09/09/2026
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The year was 2003. Aspen, Colorado.
Rebecca Solnit was forty two years old. She had just published her seventh book. The New York Times had reviewed it. She held a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was an established writer and historian with decades of serious work behind her.
None of that mattered.
Because when the host of the party asked what her books were about, and she began to mention her recent work on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, he cut her off.
"And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"
He hadn't read the book. He had read about it. In the New York Times Book Review.
He was talking about her book.
And he would not let her tell him.
Solnit tried to interrupt. Her friend tried to interrupt. Three or four times, her friend said, "That's her book." The man didn't hear. He kept talking, eyes fixed, as Solnit would later write, "on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority."
Finally the friend's voice cut through.
The man stopped.
He went ashen.
And then, remarkably, he kept talking anyway.
Solnit and her friend left the room. And once out of earshot, they started laughing. They laughed because it was absurd. Because it was humiliating. Because every woman they knew had a story exactly like this one.
For years afterward, Solnit joked with friends about writing an essay called "Men Explain Things to Me." It was a story she told at dinner parties. A pony that never quite made it to the racetrack, as she put it.
Until April 2008.
She was having dinner with activist and theorist Marina Sitrin, who stopped her mid story and said simply, "You have to write this down. People like my sister Sam need to read it."
Young women needed to know that being belittled wasn't the result of their own secret failings. It was the boring old gender wars.
So Solnit sat down at her computer.
The essay practically wrote itself.
On April 13, 2008, "Men Explain Things to Me" was published online. It opened with the Aspen story. But it didn't stay there. Solnit connected that one humiliating party moment to everything else. To the female FBI agent whose warnings about al-Qaeda were ignored before 9/11. To women who needed male witnesses to corroborate their own rapes. To the silencing of women's voices as an act of violence in itself.
"Credibility is a basic survival tool," she wrote.
The essay went viral.
One month later, in May 2008, the word appeared.
A commenter on LiveJournal, responding to a discussion about a television show, wrote simply, "Oh, gosh, thank you so much for mansplaining this to us."
The word spread. By 2009 it was on Twitter. By 2014 it was in major news outlets. By 2018 it was in the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster.
Rebecca Solnit had never used the word in her essay. She has said so many times since. But her essay had named the thing. And once it was named, it could not be unnamed.
Before 2008, when a man talked over a woman at work, at a party, in a meeting, the woman often questioned herself. Am I being too sensitive? Did I not explain myself clearly? Is this my fault?
After "mansplaining" entered the language, women had a framework. A way to say, this is a pattern. This is not about me. This is not in my head.
Solnit kept writing. Hope in the Dark. The Faraway Nearby. A Paradise Built in Hell. And in 2014 she published a collection of essays titled Men Explain Things to Me, which became essential reading around the world.
"One of the rights that the powerful often assume," she wrote, "is the power to dictate reality."
In 2003, a man at a ski chalet in Aspen talked over Rebecca Solnit about her own book. He went ashen when he finally understood his mistake.
Then he kept talking anyway.
Solnit left the room and laughed. Because what else could she do?
But five years later she wrote it down.
She told the story. She named the pattern. She gave millions of women language for something they had known their entire lives but never quite had the words to describe.
The word "mansplaining" wasn't hers.
But the revolution it sparked started with a woman who refused to be talked over. Even when the man doing the talking was explaining her own work back to her face.
Even when he had only read a review.
Even when he went ashen and kept going anyway.
~The History Today
