Review: Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (2014)

[truepenny]

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Crawling back through the funhouse mirror that was 2016, this is a collection of topical essays, mostly on politics, although there's a great one about Virigina Woolf and negative capability. Solnit is an good writer and she's very passionate about women's rights and the culture of male violence, about which she is still, in 2020, not wrong. She keeps looking for the paradigm-shifting event, the one that will make domestic violence and rape suddenly matter to the dominant culture, and I don't think she finds it.

(Her title essay is NOT where the word "mansplaining" comes from, but it is calling out the same phenomenon.)



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