Only you are having a continued problem with this. They did explain and I accept their definition though I (and my apparently imaginary co-workers) initially understood it a different way. What are you still having trouble with?
Right, I think your assumption that I’m lying says more about you than me. When I’ve potentially misunderstood something I ask those around me. People whose opinions I respect. If I’ve got the wrong end of the stick I want to know. They happen to be women and that may or may not matter in some cases but in the case of “explicitly gendered” I think it worth mentioning the fact up front.
As the only things you now appear to be bringing up are long-settled definition issues and accusations of outright lying I think we’ll leave it there. Not much being added is there? I’m sure others will have something more substantial to say.
Yes, exactly. My most vivid memory of this happening to me occurred in a restaurant when I was in my twenties.
I was travelling with my mom and dad in southern Illinois, and we were on our way to see Kaskaskia and the ruins of a French fort nearby. We were in a roadside diner, and sharing happy road stranger banter with a middle aged couple at the next table. This happens a lot at little roadside places.
I was the family navigator on these trips, and would read road maps out loud to my dad as he drove. I was very good at it, often spotting small roads to ramble on for the scenery as we moved from destination to destination.
I was studying the map looking for an interesting route to Kaskaskia, when the guy at the next table got up and loudly announced, “I’m going to show this little lady how to read a map!” Then he ambled over and bellowed, “What place are you tryin’ to find there?”
I scowled at him, and pointed to Kaskaskia on the map. I think the “sit-your-ass-back-down” look I gave him kinda deflated him, because he made a few flailing gestures, then sat back down at his table.
The conversation quickly turned friendly again, so there wasn’t any real tension to speak of. I like to think I cured him of mansplaining, but probably not.
Sorry, was I not clear in the rest of my post? It’s the method and subject matter of his “correction” that makes it accurate to call it that, IMO. It’s not just that it’s a man doing it.
Once again, since you know perfectly well, and probably even from personal experience, that this behavior is extremely common regardless of gender, why would you assume that in the case when it’s a man talking down to a woman, it’s “highly likely” to be motivated by such assumptions? And what percentage, roughly, do you mean, by “highly likely”?
When I first wrote this, I nearly included a third potential explanation for why women find the term useful, which would have been something like: “women don’t believe that mansplaining is a real phenomenon but use the term because it allows them to gratuitously insult and smear men”. But I took it out, because it felt like too much of a strawman. I didn’t think anyone would actually argue that this was more likely than women finding the term a concise way of describing something they’d experienced.
Oh well.
Like I said to Novelty Bobble above, it’s a trade off.
We know that condescening explanations are not randomly distributed across the genders but happen much more from men to women. We suspect that, from time to time, someone who’s condescension was not motivated by sexism will find themselves accused of mansplaining when they were merely being an all-purpose dickhead.
On the one hand, use of the term mansplaining allows us to accurately label obnoxious sexist behaviour, with a view to discouraging it. On the other hand, if we use it, it might sometimes be used to smear a dickhead as a sexist dickhead.
It’s a trade off I’m happy with. For several reasons. One, I think the risk is small in comparison to the benefit. Secondly, I think you put too much weight on intentions. They matter! But so do consequences. And if the consequence of our all-purpose, gender-blind dickhead patronising and condescending to women on a purely statistically random basis is that he contributes in his own small way to the silencing and marginalising of women’s voices, and calling him a mansplainer shuts him the fuck up in a way that calling him a dickhead doesn’t, then that’s actually a win. Because a) he’ll stop silencing women and b) we’ve shut up a dickhead. Thirdly, even if we postulate someone who is generally condescending without regard to gender we will I think agree that such dickheads tend to be condescending to those they regard as junior, weaker or lower in status than them, and considerably less condenscending to those they regard as higher status, senior or more powerful. And given everything we know about how gender operates in society I will be absolutely fucking stunned if somehow, despite his apparent gender-blind dickishness, the set of junior, weaker, or lower status people doesn’t by some weird fluke just so happen to include more women than men.
Because we are functional, rational beings who can interpret patterns of behavior as well as understand the underlying meaning of social interactions. Because, even if we men don’t experience it ourselves, we trust the women aren’t dumb or making it up, so we don’t try to tell them they are wrong about what they experience.
This isn’t rocket science. The guy jumped into a pro-women’s group to tell all the women they were wrong about what they called their own body parts. He is also not some sort of expert on the female body, nor on language. Ergo, he is inherently not the expert in this situation. But he decided to “explain” to the women as if they were too stupid to understand it.
That’s mansplaining. No non-misogynist would think they know more about a woman’s body than them if they weren’t some sort of expert. It is the typical misogynist thinking they are a superior intellect to all the women, even the experts.
You try to argue that the term is often misused, and that is why you object to the term. That would indeed be a fair point, if true. But you’re arguing that in a thread where it wasn’t misused. You’ve just looked at the smoke but tried to find any explanation other than fire. You have provided no examples of misuse, let alone established that it is common.
And it is gendered because it refers to a gendered phenomenon. It was coined to describe a phenomenon that women often face that didn’t have a term. And the people who do it to them are inevitably men.
I used to object, because I would argue that straight people might mansplain to a gay person. But it seems that they change the term. It’s straightsplaining. If, in some rare circumstance, a woman does this to a man, it can be womansplaining.
It’s gendered because it gives useful information, not as a way to attack all people of one gender or being used to discriminate against them. That’s when gendered terms are problematic.
