It\u2019s easy to focus on authoritarians and their petty victories. But zoom out and the picture is more encouraging, says the woman who popularised the term \u2018mansplaining\u2019, whether it\u2019s in feminism, or the environment, or civil rights<\/p>\n
When I speak to Rebecca Solnit, she is beaming, and I can\u2019t immediately figure out why. Her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, blasts in with a pragmatic positivity, it\u2019s true. She writes with a \u201cpull yourself together, don\u2019t even think about despair\u201d tone. But that\u2019s not why she\u2019s smiling \u2013 it\u2019s because Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor just got arrested. \u201cWhy is the UK doing these things the US should be doing? Why now? Wow!\u201d<\/p>\n
This \u201cfeminist chortling\u201d (as she calls it) about the disgraced royal is right in the bailiwick of the writer who virtually invented the term mansplaining. A truly hilarious story about a man explaining her own book to her at a party became the pandemically viral essay Men Explain Things to Me in 2008, then a fierce, controlled critique of the patriarchy in a book of the same name in 2014.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/b29c80a7ac643a644e92655faebfeec75034cfea\/402_112_3933_3146\/master\/3933.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=26dd93f670b718c2c6278a4ddaf5f835\" "\\"\u2018A")
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