Rebecca Solnit

A landmark essay that went viral, inspired the word mansplaining,” and prompted fierce arguments.

Men Explain Things to Me

Lea Hi

Für mich rechtfertigt sich Hoffnung schlicht dadurch, dass wir nie wissen, was als Nächstes passieren wird, und dass ziemlich regelmäßig das Unwahrscheinliche, das Unvorstellbare geschieht.

Zitat von John Keats (1817) im Essay zu Virginia Woolf (2009)

[...] Ich meine die negative Befähigung, das heißt, fähig zu sein, mit Unsicherheiten, Geheimnissen und Zweifeln zu leben, ohne gereizt nach Fakten und Logik zu verlangen. 

[...] dass sie die Freiheit der Identität einfordert durch ihr Beharren auf Vielfalt, Nichtreduzierbarkeit und womöglich auf Geheimnis, wenn Geheimnis die Fähigkeit bedeutet, im Zustand des Werdens zu verharren, über Bestehendes hinauszugehen, nicht eingrenzbar zu sein, mehr zu enthalten.

Cecilie Spangsberg

The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things.

Bekki

He was already telling me about the very important book - with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

So Mr. very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have know when Sallie interrupted him, to say: "That's her book." 

Or tried to interrupt him anyway. 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 nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen.

That I was indeed the autor 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 ear shot before we started laughing, and we've never really stopped. 

And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. 

Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another fourty-something years to live, more or less, so if could happen. 

But explaining men still assume 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.

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