there are many. She does address, in the final chapter, the progress that women have made and the path that we will continue to forge.

It was interesting to me that she didn't expand much on the psychological and even physiological affects of verbal abuse. This book contains a lot of extreme examples of physical brutality and less examples of the weight that women walk around with because of more "passive" acts against us. Condescending and misogynistic language is undoubtedly dangerous and demeaning, but if the consequences of the pervasive verbal abuse and the linguistic manipulation many women endure for their entire lives could be seen on women's bodies, if that was brought into the public light in the same way in which rape and assault are beginning to be, perhaps that would spark a greater movement towards gender equality. It doesn't always kill us, in the ways that many of the book's examples of rape do, but it takes an immense, immense toll on our ability to affirm our right to be here. She recalls times that she "objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn’t happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest -- in a nutshell, female." The repercussions of this is what I wish she had delved into further. But as she says, "women are told that they’re not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property."

My favorite essay in the collection was "Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable." It was important, insightful, and informative, but not as a commentary on gender. I hope to go back and re-read the essay at some point, because I was awaiting its linkage to "Men Explain Things to Me," which never came. I think this deterred me a bit from really absorbing her message, which is that "despair is a form of certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it...optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory and that reality doesn't necessarily match out plans." It hinges on this idea of embracing the unknown and running with it, and while its inclusion of Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag almost centered its focus on women and our agency, it failed to illuminate much on the relationships between people of the opposite sex, which again was my expectation.

I also felt that the organization of the book was a bit unsettling, as these essays were written over a span of years and were often reactions to at-the-time current events. Locating oneself in these moments was hard, because the essays weren't chronological and also because it wasn't clear where Solnit's inspiration for each particular essay was coming from, nor why she chose to order them in the way they fall in the book. I think she was asking her readers to extract meaning from her words and apply them to gender relations, but this could have been more explicit. There were also points at which I felt she was funneling information to support her points, such as in her assertion that "a marriage between two people of the same gender is inherently egalitarian...for the most part it's a relationship between people who have equal standing and so are free to define their roles themselves." While there certainly is a different dynamic in lesbian relationships, for example, they are by no means "inherently" egalitarian. Power structures undoubtedly exist among women in marriage that often replicate more mainstream hierarchies, labels, expectations, and behaviors. Lesbian relationships are not evidence of women's freedom.

For all that criticism, Solnit is undeniably brilliant, aware, curious, and intentionally informed. I am looking forward to reading her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. ...more

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Dec 05, 2017 LySaundra Janeé rated it really liked it

My 4 stars is actually a round-up from 3.52

“We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.” (from The Longest War)

This quote shows Solnit's ignorance about intersectionality. This is a book about *white* feminism written by a white feminist – I don't kno ...more

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