Apologies if there was an earlier thread, couldn’t find one.
A man tries to explain why he thinks a woman was using the word vulva wrong (Narrator: She wasn’t) and … it does not go well for him…to the point wherea dictionary joined in in the beatdown.
I fail to see the relevance of this particular idiot being a man.
Many, many people of all genders get the distinction between vagina and vulva wrong, for certain there are stupid women out there making exactly the same mistake as this goon did.
“Mansplaining” is a stupid term that is unnecessary when “wrong” is perfectly serviceable and has the benefit of being applicable to men and women alike.
“Mansplaining” is not the same as “wrong” - it’s perfectly possible to be right and mansplain. This idiot, however, is both wrong and mansplaining. It’s very significant that he’s a man, trying to explain about female genitalia to a female gynaecologist. And then continuing to double down, including (and you might want to take notes here) mansplaining what is and isn’t mansplaining…
What does he think gives him the authority to do that? Why, I do believe it starts with “P”*!
The issue isn’t that he got the definition wrong. If that’s your takeaway, I suggest you just implement my first suggestion.
The thing about the way human beings use language though is that if you were right, the word “mansplaining” wouldn’t be widely used, because nobody would see any value in using it. It would have withered on the vine. But it is widely used, and became so very rapidly, because a lot of people find that it concisely and accurately describes a very common experience. The simple fact that it’s achieved currency so easily and quickly is a pretty good indicator that it means something to the people who use it.
(Consider for example, thislist of “words of the year” which contains neologisms which have both become common currency - “red state”, “tweet” - and those which have failed - “bushlips”, “plutoed”. If it’s a useful word it gets used, if it isn’t, it doesn’t.)
People who find “mansplaining” a useful term tend to be women. People who find it unhelpful and superfluous tend to be men. One explanation for this is that mansplaining is a real phenomenon which is much more apparent to women than to men - a distribution in recognition that is precisely what you’d expect from what is explicitly a gendered phenomenon. Another explanation is that mansplaining isn’t a real phenomenon and women find the word useful because they don’t understand reality as well as the men who find it superfluous. This seems to me to be a less parsimonious explanation of observed reality than the former view.
So stop spluttering with rage for a second and explain clearly the significance of this idiot’s gender.
The issue is that an ill-educated person tries to tell someone who knows better that they are wrong. How does highlighting the gender of those involved help in any way?
I had someone try to school me in the details of endometriosis. They were hopelessly ignorant and even though I pointed out their factual errors they persisted.
Do you need to know my gender and their gender in order to know who was being the idiot in that case?
I don’t accept that opinionated idiots speaking out in ignorance is “explicitly a gendered phenomenon”
I fully accept that it happens more from women to men than vice-versa but see no benefit in using a gendered pejorative for either case. I also think that the word “nagging” is a similarly unhelpful term directed mainly at women.
Because it’s a common experience for women to have men patiently and condescendingly describe something that the woman knows perfectly well. “manspaining” isn’t always wrong, it’s often right. It’s even more annoying when it’s wrong, of course. But the phenomenon being described isn’t “idiot says wrong thing”, it’s “man assumes a woman doesn’t know stuff, and he can educate her, because he’s the man.”
Along the same lines: an Internet Mansplainer schools women on the math behind how many tampons do they need per year. His calculations are absolutely correct. Unfortunately, the underlying numbers and assumptions behind them are delusional.
I mean, I cherish my deliberate ignorance of the more disgusting aspects of menstruation but even I know the correct answer to “how many periods do most women have in a year” is not “nine”.
So… there’s a gendered *element to the phenomenon?
We’ve all had experiences of being talked down to by people who don’t or can’t recognise that a) they don’t know as much as they think they do and b) the person they’re talking to knows more. But women have this experience much more than men. More than that, very often the assumption that the blowhard knows more than the hardblown listener is based in part on the fact that she is a woman - because the blowhard doesn’t accord women the same respect he accords men. (The Solnit essay that incited, but didn’t coin, the use of “mansplaining” as a term is here, and worth reading just for the two examples she gives of the phenomenon.)
There’s a reason the term “mansplaining” caught on so fast, so widely. The ability to accurately call out the otherwise unspoken societal attitudes to gender that underlie the gender skew in this phenomenon that you recognise above is a useful and important ability, far more useful than simply saying that people are “wrong”.
*I’m taking it that you meant to say “from men to women”
How dare you, there are plenty of women out there who do have exactly that experience. Are you suggesting they are abnormal in some way?
I am kidding of course but the core point stands. If someone’s experience of menstruation was with a woman who did have such a cycle then it is hardly surprising that their calculations might reasonably start from that assumption.
That’s not a bad thing, doing the calculation is not a bad thing, being informed of the facts and revising calculations is not a bad thing.
Sticking to erroneous assumptions and refusing to listen *is *a bad thing.
It may clear up a point if I say that when I wrote “an explicitly gendered phenomenon” I was referring to the fact that “mansplaining” as a term is explicitly gendered. To reiterate more clearly the point I was trying to make:
“Mansplaining”, what with having the word “man” in it, explicitly states that there is a strongly gendered element to the experience of being talked down to by a self-regarding idiot who assumes they know more than they do.
Lots of women find this word a useful and accurate description of a phenomenon they are already well aware of, and start using the word because it’s a concise way of talking about this phenomenon.
Lots of men don’t find the word useful and accurate because it doesn’t reflect any kind of experience they’ve had.
This pattern of recognition or rejection is exactly what you’d expect if, indeed, there were a strongly gendered element to the experience of being talked down. The existence of the word essentially predicts that women would tend to find it useful and men would tend not to. It seems to me that if you’re going to argue that the word is a) useless and/or b) unneccessarily gendered then you have to explain why a) so many people use it and b) so many of these people are women. A number of possible explanations spring to mind but none of them are as parsimonious as: “mansplaining” is a real thing; it’s useful to be able to refer explicitly to it’s roots in underlying social attitudes to gender; women in particular find this to be the case.