Structure

Men Explain Things to Me is a non-fiction book that focuses on the fight for women’s equality and the suffering of women from abuse, rape and murder at the hands of violent men who seek power and control more than they seek sexual pleasure. The book begins with an anecdote in which Rebecca Solnit, the book’s author, encounters a man that cannot believe she wrote the important book he was crowing about.

Solnit then discusses the long war that women have been waging with men for equal rights. She describes the sex abuse that women have been subjected to over many centuries and how women were once considered possessions and in some nations of the world still have that status. The next chapter discusses the powerful versus the voiceless and how the head of an international monetary organization was taken down by an immigrant chambermaid...