Question 1

What is the title essay "Men Explain Things to Me" about?

Accepted Answer

The title essay — first published in 2008 as 'Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn't Get in Their Way' — describes an encounter at a party in which a man who had heard that Solnit had 'written a book or two' began describing a 'very important' book about Muybridge that had recently come out, and continued to describe it to her despite her friend's increasingly insistent hints that Solnit was the author of that book. Solnit uses this specific, absurd incident as an opening to examine the broader phenomenon of men confidently explaining things to women — particularly women's own expertise — and the way this pattern of behavior is both a symptom of and a reinforcement of gender inequality. The essay is also about the relationship between this kind of conversational silencing and more serious forms of violence: Solnit argues that the same structure of male authority and female credibility deficit that produces condescending explanation also produces rape, which is not believed, and femicide, which is not taken seriously. Though Solnit did not coin the word 'mansplaining' — it arose independently in online discourse after the essay's publication — the essay provided the concept and the example that the word names.

Question 2

What other essays are in the collection?

Accepted Answer

Men Explain Things to Me collects seven essays. 'The Longest War' makes the case that violence against women — not terrorism, not war — is the most widespread and underaddressed crisis of our time. 'Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite: Some Thoughts on the IMF, Global Injustice, and a Stranger on a Train' is about the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the politics of who is believed when they report sexual violence. 'In Praise of the Threat: What Marriage Equality Really Means' is about marriage equality and what the right-wing argument against it reveals about the institution of marriage. 'Grandmother Spider' is about Virginia Woolf and networks of connection and influence. 'Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable' is a meditation on Woolf's work and on the value of not knowing. '#YesAllWomen' is about the Isla Vista killings of 2014 and the resulting social media discussion about violence against women. Together the essays make a continuous argument about power, silence, and the relationship between everyday condescension and structural violence.

Question 3

How does Men Explain Things to Me fit in Solnit's work?

Accepted Answer

Men Explain Things to Me (2014) is one of Solnit's most widely read books but is not representative of the full range of her work, which is much broader in subject and more lyrical in approach. Her earlier books include River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), a cultural history of photography and motion; Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000); A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), a meditation on longing and the blue of distance that is in direct conversation with Maggie Nelson's Bluets; and A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), about the way people behave in the aftermath of disasters. The feminist essays in Men Explain Things to Me represent one thread in a body of work concerned with power, space, memory, and the relationship between individual experience and collective history.

Men Explain Things to Me Reading Order

Complete Men Explain Things to Me Book List