Men Explain Things to Me

by Rebecca Solnit

chapter 1 Men Explain Things to Me

i am nothing if not a feminist

Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.

that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.

It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

More extreme versions of our situation exist in, for example, those Middle Eastern countries where women’s testimony has no legal standing:

Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist.

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.

billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.

intelligence is not situated in the crotch—even

Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.

Young women, she said, needed to know that being belittled wasn’t the result of their own secret failings;

When something assembles itself that fast, it’s clear it’s been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time.

He thought that being patronized was an experience a woman chooses to have,

The term “mansplaining” was coined soon after the piece

some men explain things they shouldn’t and don’t hear things they should.

I’m grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice,

Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country. Just to be clear: not nine minutes, but nine seconds. It’s the number-one cause of injury to American women;

Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claimed that rape pregnancies were “a gift from God,”

one of three Native American women will be raped, and on the reservations 88 percent of those rapes are by non-Native men who know tribal governments can’t prosecute them.

is reintroducing a bill that would give states the right to ban abortions and might even conceivably allow a rapist to sue his victim for having one.

Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.

It’s clear now that monumental harassment online keeps many women from speaking up and writing altogether.

Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her,

and it was the revolt against the IMF (among other neo-liberal forces) that prompted Latin America’s rebirth

im not smart enough for this part

just focus on “assault,” on violence, on the refusal to treat someone as a human being, on the denial of the most basic of human rights, the right to bodily integrity and self-determination.

I am gratified this time not to be in a country that has decided that the career of a powerful man or the fate of an international institution matters more than this woman and her rights and well-being.

their real objection: that they wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles.

the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all.

put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear,

What stories are told by the worn jeans, the kids’ clothes, this size underwear, that striped pillowcase?

I LOVE NON-FICTION. im tired of hiding my truth. painting analysis? yes. i can read endless essays

The woman who is represented is obscured, but the woman who represents is not.

unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives;

We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying, war is; and how normal it becomes.

Hysteria derives from the Greek word for “uterus,”

when a woman says something uncomfortable about male misconduct, she is routinely portrayed as delusional,

“Sure #NotAllMen are misogynists and rapists. That’s not the point. The point is that #YesAllWomen live in fear of the ones that are.”

#YesAllWomen because I can’t tweet about feminism without getting threats and perverted replies. Speaking out shouldn’t scare me. • #YesAllWomen because I’ve seen more men angry at the hashtag rather than angry at the things happening to women. • #YesAllWomen because if you’re too nice to them you’re “leading them on” & if you’re too rude you risk violence. Either way you’re a bitch.

Six years ago, when I sat down and wrote the essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” here’s what surprised me: though I began with a ridiculous example of being patronized by a man, I ended with rapes and murders.

But I realize now that what I was saying is: it’s a slippery slope.

or killing you to silence you forever.

The new feminism is making the problems visible in new ways,

Here is that road, maybe a thousand miles long, and the woman walking down it isn’t at mile one. I don’t know how far she has to go, but I know she’s not going backward,

but the ideas cannot be erased.