Men Explain Things to Me

 Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit   160 pages

Summary from Goodreads:  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 things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters.

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 with six perfect complements, including an examination of the writer Virginia Woolf ’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women.

And here's what I thought:  Interestingly, I read this right after Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, so my reactions to it may have had something to do with that. I found some of the essays here to be more interesting than others, but I appreciated some of the author's take on many issues.  Her comments about misogyny and violence towards women seem to especially resonate in light of recent news events (shooting of several Asian women at spas in Georgia, the police attack on a woman at night in Britain).For example, she writes on page 33 "Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence . . .  No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and there's just no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers and stepfathers." While there is some wry humor in some essays, I appreciate that Solnit is unflinching in others.