Name: Men Explain Things To Me
Rating: 3.8 (74 reviews)
Author: Rebecca Solnit

What’s in it for me? Get enraged by the real stories of gender discrimination.

If you’ve ever experienced men talking over your head in a meeting, been groped in a crowded elevator, or chosen your route home according to street lighting, chances are you’re a woman.

We often think that men and women have become equals over the last few decades, but the experience of feeling unsafe, overlooked or patronized is still more common for women than men. So how can this be?

Well, the truth is that even though we’ve made progress, gender discrimination is very much alive. It affects all women, even if not all men are perpetrators.

So let’s change that and take a look at the female perspective.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

why men think they know more, even when a woman literally wrote the book on the subject;
what horrible crime is committed at least every six minutes against women in the United States; and
how a member of Congress made a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate rape.

This is a Blinkist staff pick

“These blinks were interesting to me as someone who grew up being taught that everything was equal between men and women, then found herself experiencing a world that told a different story. These blinks represent an informative brief covering subtle sexism and sexual and physical abuse against women.”

– Clare, Editorial Quality Lead at Blinkist

Men explain things to women because they think their knowledge and expertise is superior.

Have you ever found yourself listening to a man explain to you how things really are? If you’re a woman, you undoubtedly have.

Men often assume (perhaps unconsciously) that they’re more intelligent or knowledgeable than women, so they feel the need to teach them in a condescending or patronizing way. This is also known as mansplaining, a combination of “man” and “explaining.”

The New York Times dubbed “mansplaining” Word of the Year in 2010, and it had entered mainstream political journalism by 2012. The author didn’t invent the term, but she’s credited with popularizing it. She herself feels the word is a bit unclear, however, as it seems to imply that all men do this. Women do it too, though far less often.

Mansplaining occurs because of sexism and men’s arrogance regarding women’s knowledge, reliability and expertise.

Even an established writer like the author isn’t safe from this kind of subtle, everyday sexism. In fact, a man once interrupted her to tell her about a great book related to a subject they were discussing, implying he knew more about it than she did. As he kept talking, the author realized he was telling her about her own book.

More extreme manifestations of this phenomenon occur in other parts of the world. In some countries in the Middle East, a woman’s testimony of rape doesn’t have weight unless there was another man there to witness it. A woman’s word is considered less reliable than a man’s word.

Gender discrimination forces women to fear for their lives and safety.

Mansplaining is frustrating, but women face much more threatening forms of gender discrimination.

Women are perpetually at risk of falling victim to physical or sexual violence from men. A rape is reported every 6.2 minutes in the United States, and it’s estimated that about four-fifths of rapes go unreported. That means there could be a rape occurring almost every minute.

Not all men are violent or sexist, but all women live in fear of sexual violence and sexism.

On 23 May 2014, a 22-year-old man’s hatred of women induced him to murder six women at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Women have to fear this kind of hate everyday, no matter what men think. That's why the hashtag #YesAllWomen, which began trending soon after the shooting, became so powerful. It served to counter the typical responses men give when the issue of violence against women comes up, like “Not all men are rapists,” or “Not all men are out to get you.” These responses only allow men to distance themselves from the problem.

Men perpetuate sexism and sexual violence by blaming women and controlling those who speak out.

Do you know the story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”? Women experience that story in reverse when it comes to sexual violence: they cry and cry and no one believes them.

Men psychologically and socially silence women as another form of control. Some of these controlling mechanisms are even built into our legal and political systems.

We have to discuss the problems of sexism and gendered violence if we want to eliminate them.

We’ve made a lot of progress in the fight against gendered violence but there’s still a lot to do.

The recognition that misogyny and sexism are societal problems that don’t exclusively affect women was a big step forward. Consider the 2012 gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in New Delhi, for instance. She was a 23-year-old physiotherapy student traveling with her boyfriend on a private bus. Six other passengers, including the driver, raped and killed her and then beat her boyfriend.

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