This is a comment by Quadruple A on the post “6 Reasons ‘Why Women Aren’t Crazy’ is Only Part of the Story“.
This is probably one of the best and most well balanced article on GMP that I’ve read. I’ve seen a lot of bad articles on here that lack critical thinking and tend toward a sexist bias against men (and unconsciously women) but every once in a while a gem turns up and this is one of them.
There is an amazing lack of genuine dialogue between the sexes and I find it happens very often when I do talk about gender or sexuality with women that the women I am conversing with wants to turn the issue into what other men think or say rather than listening to what I think or feel. It is a pattern that becomes exasperating.
“A remark intended to shut you down like, “Calm down, you’re overreacting,” after you just addressed someone else’s bad behavior, is emotional manipulation—pure and simple.” – This is so transparently wrong that I am amazed that anyone can take it seriously and yet it illustrates a pattern which is so common in mainstream feminist discourse. Consider the following definition of “mansplaining” which has become so popular many feminists in the internet community.
“Mansplaining is when a dude tells you, a woman, how to do something you already know how to do, or how you are wrong about something you are actually right about, or miscellaneous and inaccurate “facts” about something you know a hell of a lot more about than he does.”
http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2010/01/you_may_be_a_mansplainer_if.php
Of course if this is taken literally it means that if you say something a woman already know then your a condescending patriarchal jerk. Yet feminist rhetoric is often written in a way that taken literally would mean something that the creator of the rhetoric would probably deny. (but maybe not in a literal way!)
Why is this? I think it reveals how their unconscious tendency to assume that anything and everything is misogynistic.
Ginko wrote: “but what Ali is doing is actually quite misogynist. It is a form of male supremacy to frame the problem like this.” – What Ali was doing was paternalistic and possibly chauvinistic but to call him misogynistic is to miss a significant point of the article.
Photo credit: Flickr / ConvenienceStoreGourmet
About the Editors
I’m as impressed with most of this comment as I was with Mark Greene’s piece.
I think there’s something to this “mansplaining” thing that needs to be explored. We’ve been talking about it over in the Ryan Gosling Book piece…
The way I see it is this: There are two sorts of truths: The way it FEELS and the way we should try to see things in order to make things better.
For instance, mansplaining is very, very real. And there is a sense of it being just fine for men to speak authoritatively to women about things without considering that she may have knowledge. I’ve seen it happen with my friend who is an incredibly talented professional photographer. Her husband often works as her assistant, and men, with frightening regularity, will come up to her and start teaching her about her camera. “Did you know that this camera does this? Why are you using this setting? Did you know that to capture the light you need to…” Like really rudimentary stuff. And guess what? They literally have never done it to her husband. Who has been a photographer for maybe two years to her eleven.
Now, this applies to all sorts of situations. A father of a friend of mine was telling me all about this new drug being developed using a natural part of the body (I’m omitting details because it is a mutual friend of ours’ company and it’s a secret thing, not because I don’t know about it). I said something about the structure of the protein in question, and he went on to lecture me about the function of such-and-such, not letting me talk, and not recognizing that I actually know a TON about this, and he was actually dead wrong.
Here’s my question – when men talk to each other, do they not consider whether the other man may also know this info before they launch in like know-it-alls? I think many men are simply more sensitive to the fact that a guy might be offended by know-it-all-ing.
I don’t think the men who “mansplain” are trying to do anything bad. I don’t think they even know they’re doing it. They don’t think they’re being patriarchal or misogynistic. It’s what they learned, most likely from their fathers. If someone were to lovingly point out to them that it might be condescending, most would probably stop doing it, or try to.
And while it may not be fair to give it a name, and we could say he’s “patronizing me”, there’s something particular about when a guy does it like he knows a whole ton more than you. And no, Mansplaining is not the same as a guy saying he knows something, not knowing that you too know it. It’s the assumption that you don’t know it, and he needs to teach you without inquiring as to whether you do know it.
One example of a gendered term in reverse would be “henpecking” which is a particular thing women tend to do to men. When you see it, you know it. And when a woman does it to you, it feels a very particular way. The same thing done by a man might feel differently, and it might require a different term.
And while it might not be great that we use gendered terms for these things… Sometimes, in real life, these words just feel… right.
The worst thing is that I think something like “mansplaining” gets used as an insult for any guy saying anything about his feelings around women who are just plain old jerks and want to find a way to make guys feel like shit.
And in an ideal world – the world where we all do what we think is best and don’t do shitty things to one another – we we wouldn’t say “bitched out” or “henpecked” or “mansplaining”… but this is the real world where the things done to us feel differently based upon who’s doing it. And we do different things, in general, based upon our gender. Because gender is so much a social construct, and the ways that we act “like a man” or “like a woman” are taught to us when we don’t even realize we’re learning or mimicking.
It isn’t right but I hope maybe it helps a bit that I’ve clarified how it feels. I fully recognize how hurtful it is to have someone say it against you – especially when you aren’t doing it and they’re just flinging insults… But if you can hear what women mean when they say it – and in reverse women here what it means when guys say that a woman is bitching or henpecking – then we can all grow to a place where we don’t need those terms.
I think part of it is raising men to be knowledgable on such things to the point they probably feel the woman is asking them about it, or they see their helpful contribution is to give detail on stuff they feel they know. I’ve explained things to people not assuming they don’t know, but assuming that IF they don’t know now they do, it’s an automatic thing and I’m not sure where it came from. I guess we hear it from other men maybe, and it’s exacerbated when we’re use to people actually asking for help on a subject such as I get for photography, computers, etc where I could easily just be in that automatic mode and over-explain stuff because I am so used to people wanting me to.
