From The Guardian UK: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/06/mansplaining-explained-expert-women
Author Rebecca Solnit admits that even penning a book titled ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ doesn’t stop some men
Jessica Valenti
theguardian.com, Friday 6 June 2014
Rebecca Solnit is a prolific author (she’s working now on her sixteenth and seventeenth books), historian, activist and a contributing editor to Harper’s. Her most recent book, Men Explain Things to Me, is a collection of Solnit’s essays, including the title piece that launched a million memes. Solnit, on the road in Seattle, took some time to explain “mansplaining”, writing and how the post-Isla Vista misogyny conversation is a little like climate denialism.
JESSICA VALENTI: How do you feel about being considered the creator of the concept of “mansplaining”? Your now-famous essay – which really gave women language to talk about the condescending interactions they’ve had with men – certainly gave birth to the term, but you write in the book that you didn’t actually make up the word.
REBECCA SOLNIT: A really smart young woman changed my mind about it. I used to be ambivalent, worrying primarily about typecasting men with the term. (I have spent most of my life tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of men, though of course the book Men Explain Things to Me is what happens when I set that exhausting, doomed project aside.) Then in March a PhD candidate said to me, No, you need to look at how much we needed this word, how this word let us describe an experience every woman has but we didn’t have language for.
And that’s something I’m really interested in: naming experience and how what has no name cannot be acknowledged or shared. Words are power. So if this word allowed us to talk about something that goes on all the time, then I’m really glad it exists and slightly amazed that not only have I contributed about a million published words to the conversation but maybe, indirectly, one new word.
Do men still explain things to you?
Do they ever! Social media are to mansplainers what dogs are to fleas, and this recent feminist conversation has brought them out in droves. I mean, guys explain ridiculous things to me like that the Louisiana Purchase gave the United States a Pacific Coast. But more than anything since I wrote Men Explain Things to Me, they’ve explained women’s experience to me and other women. With this explosive new conversation since the Isla Vista murders, there’s been a dramatic uptick in guys mansplaining feminism and women’s experience or just denying that we need feminism and we actually had those experiences.
If there were awards to be handed out, one might go to the man who told me and a woman friend that 1) women actually like all those catcalls 2) as a man who’s spent time in men’s-only locker rooms, he knows men don’t actually speak to women that way. So we like street harassment, but that doesn’t actually exist, because we’re just crazy that way, us subjective, imaginative, unreliable ladies. Just ask an expert. Who is not a lady.
Continue reading at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/06/mansplaining-explained-expert-women
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