Men Explain Things to Me and Other Essays by Rebecca Solnit (Granta, £12.99)
“Mansplaining”: a tendency among some men to unnecessarily explain things to women, based on a mistaken assumption that they know more about a given subject.
This is the term spawned by Rebecca Solnit’s 2008 essay “Men Explain Things To Me.” Solnit, a historian, wrote the essay after attending a party where the host insisted on lecturing her with great authority about a book he had not read and which, another guest politely pointed out, she had written. It’s an amusing anecdote, but it’s also a situation of a type that many women recognise.
This book of the same title is a collection of Solnit’s recent writings on gender equality. Each essay deals with a particular subject: knowledge and authority; violence against women; equal marriage. But through each runs the understanding that these issues are all connected, a point too often overlooked: “We would understand misogyny... better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harassment and intimidation,” she writes.
The book is overshadowed by its title essay—an exceptional piece of writing to which some of the others struggle to match up. Nevertheless, the feminist debate has once again exploded into the mainstream over the last few years, and this collection marks Solnit out as among the most thoughtful of the many energetic writers leading it.
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