"The Problem With Men Explaining Things" - very much worth reading

[safewrite]

As a trailblazer woman in a male-dominated field, I had things "explained" to me all the time. I, the construction safety engineer,  suffered through the outrage of a out-of-compliance contractor explaining why it was okay for him to break the law and risk his employees' lives (and then offering me a job as "one of his girls" in his office what

Comments

[dorianegray]

Excellent article.

But oh, so annoying (though perhaps unsurprising) that the second comment I read was a "oh but women do that to men too! poor men!" Grrr.

[barbarienne]

Well, I totally do that to men. On purpose, when they are clearly the sort of guys Solnit is talking about. Sometimes they need someone to return the favor, to slam them with what I call the "wall of sound": a relentless stream of data and philosophizing, delivered in funny voices and sarcasm to keep it entertaining.

It's not something I particularly like to do (anymore. I've grown up some), but it serves the useful purpose of shutting down arrogant pontificating. If the pontificating continues despite, I start interjecting with sarcastic comments that disrupt the flow. I'm sure it helps that my voice is low for a woman, and I learned very young how to project it to reach the people at the very back of an auditorium without a microphone.

Ain't nobody gonna out-talk an Irish-American New Yorker raised by lawyers. :-)