Young women subsequently added the word “mansplaining” to the lexicon. None was more astonishing than the one from the Indianapolis man who wrote in to tell me that he had “never personally or professionally shortchanged a woman” and went on to berate me for not hanging out with “more regular guys or at least do a little homework first,” gave me some advice about how to run my life, and then commented on my “feelings of inferiority.” He thought that being patronized was an experience a woman chooses to, or could choose not to have–and so the fault was all mine. It still seems to get reposted more than just about anything I’ve written at, and prompted some very funny letters to this site. That was April 2008 and it struck a chord. It wanted to be written it was restless for the racetrack it galloped along once I sat down at the computer and since Marina slept in later than me in those days, I served it for breakfast and sent it to Tom later that day. So lovely, immeasurably valuable Sam, this one always was for you in particular. Young women needed to know that being belittled wasn’t the result of their own secret failings it was the boring old gender wars. My houseguest, the brilliant theorist and activist Marina Sitrin, insisted that I had to write it down because people like her younger sister Sam needed to read it.
One evening over dinner, I began to joke, as I often had before, about writing an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me.” Every writer has a stable of ideas that never make it to the racetrack, and I’d been trotting this pony out recreationally every once in a while.
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