Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I’m Amy McPhie Allebest. All of us have heard or used the term “mansplaining” - that thing that happens when a man explains something to you that he assumes you don’t know, when you do know what you’re talking about because of your professional expertise or your own lived experience. These interactions reveal that this man thinks that instead of being your peer he is in a role of your dad or your teacher or your boss. The author Rebecca Solnit published an essay online in 2008 called, “Men Explain Things to Me,” which went viral and has become a touchstone for feminist thinkers and everyday women, and it now appears on many “essential reading” lists, which is why we’re discussing it today! This essay inspired the coining of the term “mansplain”, although the essay doesn’t say the word and Solnit herself says she doesn’t use it. Solnit says she has mixed feelings about the word, as I do I, but before we talk about the word, and about this essay and some others in Solnit’s collection, I want to welcome back to the podcast Malia Morris. Hi, Malia!! Malia: Hi, Amy!
Amy: Listeners will remember Malia from our very first episode after the introduction, The Chalice and the Blade. So excited to have you back, Malia!!
Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, Malia, maybe review some of your key stats and then tell us a story or anecdote that illustrates who you are?
Malia:
Amy: Before we talk about these essays, let’s learn a bit about Rebecca Solnit.
Malia - Bio:
Rebecca Solnit was born in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeport,_Connecticut (Bridgeport, Connecticut) in 1961, to a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish (Jewish) father and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Catholic (Irish Catholic) mother. When she was 5 years old her family moved to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novato,_California (Novato, California), where she grew up. She said of her childhood: "I was a battered little kid. I grew up in a really violent house where everything feminine and female and my gender was hated.” She enrolled in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, and after that she passed the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Educational_Development (General Educational Development) tests and skipped high school altogether. She enrolled in junior college, and then when she was 17, she went to study in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris (Paris). She returned to California to finish her college education at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_State_University (San Francisco State University) and then received a master's degree in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism (journalism) from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Berkeley (University of California, Berkeley) in 1984. She has been an independent writer since 1988, and has written many many books and essays, including a memoir in 2020 entitled Recollections of My Nonexistence, and has won several prestigious writing awards. Amy: So let’s talk about these essays. Solnit starts out with a story, so let’s start there. She talks about attending a party with her friend Sallie when she was about forty years old, at a cabin-mansion in Aspen that was owned by a wealthy older man. The whole crowd at the party was older and wealthy, and as Rebecca and her friend were preparing to leave the party, the host found them and said “No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you.” He said “So I hear you’ve written a couple of books,” and she replied that she had written several. And I’ll read the rest of the interaction. “He said, in the way you encourage your friend’s seven-year-old to describe flute practice, “And what are they about?” They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of...