Maybe a quick Hey, “I don’t need to know this”, or “you don’t have to explain it all” is needed but so often I see mansplaining used as SNARK which isn’t always helpful. But much of the backlash to the word I see comes from it’s usage by some radfems/feminists/whatever who use it to shut down men and even insult them. Please remember that whilst many of these terms have valid usages, a lot of them can also be used in a highly patronizing, insulting, and silencing manner which you’ll hear some folks say they receive from some internet feminists at times.
Also on public forums some people might over-explain stuff not assuming the commentator they are replying to doesn’t know, but that OTHERS reading both comments may or may not know. Would that be mansplaining still?
““Did you know that this camera does this? Why are you using this setting? Did you know that to capture the light you need to…” Like really rudimentary stuff. And guess what? They literally have never done it to her husband. Who has been a photographer for maybe two years to her eleven.”
I would consider it a desire to impress to win someone. And demonstrating competence and knowledge for a man is roughly the equivalent of a woman displaying legs or breasts. So for sure, it will happen more to women…but it’s about being hit on.
Personally I overexplain to everyone, think aloud and am generally the Captain Obvious of the place. The sex of the person doesn’t matter.
But I’m also generally not trying to impress them to get with them romantically, but just for them to tolerate my acquaintanceship. And it usually hurts my chances.
I do the same quite a bit. It’s the carpetbombing version of explaining something, it CAN be helpful and educational but it can also be patronizing. I think it’s important though to realize the intention of the man/woman doing the ‘splainin’.
I know I have a different conversational style with men and women in the work place. Men, if they know something say so and the conversation moves smoothly onto what the key part of the communication is. I’ve noticed men used short interrogatives to check whether something needs to be explained or not and other men respond to them with equally brief answers that do not interrupt the flow. Communication is functional and attends to the topic.
With women I don’t explain anything, it simply isn’t worth the aggravation. Instead I assume they know what I’m talking about and I only explain if they state they do not. Conversations with women seem to focus on what it means to them, how it makes them feel and so-on rather than attending to the actual topic, as well as how insulting *men* are when they explain something we should know women already know.
I believe that mansplaining as you define it is a very real phenomenon and while I haven’t experienced it off hand but it sounds believable. I think that sometimes you have to be careful with when it comes to ascertaining the motives that technical people have when they explain things. The example with the husband/wife team has a very control variable although I don’t know the full situation.There is a certain kind of technical sort that loves to explains things. They can’t help but explain everything about the world. I have an uncle who works for a large engineering firm and he will explain how a professional illusionists trick works within 5 seconds of seeing the performance- as you can imagine it can get annoying but it is his way of expressing how he sees the world. We’re not always the most popular sort and I would argue that we are misunderstood. Being labelled know-it-alls who are trying to make themselves look smart all time is a common misconception. Another common but perhaps not unrelated misconception is that we only deal with bare boned facts without any connection to underlying emotions or feelings. Some might think that my analysis of the mansplaining definition as an example of that form of literal thinking. The definition wanted to somehow convey the feeling without defining it- there is even a school of feminist epistemology that would tacitly approve. Yet when you look at the greater pattern what seems to be the case is that within the emotions not being directly conveyed there is in fact a very definable prejudice (which I explained at least partially)
As for the the feeling/truth dichotomy when it comes to gender. I see that as one of the core issues within feminist theory- or if it isn’t I think it should be. You give the example of hen-pecking as word that feels like it explains/describes a social reality while at the same time I think you question it’s inherently categorizing and therefor limiting force. The subject of gender is elusive because it is based on categories which are based on feelings. When we try to connect those feelings to the world of discernible cognition we usually find ourselves immediately in contradictions and antinomies. But there has not been much theoretical work connecting feelings with reasons because of a limiting belief that the two have nothing to do with one another.
I never heard of mansplaining. I suppose it has happened but I think women do it too.
Usually if someone is going on about sonething I know, I just look them straight in the eye and tell them I got it. No fuss, no muss. Why get upset over a guy doing this. And btw, if the guy is cute, he can ‘splain as much as he wants. I understand that there is communication under the communication. Maybe the guy wants to break the ice. Maybe he just wants to talk and will say anything to start the conversation. Maybe he wants to show his experience and mastery. Either way, it is communication.
When women do it we call it nagging.
“Let me ‘splain. No, is too much. Let me sum up.”
I agree with Joanna here, for the most part. I think there are many people who are quick to try to explain things or quick to show their expertise to other people, sometimes assuming that the other person won’t understand the details. There is a certain common (not universal!) gender phenomenon of men being more likely to give unnecessary explanations to a woman about something, more than men would do to each other. That kind of “mansplaining” does exist.
I tend to see it partly as a socialized gender thing and partly as a personality thing. Some people are know-it-alls (thank god I’m not like that…..) to everybody. All genders have their stereotyped areas of expertise that they sometimes lord over other people. Sometimes it’s not even gendered ego so much as a sincere desire to be helpful that comes across badly.
Henpecking and nagging are not the precise counterparts, but there are counterparts that we don’t really have words for. For example, a man taking care of a baby will get LOTS of unsolicited advice from women (even women who don’t have children) with the assumption that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, even when there is no evidence that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. “Make sure you support the baby’s head” they say, even as he is, already, supporting the baby’s head. I don’t know if we have a word for that. I associate henpecking and nagging with saying the same thing repeatedly, not necessarily with unsolicited advice.
I have heard “mansplaining” used in a very different sense: a man expressing a point of view that is different from most women’s point of view. The term here is used to say he doesn’t really have a valid point. It’s not a “real” explanation, it’s the sort of “irrational explaining that men do.” In this case, it’s just as sexist as saying “the way women drive” or saying “throws like a girl.”
Child of pop culture that I am, the word always makes me think of Ricky Ricardo on the I Love Lucy show: “Luuucy, you got some ‘splaining to do!”
Femsplaining?