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199 pages, Paperback
First published March 14, 2017
"If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one's humanity."The idea of who isn't at the table, of whose voice isn't represented, is just as important.
"If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the stories that have not."And she examines what happens when power consumes others voices, controlling the news, controlling the narrative.
"It's as though the voices of these prominent public men devoured the voices of others into nothingness, a narrative cannibalism."And this essay was written before our very young presidency, which has done nothing but sign presidential orders to silence more voices. It cuts deep in these days. Solnit also takes a look at male silence, and the expectation particularly for straight men to stay true to the narrative of power. Then she spins it around and examines how this perpetuates violence against women.
"Love is a constant negotiation... to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort... so much sexual violence is a refusal of that vulnerability.""Men Explain Lolita to Me" is a bit of a continuation of the well-known essay, "Men Explain Things to Me," (read online at LitHub about the white male reaction to her various statements on literature. She wrote a reaction to the GQ Magazine's article called "80 Books All Men Should Read" with, shall we say, a rather different response. The entire essay is worth a read, but a quote near the end stuck with me: "You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us."