12/28/2025
A little history behind the term "mansplaining" worth knowing.
"In 2003, Rebecca Solnit was at a party in Aspen when a man asked her what she was writing about. She began to explain that she had just published a book on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, a figure she had spent years researching and thinking about.
He interrupted her almost immediately.
With the calm confidence of someone certain of his own authority, he leaned back and said something like, “Have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”
It was her book.
He had not read it. He had only read about it, in a review in The New York Times. That was enough. He proceeded to summarize the book to her, explaining its importance, its ideas, its relevance, while she sat there listening to a stranger lecture her on work she herself had written.
Solnit later described his gaze as fixed on “the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.” She did not interrupt him. She did not correct him. It took another woman at the table, who knew exactly what was happening, to finally say, over and over, “She wrote that book.” Only then did the man falter, confused, embarrassed, briefly silent.
For years, the incident lived where so many similar stories live. As an anecdote women tell one another. A familiar irritation. Something absurd, slightly funny, and deeply exhausting.
Then, in April 2008, Solnit finally wrote it down.
She wrote the essay quickly, over breakfast, after a houseguest urged her to do it. The guest insisted that young women needed to read something like this. They needed to understand that being talked over, dismissed, or corrected about their own expertise was not the result of insecurity or personal failure. It was not a flaw in them. It was a pattern.
She titled the essay Men Explain Things to Me.
Once it was published, it spread almost immediately. It traveled across blogs, email chains, and social media platforms. Women recognized it instantly, not because of the specific story, but because of the structure underneath it.
The essay was not really about that man in Aspen.
It was about power.
Solnit traced how the casual confidence with which some men explain things to women, regardless of the woman’s knowledge or experience, is not harmless. It is part of a larger system that teaches women to doubt their own authority and trains men to assume theirs is unquestionable.
She wrote that many women fight two battles at once. One is over the topic being discussed. The other is over the right to speak at all, to be taken seriously, to be heard without being overridden.
From there, she made the connection that gave the essay its lasting force. The same assumptions that allow a man to explain a woman’s own work to her are the assumptions that cause women not to be believed when they report violence. That require male confirmation for women’s testimony to be taken seriously. That label women’s anger as hysterical while treating men’s anger as justified or strong.
The small humiliations and the life-threatening silences grow from the same root.
That is why the essay resonated so deeply. Nearly every woman recognized the pattern immediately. As Solnit wrote, it is the presumption that does the damage. The presumption that keeps women from speaking, or teaches them that speaking will cost more than silence.
Not long after the essay spread, young women online coined a word for the behavior. Mansplaining.
Solnit did not invent the term, and she has remained uneasy about it. Her essay was never meant to be a joke, a slogan, or a way to mock individual men. It was an attempt to describe a cultural mechanism that erases women’s authority quietly, persistently, and often politely.
The word entered everyday language. Eventually, it entered the dictionary. The idea traveled further than the essay itself.
But the core argument is often flattened when the story is reduced to a punchline.
Solnit was not saying all men do this. She was not describing a personality flaw. She was naming a system that shapes who is believed, who is interrupted, and who learns, over time, to doubt their own voice.
The man at the party explained her own book to her.
But what Rebecca Solnit revealed was larger and more unsettling.
She showed how women are explained out of conversations, out of authority, and sometimes out of history itself. How silence is produced not by force alone, but by repetition. By being told, again and again, that someone else knows better.
She did not just write about an awkward encounter.
She gave language to a structure that had been operating for centuries, unnamed but fully intact.
And once named, it could no longer pretend to be invisible."
