Men Explain Things to Me--by Rebecca Solnit

 1.    

            So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year--meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11 casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror." 

2.

            What's love got to do with it? asked Tina Turner, whose ex-husband Ike once said,  "Yeah I hit her, but I didn't hit her more than the average guy beats his wife."  A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country.  Just to be clear: not nine minutes, but nine seconds.

3.

            "Here in the United States, there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in their lifetime." 

4.

             "Throughout much of its history in the West, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession.  Or the man a boss and the woman a servant or slave." 

             Men Explain Things to Me is a collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit. I couldn't put it down.  After I re-read it, I'll read her other books (she's written 15) starting with The Mother of All Questions, her most recent.  This books opens with what we might consider a little thing.

           We all know the scenario.  A man (at a party, over a table, in a marriage) interrupts you to tell you how the cow ate the cabbage (or what's true, or what's right, or whatever.)  He (not all men but this particular man) knows more than you do (or so he thinks, or so he's been culturally conditioned to think).  Even if you happen to raise acres of cabbage (and cabbage-eating cows), you let him go on and on and on.

           You, being a woman, are culturally conditioned, too, and you know how to pretend to listen.  (If you're about my age, you recall countless articles in magazines for teens and women advising you to stroke men's egos, listen with feigned interest and "not to bore them" with your opinions.)

           You don't confront the guy who's rolling over you at the party, in the bed, from the driver's seat, at the office.  You don't knock him over the head as you fantasize doing. But you feel icky.  You feel unheard, invisible.  If you have a woman-friend with you, you give each other the look--here we go again, more mansplaining!

            The book moves into other ways women, historically, have been raped, killed (90% of violence between men and women is by men toward women), erased, and silenced.  It's a little book in size that can be read in an hour--except that, in my case, I kept pausing to reflect on memories of my own and other women before I could move on to the next page.   Little things lead to big things.  Little silences lead to bigger ones.

             In this book, as in public forums, in social media and conversations all over the world, one woman tells what happened and gives her sisters (and daughters, and friends, and strangers) courage to do the same, and, look, the world is splitting wide wide open!

 *****
           

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”

― Muriel Rukeyser