Men Explain Things to Me

In her comic, scathingly honest essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about the phenomena of men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, using some of her own hilariously awful and insulting encounters as the personal foundation.

Throughout the book inspired by this particular piece of her work, Solnit explores the reasons men so often believe they are more educated than the women around them, why women are made to feel the same, how it all manifests, and the ultimate problem at hand: 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 with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf ’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, as well as a highly original inquiry into marriage equality and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women.