Men Explain Things To Me

Violence against women is perhaps the book’s most significant theme. It appears in most of the essays, which explore different aspects of this pervasive issue. In places, she examines individual cases such as “the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi” (19) or the incident in which Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the “extraordinarily powerful head of the International Monetary Fund […] allegedly assaulted a hotel maid” (42). In others, she provides an overview looking to highlight the scale of the problem through the use of statistics. Frequently, she links violence against women to another of the book’s key themes, gender roles, exploring how “virtually all the perpetrators of such crimes are men” (21). She also notes that, despite the obvious relevance of this fact, we still find that the “pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all” (24-25). Solnit suggests that this seriously limits our ability to combat violence, arguing that to do will require that we talk “about masculinity or male roles” (23) and “about how masculinity is imagined, about what’s praised and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys” (35).