29. Men Explain Things To Me | Rebecca Solnit
Friends,
Men explain things to me all fucking day long. Even when I ask them to stop. I work in an industry that pays men a lot of money to talk all goddamn day. I’m delighted to say that I am at peak man listening now in the year of our lord 2022.
This is a collection of nine of Rebecca’s essays and for this post I’ll be focussed mainly on my favourite parts from the essay which gave us the title of this book.
Men Explain Things To Me (2008)
“Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.”
“Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.”
“Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”
“Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”
“Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful.”
“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. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf’s long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.”
Her phrasing always makes me laugh "an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge". Thanks for sharing.