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6580da9
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I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1679592
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I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...
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politics
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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44f3e1d
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The truth is that we're drowning in busywork, nonproductive work, everything from "creative" banking and insurance bureaucracies to the pointless shuffling of data and the manufacturing of products designed to be obsolescent almost immediately- and I would argue that a great deal of what we're doing should just stop. Interestingly, people of all sorts are beginning to reconnect to skills and sensibilities that were bulldozed in the frenzy o..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c303a3a
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Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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803f333
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That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social minor to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harrassment and intimidation, online at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear). Havi..
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feminism
rebecca-solnit
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Rebecca Solnit |
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2d6c122
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The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden--which is to say that revolution doesn't necessarily look like revolution.
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politics
imagination
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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f87ce78
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Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fin..
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politics
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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205e0f2
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More than any other city, [Paris] has entered the paintings and the novels of those under its sway, so that representation and reality reflect each other like a pair of facing mirrors, and walking Paris is often described as reading, as though the city itself were a huge anthology of tales. It exerts a magnetic attraction over its citizens and its visitors, for it has always been the capital of refugees and exiles as well as of France.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ae91c9f
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Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as ..
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family-relationships
poverty
family
coming-of-age
parents
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c2710d8
|
But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3b3cb97
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After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas...
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a2000e2
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Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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851a689
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It's the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ea6a88b
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In the fall of 2017, we began to consider anew how violence, hate, and discrimination push people out, and how the stories we have are haunted by the ghosts of the stories we never got.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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46cda9b
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Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not trave..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d2761a6
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The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse "los," meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know."
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loss
rebecca-solnit
lost
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Rebecca Solnit |
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96f3090
|
The current President's verbal abuse of language itself - with his slurred, sloshing semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday, no matter what else he's serving, he's always serving meaninglessness.
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words
trump
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1a65e0a
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As the writer Caitlin Moran tweeted: "For those who say, 'why complain- just block?'--on a big troll day, it can be 50 violent/rape messages an hour."
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Rebecca Solnit |
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4951561
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the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.
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men
feminism
mansplaining
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Rebecca Solnit |
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411c32e
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Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointment, betrayal...
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politics
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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bd5fa44
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Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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affe24a
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The self is...a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on.
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self-realization
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3747bed
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Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place without truly knowing its history, its systems, and the people who are different from you and who move through different versions of the city.
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history
community
maps
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Rebecca Solnit |
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0f5112f
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Americans have swapped the awkward phrase "same-sex marriage" for the term "marriage equality." The phrase is ordinarily employed to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was."
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Rebecca Solnit |
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2dac612
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Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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36049ff
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We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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93d0099
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A Presbyterian pastor who had performed a number of such marriages told me, "I remember coming to this realization when I was meeting with same-sex couples before performing their ceremonies when it was legal in California. The old patriarchal default settings did not apply in their relationships, and it was a glorious thing to witness."
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b0fcbf6
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I've often wondered what alliances and affinities might arise without those badges of right and left. For example, the recent American militia movements were patriarchal, nostalgic, nationalist, gun-happy, and full of weird fantasies about the UN, but they had something in common with us: they prized the local and feared its erasure by the transnational. The guys drilling with guns might've been too weird to be our allies, but they were jus..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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2e7f3c2
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Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez's image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it's in has a title: Telarana. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman i..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e13fb25
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Reading is also traveling, with the eyes along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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d2f1b5d
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A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, it's memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life
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Rebecca Solnit |
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410310b
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It wasn't surprising and it wasn't quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine's corpse was and urged me to see her at the funeral chapel. This with her cigarettes still in my ashtray, her hair still in my brush, her clothes still in my car, her voice still in my ears, so soon after we'd been looking at ourselves together in my mirror and she ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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2a4dc74
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Alas, many of these long-distance writers are not fascinating thinkers, and it's a dubious premise that someone who would be dull to walk round the corner with must be fascinating for a six-month trek. To hear about walking from people whose only claim on our attention is to have walked far is like getting one's advice on food from people whose only credentials come from winning pie-eating contests.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c537748
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In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. this is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the word or in this case, makes a mess of it. It is th..
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literature
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c6789b3
|
One more thing about Cassandra: in the most famous version of the myth, the disbelief with which her prophecies were met was the result of a curse placed on her by Apollo when she refused to have sex with the god.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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598cf1e
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On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, 'The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.' Dark, she seems to be saying, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future's unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, t..
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future
unknowability
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Rebecca Solnit |
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475f939
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For mothers, some mothers, my mother, daughters are division and sons are multiplication; the former reduce them, fracture them, take from them, the latter augment and enhance. My mother, who would light up at the thought that my brothers were handsome, rankled at the idea that I might be nice-looking. The queen's envy of Snow White is deadly. It's based on the desire to be the most beautiful of all, and it raises the question of whose admi..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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9af2c5e
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If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.
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words
travel
walking
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Rebecca Solnit |
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a091e5a
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What's blocking action on climate change is what's blocking action on all the other issues that matter: it would cut into profits. Never mind the deep future, not when what's at stake is quarterly earnings.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ca842d1
|
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3bb34aa
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I]t's become standard practice to erect a miniature police state around any globalization summit, and these rights free zones seem to prefigure what corporate globalization promises.
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rights-free-zones
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Rebecca Solnit |
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24ff980
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Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments "when hope and history rhyme,"
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Rebecca Solnit |
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878df04
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The word for teardrinkers is lachryphagous, and for the eaters of human flesh it is anthropophagous, and the rest of us feed on sorrow all the time. It is the essence of many of the most beautiful ballads and pop songs, and why sorrow and heartbreak are so delicious might have to do with the emotions it stirs in us, the empathy for others' suffering, and the small comfort of not being alone with our own. With a sad song we feel a delicate g..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1e721e9
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explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.
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metaphor
mansplaining
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Rebecca Solnit |