I would bet serious money that use of the term mansplaining covers a hell of a lot more than interrupting an expert in her field. :rolleyes: For example
Umm…how do I put this. ZPG Zealot is a valued member of our community, but her take on MANY MANY things is…idiosyncratic. Her use of words, whether “mansplain” or “rape,” is not indicative of widespread usage.
That is a fine way to put it.
Although, I have to agree that there are cases where the word mansplaining is used by other people where I think “you realize the word doesn’t mean ‘man explaining something to a woman because she doesn’t understand it?’” There has to be the “unnecessarily explaining” in it.
Damn. That backfired, didn’t it.
I agree with lance strongarm that these are oversimplifications of the articles objections.
The reason the Straight White Boys Texting site is distasteful is that it associates the phenomenon of cyber harassment with a specific race, gender, and sexuality as though it is exclusive to that demographic. Literally everyone in the world knows that this isn’t true, and they’ve always known this isn’t true. So why does the blog exist? Why do they focus on straight white boys? The simplest answer is that whoever runs the blog thinks that straight white boys are an acceptable target.
This is just hypocrisy, pure and simple. We all know (and yes, we do all know, whether we want to admit it or not) that a blog called ‘Homophobic Muslim Tweets’ or ‘Videos of Black People Going Mental in Public’ would be universally condemned, and rightly so. They’d be condemned because homophobia isn’t exclusive to Muslims and street violence isn’t exclusive to black people. A website that pretended otherwise would be perpetuating bigotry. Straight White Boys Texting is an example of acceptable bigotry.
Oh, and if you’re offended by Straight White Boys Texting, the site’s proprietor has a very thoughtful response.
As for “mansplaining”, as I said earlier in the thread:
*"I’ve met plenty of women who love nothing more than explaining to men how their own minds work. “Guys only think with their dicks”, “Men can only think about one thing at a time”, “Most men are emotional cripples” the list is endless. A friend of mine who happens to be rather indifferent to sport, upon telling his co-workers that his wife was expecting a baby boy, was asked by a woman in his office “How can you expect to raise a son if you don’t like football?” I mean, what the fuck is that?!
Some men are condescending arseholes. Some aren’t. Some women are condescending arseholes. Some aren’t. We don’t need a deliberately gendered word to describe the phenomenon of condescension as if only one gender ever does it. People just need to stop being arseholes, end of."*
Same for “manterrupting”. This is something that men and women both do. So why pretend that only men do it? I work on a team with two other men and eight women. I almost never bother saying anything anymore because nine times out of ten one of the women will cut me off. I actually put my hand up like I’m in a classroom. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t get a word in edgewise. What am I supposed to call that?
Your other representations are similarly simplistic but I’ll leave those for other posters to pick apart.
Because study after study have shown that women get interrupted more than men. That men interrupt women more - although women also interrupt women more - although not as much as men.
Yes, everyone does it, but the disparity between the frequency that women’s words are not respected is significant enough that it has career consequences for them as a population. It has political consequences as our voices are unheard because we are talked over.
You know what’s GOOD for feminism, when people listen to women - you can’t do that when you are talking over them. You know whats good for individual women - when their voices are heard.
I don’t think this is conscious on the part of many men - Eric Schmidt isn’t such an idiot to do so on a panel on gender diversity in tech on purpose:
A company I used to work for would promote unqualified men over any woman because the clients would believe anything that came out of the mouths of men vs nothing a woman said. My boss, a woman, told me this in disgust and kind of suggested I might be better off leaving because I was going nowhere due to a lack of balls. When they promoted a male person who could barely speak English and had been there less than 6 months quite a few highly qualified women who had been there for years (including me) jumped ship.
Ok, so how do assess something like the fact that I may have been the child of recent white immigrants, who were poor Europeans from a long line of poor. How would I owe jack-shit to any local present decendants of previously disadvantaged people? None of my ancestors derived one red cent from the misdeeds of the previous centuries. Am I guilty by some twisted sense of guilt by association?
This gets extremely complicated. There are 300 million+ people in America. Some benefited from others’ ancestors, some didn’t.
A recent white immigrant from Sweden wouldn’t benefit from his ancestors oppressing native Americans - they didn’t (assuming the family was always in Sweden.)
A recent white immigrant from Ukraine wouldn’t benefit from his ancestors owning black slaves in America - they didn’t (assuming the family was always in Ukraine.)
How do we do these investigations? They would get impossibly complex. Which of 300 million people owe something to which of the other 300 million people?
It has nothing to do with guilt. You benefit, in your new homeland, from “the misdeeds of the previous centuries.” By virtue of being white you have an inherent advantage thanks to those centuries.
Its bigger than being merely white.
My husband has it - Mayflower decedent, white man, grandfather a West Point grad. He has two Presidents, a Confederate General and a WWII General in his family tree.
