Men Explain Things To Me

The first essay introduces two key characters Mr. Very Important I and Mr. Very Important II. Mr. Very Important I is “an imposing man who’d made a lot of money” (1) and the host of a party Solnit attends. After insisting that she talk to him, he patronizingly asks her about her writing. When she begins talking about her latest book, he interrupts her to tell her about “the very important Muybridge book that came out this year […] with that smug look [she] know[s] so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority” (2), entirely unaware that he is actually discussing Solnit’s book. This highlights a key theme of the book: gender roles. Central to Mr. Very Important I’s assumption that he is better position to talk about the book than Solnit is the fact that he is a man and she is a woman. Conditioned to conform to mainstream gender roles, he expresses the “out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant [that] is, in [Solnit’s] experience, gendered” (4). Indeed, when Solnit’s friend finally manages to get him to hear that the book is, indeed, Solnit’s, he cannot make this information fit into his narrow understanding of gender roles. The information “confuse[s] the neat categories into which his world [is] sorted” and renders him speechless for a moment “before he [begins] holding forth again” (4).

Mr. Very Important I’s gendered behavior also demonstrates an important motif: men’s silencing of women. In talking over Solnit about a book that she had, in fact, written, he drowns her out, assuming that her voice is less informed and less important that his own. Such assumptions discourage women from speaking out and discourage men from listening when they do. As Solnit observes, it has the effect of “indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world” (4). Solnit also links this silencing to violence against women, another of the book’s central themes. She notes that “[c]redibility is a basic survival tool” (6) and that, in situations where women’s voices are silenced and discredited, they are far more vulnerable to sexual violence and even murder. Alluding briefly to another key theme—feminism’s progress in securing women’s rights—she also notes that attaining credibility has been at “the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes” (7).

The same issues play out in the behavior of Mr. Very Important II, who “sneer[s] at [Solnit]” (9) as he informs her that she is misinformed about something about which she has, in fact, written a book. Again, this is a silencing experience because Solnit finds his scorn “so withering, his confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seem[s] a scary exercise in futility” (9). This pattern of silencing is so widespread that “women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being” (10-11). Demonstrating how this functions as a part of a “continuum that stretches from minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death” (16), Solnit links silencing women and violence against women by observing that men’s casual assumption that they are better informed than women expresses the same power as that which is expressed through “intimidation and violence” (15) and hierarchy or social stratification.

The same themes and motifs are present in Essay 2. Violence against women, in particular, is central to the essay as Solnit provides several statistics about the scale of sexual and domestic violence in the U.S. and throughout the world. Again, Solnit links this to gender roles, observing that “violence doesn’t have a race, class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender” and that “virtually all the perpetrators of such crimes are men” (21). Thus, she reasons, to counter such violence we must talk “about masculinity or male roles” (23) and “about how masculinity is imagined, about what’s praised and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys” (35). However, in actuality, the “pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all” (24-25) and this can be seen as another expression of the motif of silencing women. This is true in the sense that there is “a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked” (20), suggesting that women’s voices and lived experiences are consistently silenced and ignored. However, it is also true in the sense that such violence operates as “a system of control” (28) used to directly silence and limit women. Solnit emphasizes how this can be seen in “the barrage” of violence and threats that “some men lay down as they attempt to control women” (30) and is even “embedded in our political system, and our legal system” (32), something that is evident in the “spate of crazy pro-rape” (32) statements from Republican politicians that effectively constitute men inaccurately “explaining” men’s sexual violence against women to women.

Violence against women is also a central theme in Essay 3, which discusses an incident in which Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the “extraordinarily powerful head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global organization that has created mass poverty and economic injustice, allegedly assaulted a hotel maid, an immigrant from Africa, in a hotel’s luxury suite in New York City” (42). In this essay, Strauss-Kahn, a key character in the book, comes to represent power, privilege, and men’s violence. He also represents that immunity often afforded to men who maintain high-profile careers despite numerous accusations of “predatory behavior toward women” (46). Such tolerance for powerful men’s abuse, as Solnit notes, “says something about the shape of our world and the values of the nations and institutions that tolerated his behavior and that of men like him” (47), allowing Strauss-Kahn to, again, serve as an example of power and privilege at play.

More than this, however, Strauss-Kahn’s actions symbolize colonial violence and the neo-imperialism of the IMF and other Western institutions and governments. Solnit repeatedly highlights this symbolic connection, asking: “How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her” (41) and, even more explicitly, asserting: “Her name was Africa. His name was IMF. He set her up to be pillaged, to go without health care, to starve. He laid waste to her to enrich his friends. Her name was Global South” (45). In Strauss-Kahn’s sexual violence against Diallo represents the colonial exploitation of the IMF and the West more generally. Indeed, it does so so neatly that Solnit even asks: “Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we’ve just been given?” (42).

However, she also suggests that this analogy works both ways and the “struggles for justice of an undocumented housekeeper and an immigrant hotel maid are microcosms of the great world war of our time” (53), or the increasingly effective resistance to Western exploitation. She makes this symbol explicit too, by suggesting: “His name was privilege, but hers was possibility […] the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished” (53). Despite this brief, optimistic allusion to feminism’s progress, the postscript notes that Strauss-Kahn’s privilege allowed him to get the case dropped “through the massive application of money to powerful teams of lawyers” (54). The symbol of silencing returns here in the discussion of how Diallo, “[l]ike other women and girls who’ve been raped” (54), was maligned in the press as a liar and a sex worker, destroying her credibility and drowning out her voice. This motif is present even in Diallo’s successful civil case because “one part of the terms involving what may have been a substantial financial settlement was silence (55). Solnit starkly connects this to the other forms of silencing by noting that this “brings us back to where we began” (55).