Men Explain Things to me

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"Dispatch books."
Men explain things to me -- The longest war -- Worlds collide in a luxury suite: some thoughts on the IMF, global injustice, and a stranger on a train -- In praise of threat: what marriage equality really means -- Grandmother spider -- Woolf's darkness: embracing the inexplicable -- Cassandra among the creeps -- YesAllWomen: feminists rewrite the story -- Pandora's box and the volunteer police force.
In her comic, scathing essay "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. She ends on a serious note: the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, "He's trying to kill me!" This book features that now-classic essay with six complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf 's embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Worth the Read submitted by eschrine on July 31, 2020, 3:38pm This series of essays is informative, well-written, and worth the read. Solnit's writing is educational yet easy to read, providing a valuable report on several long-standing issues that remain prevalent today. Her accounts are both saddening and empowering, and I recommend it as a an eye-opening book for all.

A bit dated in its appraisal of feminism submitted by foilista on June 28, 2023, 11:08am More than anything else, this collection of essays was an interesting index of what feminism appeared to be in 2014. And as always with Solnit, I find that she fails to foreground race and class (or issues that trans women face). Not surprisingly, it doesn't read as quite current.

My favorite essay in this collection was the one that fit least with the titular theme--"Woolf's Darkness." Solnit writes: "Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can't count what matters. The revolt against this destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favor of subtleties, of pleasures money can't buy at corporations can't command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning, of the slow, the meandering, the digressive, the exploratory, the numinous, the uncertain."