Sonja Ahlers - Men Explained Things to Me Sonja Ahlers

"MEN EXPLAINED THINGS TO ME is an art project about the emotional economy of mixtapes from boys. It was hatched when we (Sonja and Godfre) and Alex Alisauskas were sitting in Sonja’s kitchen in Victoria. We were talking about four mixtapes made for Sonja in the nineties by a very famous musician/artist (who will remain unnamed here), and the power dynamics involved in those “gifts.” A copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me happened to be sitting on the bookshelf above the kitchen table with its cover facing out.

At that kitchen table, Sonja wondered out loud, “Maybe I should erase those tapes…” These four tapes play out that idea. We asked a bunch of women and nonbinary artists whose work we admire to contribute unreleased or hard-to-find tracks to this project, or music that they felt was stepped over or never found its audience. Then we “taped over” the four original mixtapes with these songs.*

When this art project enters the world, the identities of the artists on these tapes won’t be made known to the public. Their identities, as well as the names of the songs, will only be listed in these liner notes. This project is partially an experiment to see whether it’s possible to recreate a way for these tapes to find their way to the people who want them by word of mouth, the way Sonja’s zines and her friends’ music did back in the nineties, or the way five hundred thousand people in 1993—without the aid of the internet—bought an AIDS benefit comp because someone told them it had a secret new Nirvana song that wasn’t listed on the back of the CD.

This project is also a love letter both to the old penpal networks that Sonja’s zines used to circulate through, and to “whisper networks.”

—Sonja Ahlers and Godfre Leung, 2023