Men Explain Things to Me
by Rebecca Solnit
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Reading Club Session: 6th Nov. 2019
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Men Explain Things to Me is Rebecca Solnit’s 19th book. First published in 2014, it is comprised of a collection of essays primarily concerned with gender politics. The first essay explores men silencing women. It begins with Solnit recounting a conversation with “Mr. Very Important” in which he asks her about her writing, only to talk over her and lecture her about a book that, it turns out, she actually wrote. She uses this to explore the way traditional gender roles inculcate men to believe that they are automatically better informed than women and have a right to speak over them. Examining how this works to silence women and drown out their voices, Solnit links this to wider patterns of repression, violence, and abuse.
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Questions for Discussion
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Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including a trilogy of atlases and the books The Mother of All Questions, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award).
A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s.
Interview with Rebecca Solnit:The Guardian: Mansplaining, explained