My dad doesn’t - despite filling out census forms as a white male. None of his grandparents spoke English. He is not “white enough” - he has the dark olive skin of his Roma mother. His last name is Italian - and he is old enough where these things matters.
I don’t - I’m white - I have the “vampire chic” skin tone of my German mother, I’m young enough that my Italian last name is just a name. But I come with breasts. And we haven’t get gotten rid of that being worth a demerit.
But I get far more of a headstart than a black man, or a black woman. I’m straight, and culturally Christian. I’m still way privileged, I just don’t get to sit on the top rung of the privilege ladder.
Of course. But BwanaBob brought up ethnicity specifically–well, skin color at least–so I figured I’d start there. 
The trick in privileged is to acknowledge your own, and not resent others for theirs. As your mother taught you “life isn’t fair”
And almost everyone has some sort of privilege that someone else doesn’t get. There are some privileges I get as a women than I don’t get as a man - i.e. if once in a while I go home “crampy” from work, most of the time its overlooked. I may have gotten a free pass on a speeding ticket or two when I was younger. But the scale does not balance in my favor against being a white man.
My first sentence above is being taken too literally; look at the second sentence. It doesn’t have to be your grandfather specifically; was that unclear, did you think I was literally talking about your particular grandfather? The point is about unearned advantage in general, when that unearned advantage is due to previous misdeeds, even if those misdeeds weren’t yours, and even if they weren’t your ancestor’s.
Andros is right that it has nothing to do with guilt. If I inherit my granddad’s–excuse me, my second cousin’s twice removed on my mother’s side, carry the five–painting that was stolen from a Jewish family during the Holocaust, or even if I buy it at a flea market two weeks after immigrating to the United States from Sweden, and if the dude who originally owned it wants it back, I’m not guilty of theft. But I still oughtta give it back to him.
Is it complicated? Sure. And that’s a good point, the United States sucks at doing complicated things, we can’t figure out how to do anything complicated, so we should throw up our hands and give up before investigating how to do it.
Or, you know, not.
(I know this is pretty far afield from the OP. I’m good with that.)
I see your point. In the list I had made, I assumed that things being objected to were content rather than titles, and the OP and column do seem to take that stance. But as far as headlines go, the “Dear Men” title in particular seems pretty objectionable.
I’m still pondering the Straight White Boys Texting title, because IMO it’s pretty clear that it’s intended to be #NotAllStraightWhiteBoys.
So rather than addressing her actual comments wrt his patronizing behaviour, or in fact modifying said behaviour one iota, he decided to pitch a fit over the vernacular to make it look like she was the wronging party and he the wronged, and keeps interrupting her and shouting her down in the process.
Have I got this right ?
In the interest of research, I visited the tumblr “Straight White Boys Texting” for the first time. I was genuinely curious how white the texting boys are. Unfortunately, I can’t tell how white they are based on their texts. However, their gender and sexual preferences are clearly (if inelegantly) expressed.
Why does the blog exist? you ask. It exists because some guys were being rude and some women were tired of this particular form of rudeness and decided to give the rude guys and their idiocy a wider forum. This whole argument, though, seems to be a rehashing of #NotAllGuys. When #NotAllGuys comes up, the person raising generally wants to deflect attention from the original issue being discussed and instead make himself the injured party.
Most people don’t title their websites as if they were a chapter in a Victorian serial. The viewer will have to discern that “Girls Gone Wild” is not every girl or even a plurality of them, “Hamilton the Musical” also has some talking in it, and “Bad Astronomy” actually contains good astronomy. It is a little tricky, but I think many folks can figure it out.
Bingo. I would only add that she appeared to be initially annoyed because he wasn’t answering her questions, and by grandstanding with his hurt feelings, he managed to continue avoiding answering her questions. He seems like quite a grand politician.
IMO, when the term “mansplaining” was first coined, it was a useful and somewhat biting description for a gendered phenomenon that deserved a gendered description. It has occurred and continues to occur that some men consider themselves to be more of an authority on a given topic than a woman because “men naturally know more than women.” I’m sure it isn’t that baldly stated in their minds; however, their pattern of behavior tends to reveal it. Again #NotAllMen. If you want to discuss the phenomenon or are skeptical of it, we can start another thread where people can contribute studies and their own experiences. My point here is that the condition exists, is sadly non-negligible, and “mansplaining” is an appropriate term for it, because the irrational assumption of superior knowledge was influenced by the gender of the speaker and the gender of the listener.
That said, now it’s just being used as an equivalent for “men explaining condescendingly to women,” which is not the same thing. So, if you think it’s overused and no longer a useful term, I agree.
Most of the other “man”-whatever terms, yes, I agree. Not accurate, not useful, not clever.
Now, because I can’t resist, you realize that you are complaining because nine times out of ten you are interrupted by a woman in a group in which eighty percent of the potential interrupters are women? What are the odds? 