Men Explain Things to Me
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| Author | Rebecca Solnit |
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| Illustrator | Ana Teresa Fernández |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Feminist theory, women's rights, media culture, media studies |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Published | May 2014 (Haymarket Books) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 130 |
| ISBN | |
| Text | Men Explain Things to Me at Haymarket Books |
Men Explain Things To Me is a 2014 book by Rebecca Solnit, published by Haymarket Books. The book is a collection of seven essays and, according to its publisher, "has become a touchstone of the feminist movement". The main essay in the book was cited in The New Republic as the piece that "launched the term mansplaining". The September 2015 expanded edition of the book included two new essays: "Cassandra Among the Creeps" and "#YesAllWomen: Feminists Rewrite the Story".
Each chapter is a separate essay from varying years that sum to a glimpse in the world of women under patriarchy and its reflection on the world.
The eponymous essay of this book focuses entirely on the silencing of women, specifically the idea that men seemingly believe that no matter what a woman says, a man always knows better. This phenomenon would later come to be called mansplaining, but in this essay Solnit describes how the silencing of female voices is an infringement on female liberty and is in fact an abuse of power. With an absence of credibility to female voices in the male mind issues like violent death, abuse, harassment, and rape are often discounted. In this way, she argues, female silencing is a dangerous phenomenon.
This essay focuses on the violence against women, specifically that women are more likely to be murdered by their husbands, abused, raped and generally injured by males. Solnit describes how the online community also facilitates this violent environment and focus on the rape and death of Jyoti Singh in New Delhi as very public examples of what women face over all in their lives.
This essay about former IMF president Dominique Strauss-Kahn is in response to the rape of Nafissatou Diallo. In it, Solnit reflects on how the IMF takes advantage of formerly colonized nations much as the world rapes and takes advantage of women from less fortunate positions, equating the world with women and the IMF with men from their positions of power.
Solnit poses the idea in this essay that the backlash to marriage equality by proponents of traditional marriage comes from a place of ideological misogyny. Her theory is that since same sex marriages no longer operated in the confines of traditional gender roles, they did represent a threat to traditional marriage as they were unions between equals. In that frame of thought, it is so ingrained that woman must be subservient to men that marriage equality would mean the ideological emancipation of women in marriages if they were forced to be considered equals. So she is in praise of the perceived threat to traditional marriages same sex marriages pose because they demand equality in partnership, something women haven’t visibly had.
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