Website review: Men who explain things - Los Angel...
marjaana discovered this in Feminism
•24 reviews since Apr 19, 2008
feminism, women
•latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-sol...
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Reviews of this website
marjaana discovered 3 months ago- "Yes, it's true that guys like this pick on other men's books, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. "
- alisdee rated 3 months ago
- "Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't."
- Gatochy rated 3 months ago
- "Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence."
- PcsBear rated 3 months ago
- From the page: "Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.
...
I was in Berlin giving a talk when a writer friend invited me to a dinner that included a male translator and three women a little younger than me who would remain deferential and mostly silent throughout the meal. Perhaps the translator was peeved that I insisted on playing a modest role in the conversation, but when I said something about how Women Strike for Peace, the extraordinary, little-known antinuclear and antiwar group founded in 1961, helped bring down the communist-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities, Mr. Very Important II sneered at me. The House committee, he insisted, no longer existed in the early 1960s and, anyway, no women's group played such a role in its downfall. His scorn was so withering, his confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seemed a scary exercise in futility and an invitation to more insult.
I had written a book that drew from primary documents and interviews about Women Strike for Peace. .... Back in my hotel room, I Googled a bit and found that Eric Bentley in his definitive history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities credits Women Strike for Peace with "striking the crucial blow in the fall of HUAC's Bastille." In the early 1960s.
Dude, if you're reading this, you're a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame." - From the page: "Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.
- downstreamer rated 3 months ago
- From the page: "But explaining men still assume that I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch -- even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie."
- jenjen1352 rated 3 months ago
- Just the other day I chose not to put up with a buildery sort of chap who said to me, after a long discussion on the composition of soil, "Well, I suppose you may know more than me". I retorted that as a qualified horticulturist I most certainly did, lots actually. Probably lots more than him about other scientific stuff too. Don't expect me to pretend otherwise. My ego is just as valuable as yours.
- demonveen rated 3 months ago
- Yes siree -- nothing condescending or grossly overgeneralized or sexist in that article at all. I think the female counterpart of this behavior is smug tittering.
- Sariade rated 3 months ago
- The truly sad thing is that women are conditioned to this silence right from the cradle. If, as she speculates, women have only gained minimal credibility beginning in the seventies, we have several generations to go before women are raised with the same taken-for-granted self-assurance possessed by men.
- fredzena rated 3 months ago
- From the page: "The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled many women -- of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to mention the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human."
- javamanjoe rated 3 months ago
- MEN WHO EXPLAIN THINGS. [not men, but, people--javamanjoe] But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a 19th century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless -- for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing.
- thewordisberry rated 3 months ago
- Having experienced a particularly obnoxious carbuncle on the face of the planet just last week (in the form of a privileged Southerner who actually informed me that he was a Renaissance Man - in ALL SERIOUSNESS - and then dismissed my entire career and my industry - new media - with a trite observation from his time in advertising in the 70s), I could not possibly agree more with this article. It happens constantly. update @nekop: great point.
