Men Explain Things to Me

by Rebecca Solnit

For the grandmothers, the levelers, the dreamers, the men who get it, the young women who keep going, the older ones who opened the way,

But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.

Never mind workplace violence, let’s go home. So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year—meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror.

“the tyranny of the quantifiable,” of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot:

Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples.

Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone. The men who get it also understand that feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a campaign to liberate us all.