I don’t know of my own personal experience that it’s extremely common regardless of gender. I have been talked down to by idiots. But not a lot. It’s not a regular feature of my life. But when I listen to my friends, family and colleagues, or read about the phenomenon more widely, I find that women report it happening much, much more frequently than men. Both in absolute terms (i.e. more women report it than men) and in terms of frequency (i.e. it happens to women much more often than men). And, of course, they report that it’s always or usually men who are doing the talking down. This massive gender skew in reporting could of course be due to men keeping a dignified silence on the matter but between the two propositions:
[ol]
[li]There are many ways in which women are treated differently than men in our society and this is just one more example; [/li]
and
[li]The distribution of condescending explanations is entirely gender neutral but despite finding it just as common and aggravating as women do, men just don’t mention it for some reason;[/li][/ol]
I find the first a lot more convincing than the second.
So once I’ve accepted the evidence that there’s a gender skew at play, I can either believe that this is just random happenstance, or that it’s influenced by people’s attitude to gender. The first option seems utterly ludicrous, the second a no-brainer. If you want a percentage,I reckon my a priori view, with no information about context or characters involved other than that a man is telling a woman without being asked something she knows at least as well as him would be that it’s 80% likely that their respective genders play a role in his decision to assume she needs to hear what he’s got to say.
For what it’s worth I don’t have any trouble believing that Novelty Bobble has been discussing this with his colleagues, nor that they are women, but I do believe that we’d be better off if we dropped this part of the discussion.
We’re in the pit, so I’m supposed to say “fuck you” or something - but I’ll be a rebel and say thanks for posting that link; it was a really interesting essay.
There are plenty of people who will jump into ANY group to tell everyone they are wrong about whatever topic that group is expert in, despite the fact they themselves are not experts.
Politics, economics, science, any field in which there are experts, there will be no shortage of non-experts willing to “explain” how the experts are wrong.
The fellow in the OP may very well be mansplaining, but it is not the only possible explanation for his behavior.
No. You mentioned something about being condescending, but if the person butting into my conversations about movies was being condescending, it still wouldn’t make them sexist.
Finding a way to call someone an —ist any time they say something you don’t want to hear takes something away from the word. When something goes from ‘this is a real issue and I’m making a serious allegation against you’ to being a buzzword, people are going to roll their eyes instead of looking to see if there’s something different they could have done.
As I mentioned in my example, myself (male) and two females are all giving another female suggestions on how to fix something. I and I alone was called out for mansplaining. It’s hard to take the term seriously when it’s used to simply say ‘I don’t want to listen to you because you’re a male’.
Really? If you think people aren’t fond of opportunities to take cheap shots at others and won’t embrace enthusiastically this option if they can get away with it (and even possibly be congratulated for doing so) you’re more optimistic than me about human nature.
From time to time??? I think that’s where we have an issue, here. People do that (talking down to others despite not having any reason to assume they know less, and frequently despite having ample evidences that they know more, like for instance lecturing someone about his own job) all the fucking time. Men do that. Women do that. They do that to women. They do that to men. Having worked mostly with women all my life, as subordinates, coworkers and managers, I’ve seen tons of women convinced that they know better than people actually doing the job. That’s arguably the most common of negative behaviors in the workplace, IME.
Unless you think that this behavior is rare when it’s not directed by men to women, you’ve no reason to assume that it’s only “from time to time” not motivated by sexism when it is. Do you think that men only rarely talk down to other men? Or that women only rarely talk down to other women or to men? Because it’s that’s the case, then it would explain your position, but we’re clearly not living on the same planet.
Precisely, no, it doesn’t allow you to accurately label an obnoxious sexist behavior, because you don’t know if it’s actually an obnoxious sexist behavior.
On top of it, I’ve seen it used when the behavior wasn’t even obnoxious, but perfectly normal in context. Like a male politician condescendingly dismissing a critic enunciated by a woman, which is a perfectly usual attitude for a politician facing a critic, regardless of gender.
The mere fact that the man acts condescendingly or display a superior attitude is generally taken as evidence of sexism when there’s no reason to assume that he wouldn’t have acted with the same smugness if he had been addressing a man.
I think the risk is high, at the contrary. That the behavior is so common that it’s very likely to not have required any sexist motivation.
Fuck that argument. If something is good for the goose, it’s good for the gander. I’m not going to accept any argument that implies that false statements or false arguments are nevertheless fine if they somehow benefit women, which is basically what you’re defending here.
I do not dispute that women could be more often subject to this attitude. I dispute the idea that this attitude is so gendered that one could safely assume that it’s likely motivated by sexism when it’s addressed to women. Hence that it should be called “mansplaining” in the absence of other evidence.
And I assess that it’s frequently used , even when in good faith, despite a complete lack of evidence that it’s appropriate, but often too simply because it’s always convenient and pleasant to smear some more your opponent, because it’s always useful to imply nefarious intent, and finally because it allows to “demonstrate” that sexism is more widespread than it really is by transforming any negative exchange into a proof of sexism, and any jerk or ignorant interacting with a woman into a misogyne.
My contention is that “mainsplaining” is widely misused to such an extent that rather than being a useful word, at the contrary it mostly obfuscates and misleads.
It’s true that people often refer to the whole shebang as a “vagina” in casual conversation. People also refer to non-hemipteran arthropods as “bugs”, too. It’s not technically correct, but people understand what you mean.
But insisting that the informal term is somehow more correct than the technical medical term? That I’m having trouble wrapping my head around. That is some solid ignorance right there.
