Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit is a collection of feminist essays, the first being the title essay. It all begins with the story of Ms. Solnit attending a fancy party in Aspen where the host asks her what she does for a living. When she begins to talk about her writing and the topic of her most recent book, the host interrupts her and goes on at length about another, much more important book that was recently published on the same subject. No matter how much she tried to interrupt, no matter that her friend said three different times, "That's her book", he continued to hold forth "with that smug look I know so well in a man".

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.

She does make it clear that both women and men pretend to know more about things than they really do:

...but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.

She is quick to clarify that she knows plenty of men who do not do this. Her writing isn't about All Men, but about behaviors that are predominantly displayed by men. In a postscript, she clarifies:

If it is not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people explain things to me they know and I'm interested in but don't yet know; it's when they explain things to me I know and they don't that the conversation goes wrong.

As an example, she mentions the Republican Representative from Missouri Todd Akin and his explanation for why abortion isn't necessary, even in cases of rape because "if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down." 

The next essay, titled The Longest War, focuses on violence and the common factor in most violent crime- gender. 

So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year. Of sixty-two mass shootings (as of the date of this essay, 2013) in the United States in three decades, only one was by a woman, because when you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns but not about men.

The term rape culture is discussed in several of her essays and what that means for the way women approach the world differently than men. Every woman has been given the "self-defense" recommendations to avoid being raped (don't go out alone, carry your keys in your hand, don't wear certain types of clothing, etc.). Solnit discusses how this limits women. And why is it that women have to be taught how not to get raped, rather than the men being taught not to rape? She mentions these tips that were circulating the internet at the time:

The number of violent crimes committed by men are much higher than those committed by women.

Young female athletes, unlike the male football players in Stubenville, aren't likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. There's just no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers. No major female pop star has blown the head off a young man she took home with her, as did Phil Spector.  No female action-movie star has been charged with domestic violence, because Angelina Jolie just isn't doing what Mel Gibson and Steve McQueen did, and there aren't any celebrated female movie directors who gave a thirteen-year-old drugs before sexually assaulting that child, while she kept saying "no," as did Roman Polanski.

Solnit credits a Twitter user named Jenny Chiu who posted "Sure #NotAllMen are misogynists and rapist. That's not the point. The point is that #YesAllWomen live in fear of the ones that are."
This book was a quick, thought-provoking read. If feminism is a topic in which you're interested (and I certainly hope you are) I think you will find Ms. Solnit has much to add to the conversation.

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people" --Marie Sheer