Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

She weaves a global story of women’s voices and their testimony being downgraded or dismissed: the female FBI agent whose warnings about al-Qaeda were ignored the women who need a male witness to corroborate their rape the writers and politicians whose anger is read as “shrill” and “hysterical,” who are told to “make me a sandwich” by 17-year-old neckbeards on Reddit. The internet being what it is, the essay was strip-mined for that one idea and very little attention was paid to where Solnit takes it next. But he carries on, “with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.” When her friend finally communicates the idea that a woman could have written the book the Very Important Man liked so much, it transpires he has not even read it, just read about it in the New York Review of Books. She begins to tell him about her latest work, on Eadweard Muybridge, but he cuts her off: “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?” She and her friend try in vain to tell him that it’s her book he’s talking about.

Men Explain Things to Me begins with the writer in Aspen at the home of an “imposing man who’d made a lot of money.” Hearing that she is an author, the man asks, “in the way you encourage your friend’s seven-year-old to describe flute practice,” what her books are about. Thanks to the lead essay in this collection by Rebecca Solnit, I knew that I wasn’t alone in being patronized in this intriguingly gendered way. He must have thought I’d won the opportunity to appear on a politics TV show in a raffle. Was this guy explaining the concept of the lobby system to me? It appeared that he was. You know, we talk off the record and they give me stuff for the paper.” He continued in this vein for several minutes, during which my eyebrows crept ever closer to my hairline.

Afterwards, I asked him what he was off to do next. One of my fellow guests was a male political writer, past the first flush of youth, and for half an hour we gave the somnambulant viewers of daytime telly the benefit of our dubious wisdom. A few months ago, I went to record a television show about politics.

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit