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“Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”
― Rebecca Solnit

“Differences of Opinion

1 HE TELLS HER

He tells her that the earth is flat --
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong,
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.”
― Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns

“There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head.

So many dudes I’ve dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize
and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.)

They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I “get them� more than anyone they’ve ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks.

None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can’t cure.

They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about.

Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice.

They don’t want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real.

So they invite me over when they’re going through writer’s block but don’t answer my calls during breakdowns. They tell me I look beautiful when I’m crying then stick their hands in-between my thighs. They mistake my silence for listening to them attentively and say my quiet mouth understands them like no one else has.

These men love my good dead hollowness. Because it means less of a fighting personality for them to force out. And is so much easier to fill someone who has already given up with themselves.”
― Lora Mathis

“Eyebeam: What do you mean, I have “male answer syndromeâ€�?

Sally: It’s the compulsion to provide an answer to any question, even if it means resorting to pure speculation.

Eyebeam: I knew that�

Sally: It’s a very widespread phenomenon.

Beth: I wonder what causes it?

Eyebeam: Cause? Well, society has chosen male role models who always exhibit total control� If a male says “I don’t know�, he’s admitting to conversational helplessness and failing to live up to that societal standard�

Sally: Pretty pitiful, huh?

Eyebeam: Damn!

Beth: …And I always thought they learned it all in “shopâ€�.”
― Sam Hurt, The Mind's Eyebeam

“Why do some trees stay green while others change their color?â€�

“Certain trees need to show off, dear. I’m sure that my big brother could explain why it happens. Dahlaine loves to explain things, and he can be very tedious about it. I prefer simpler answers. The trees are sad because summer’s almost over.”
― David Eddings, Crystal Gorge

“But a funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don't want to get married: they don't believe you. They think you're lying to yourself or to them or you're trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse for just telling the truth.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“Justifying a demonic act does not make the actor less demonic; justifying only makes the negator more complicit.”
― Glenn Hefley

“If it’s not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I’m interested in but don’t yet know. It’s when they explain things to me I know and they don’t that the conversation goes awry.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women â€� of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.”
― Rebecca Solnit

“He went on, but I tuned him out. I made eye contact and nodded occasionally, but I didn’t hear what he was saying. I had heard it all before. Even men who should’ve known better–overeducated progressive types who probably considered themselves feminists–had no compunction explaining things to me.”
― Alexis M. Smith, Marrow Island

“...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“The serene confidence with which Western journalists and liberal academics prescribe solutions to our [Singapore's] problems is a source of constant wonder to us.”
― Goh Keng Swee

“Only small men parade their learning, talk over their audience and air their superior knowledge. Only brutal men throw their strength about, and vain rich men display their wealth in ostentatious useless luxuries.”
― John Myer, John Myer: A Collection of his Sermons and Writing, #1

“This was always the case when people asked if you knew what something meant. They didn’t want you to know it. They wanted to be able to explain it themselves, to prove themselves bearers of esoteric knowledge.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“If he’d explained his reasoning with humor, rather than with condescension, she might have stayed sane; now she’d grind his bones to make her bread.
-The Widow Nash”
― Jamie Harrison

“Of course, like Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wingenstein, Kant never formed an intimate tie or reared a family.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“Phillip with his raging boner for the sound of his own voice, always the first to pipe up with the proposed solution.”
― Kawai Strong Washburn, Sharks in the Time of Saviors

“I do hate to have a man--any man--tell me anything in that faintly patronizing voice men use sometimes that begins: "The trouble with women...”
― Shirley Jackson, Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories

“I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“...the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“It is the men who transcribed the dreams who are at fault, because they are men and I am only a woman whom they should have warned.”
― Richard L Kagan, Lucrecia's Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain

“Madeleine Cranmere met him in the hall and showed him over the ground floor herself. She appeared delighted to listen to his rapturous enthusiasm, and consulted him on a few points as if he were an expert on the period. He was not, but he knew enough about it to be able to advise her roughly, and was far too flattered by the earnest way in which she listened to gather that actually she knew a great deal more about the points in question than he did.”
― Francis Iles, Malice Aforethought

“Lekarz zawsze uważa, że wie lepiej niż pacjent, a mężczyzna zawsze uważa, że wie lepiej niż kobieta.”
― Victoria Mas, The Mad Women's Ball

“Men were always so superior about women that any slip she did make would be treated less as a suspicious circumstance than as a proof of how ridiculously addlepated all women were!”
― Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad

“Co pani ma wÅ‚aÅ›ciwie do tego Freuda" - pyta terapeutka, a ja nie wiem od czego zacząć. (...) jest archetypem najbardziej wkurwiajÄ…cego kolesia w pokoju, Znacie go. To ten, który w podstawówce na pytanie o jedno życzenie odpowiadal "nieskoÅ„czona liczba życzeÅ„", w liceum odkryÅ‚ returykÄ™ i postawiÅ‚ sobie za cel nigdy nie przegrać żadnej dyskusji - niezależnie od tego czy ma racjÄ™. (...) Freud byÅ‚ duchowym ojcem typów, którzy mowiÄ…, że kobiety sÄ… zbyt emocjonalne, tylko po to, żeby patrzeć, jak gotujesz się ze zÅ‚oÅ›ci. (...) CaÅ‚y jego system zbudowany jest tak, by nie można byÅ‚o udowodnić mu, że się myli. Nie zgadzasz siÄ™? Mechanizm obronny. Wkurza cię terapeuta? Tak naprawdę jesteÅ› zÅ‚y na ojca. Nie pamiÄ™tasz żadnej z sugerowanych ci rzeczy? Cóż, najwidoczniej je wyparÅ‚eÅ›. Jednego Freudowi nie można odebrać: byÅ‚ mistrzem nazywania rzeczy.”
― Emilia DÅ‚użewska

“[Mark] Zuckerberg has also said companies need more “masculine energy,â€� which I think means having employees of all genders wear fake mustaches and interrupt one another more often to talk about stuff they only have a little knowledge about but a lot of confidence in.”
― Vu Le