Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
I wish I could say I enjoyed this book, I was hoping I would but I just did not. The topic seemed great; feminism and a simple statement of Men Explain Things to Me. Yes, I will relate to that, all women will relate to this! But the book was poorly written and lacked so much in terms of the topic. Then, the author goes off on these tangents that so loosely relate back to the topic it was like she forced it just because she wanted to mention it.
For example, she ends up discussing all the books she's written for the sole purpose of showing she's gotten somewhere was my best guess, because there seemed to be no other reason to list all her books in the middle of an essay. Then, there's an entire essay on Virginia Woolf. Of course, Woolf is a huge influence for feminism, and yes she was ahead of her time, but the essay basically sings her praises and quotes a few of her books but doesn't really give insight towards the main topic of this book. See quote below:
"Woolf gave us limitlessness, impossible to grasp, urgent to embrace, as fluid as water, as endless as desire, a compass by which to get lost."
She also added so many statistics but didn't really seem to explain beyond the statistics, or really relate it back to her overall concept. A simple concept that may not need much to back it up, but if you're going to write an entire book on this, shouldn't you be backing it up or explaining it more?
This really just seemed a way to expand and make money off her original article that spurred "Mansplaining". She copies her article in the first part of the book, but after that I didn't get much else out of these essays and just felt confused as to why I was even reading those topics. Overall, I would not suggest this book and especially not as a best of feminism.
Snyopsis: In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me”, Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know about things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises and how this aspect of the gender wars works. She ends on a serious note, because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like “He’s trying to kill me!” This book features that now-classic essay and six complements.