So proud!
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this post seems to be going over well, given the number of upvotes.
It's being upvoted, but the vast majority of comments are not in agreement with the person in the screenshot.
There also seems to be a consensus that the term is misused a lot.
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I think the insulting part of mansplaining is the assumptive nature of it.
This can all be avoided by a soft check before explaining something, rather than assuming a boy/girl/chimp wouldn't know the first thing about welding/cooking/crochet/throwing feces.
Whenever I have the urge to info dump about a topic I'll probe with a, 'You may very well know more about this than I, please let me know before it becomes tiresome.' 10 out of 10 it works, and usually both of us learn something.
That often doesn't really work though.
Take for example the classic tech support situation.
- Person with problem: "The remote connection to the device doesn't work!"
- Tech support: "Are you sure the device is turned on?"
- Person with problem (getting angry): "Of course it's on. Do you think I'm stupid?"
- Tech support: "Is it the device I see on the background of the video call?"
- Person with problem: "Yes"
- Tech support: "The lights are not on. Please double check if it's turned on."
- Person with problem: "Oh, I forgot to plug it in."
A soft check would have lead the tech support to accept that the device is on, instead of digging further, and it would have lead to potentially hours of wasted time.
The same thing often happens in such situations. The person infodumping does so to clear up potential underlying misunderstandings that a soft check cannot catch. That's not evil or mean or condescending. It's done with the clear understanding that the person you are talking to likely knows 95% of the things you are saying, but that the remaining 5% might be an issue and a soft-check fails every single time for that kind of issue.
But it's also a reverse issue. Many women reflexively assume that any time someone infodumps that person is only doing that to them, because they are women and because that man thinks that women are dumb. Even if that man does the same with other men.
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I've never had this phrase used against me personally, but that's probably because I don't really talk much with bigots.
If we want to build a world that is equal and just for everyone, we cannot afford to keep perpetuating these hateful divisions. I understand that historically, the vast majority of oppressors have been cis (allegedly) straight men, and in the US and Europe they have been white as well. So for some it feels cathartic to lash out against groups that resemble their oppressors. Hurt people want to hurt others. As long as we perpetuate the cycle the same mistakes will keep repeating. But it's also important to remember that anyone can be an oppressor. Peter Thiel is gay and leading the world into technofascism. Look up a list of the world's richest person and yes, there's a lot of white dude at the very top but if you scroll down a little bit you'll find find Jensen Huang, Carlos Slim, and tons more non-white people. The women of the Walton and Koch families.
Progressives keep asking why they are losing elections, why so many young men are falling into incel or alpha male culture. There's a lot of complicated reasons for that, but shit like this certainly isn't helping.
It's especially disheartening to look through the profiles of some people here who are arguing in favor of this sexism. Because most of the people here I agree with 99% of what they post and comment.
Imagine this was a microagression about any other identity group. Imagine some asshole joking about how Asians are bad drivers to a Chinese person. Imagine that Chinese person gets offended, and you tell them "it's really hard for me to take you seriously".
I don't have any emotional trauma about this. I was raised exposed to a certain amount of toxic masculinity, and as I grew older and strive to become a better person I had to un-learn some bad habits. I didn't just memorize what words were offensive or not, but gave a lot of thought and educated myself into WHY they were offensive. The word "mansplaining" alone is mild, but what it's doing is singling put a specific identity group, then generally associating a negative connotation to the whole group. It's offensive, it's bad, and it should not be perpetuated.
I think the real point here is that this is the thing you have chosen tofocusing on. You have had so little unfairness in your life that you feel the need to fixate on men being minorly teased.
If you really want fairness, maybe you should focus on the things that are massively unfair first.
Or do you only want fairness for white men?
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Imagine going to school for years and years. You have your doctorate. You're in the field for 10 years. You work in field that is 93% male.
You find a new job, good pay and reputable. The boss on the daily explains things to you. Some things that are just basic science and not even directly applicable to your work. No other new hires get these interesting and informative chats but what a coincidence, all the other new hires are men.
I never called it "mansplaining," it's just sexism. One cute word doesn't capture the malice that is often behind it and makes men who view themselves as harmless defensive.
Of course there is pointing out systemic sexism that is ingrained in natural behavior but its important to note the difference in a simple conversation and singling out a woman to explain something while assuming she doesn't have anything in that pretty little head of hers.
Personally hence, I've noticed it used most often when the woman you're targeting is smarter than you and this is a subtle power play to remind her of her place.Bruh, I had a colleague who transitioned FTM and he would talk about this all the time. Constantly being told the most basic shit over and over really fucked with the guy before he transitioned, he said not having to deal with it felt like a breath of fresh air.
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I think the real point here is that this is the thing you have chosen tofocusing on. You have had so little unfairness in your life that you feel the need to fixate on men being minorly teased.
If you really want fairness, maybe you should focus on the things that are massively unfair first.
Or do you only want fairness for white men?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Lol you have no idea what I focus on. You're just reaching for a personal attack. Also it's weird that you specify "white" men when I purposefully have not, because as far as I can tell there's no racial component to the word "mansplaining". Are you assuming that I'm white for some reason? I'm not sure if I'm white or not - kinda depends on who you ask.
Bigoted thinking is bigoted thinking, and I call it out when I see it. It's fundamentally flawed. It's bad science and bad statistics and leads to incorrect conclusions. It's the same kind of thinking that eventually leads to bigger things. You cannot in good faith argue for fairness while allowing unfairness based on some arbitrary scale. You seem awfully comfortable turning a blind eye to prejudice when it doesn't impact you.
You're engaging in stereotypes, and stereotypes are harmful. Even positive ones, like the idea that Asians are good at math or women are nurturing.
The inequality people have suffered from bigotry throughout human history is horrible, but that does not justify bigotry against people who resemble old bigots.
You can say "minority teased", but the modern word is "micro aggression".
It's pretty damning that most of the arguments you're using here to justify the word are the same ones racist use to justify using the 'N' word, or any other bugot uses to justify their bigoted language.
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That’s a great observation Nougat! Great job!
Thank you! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear!
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Alright I can real talk.
To start off, I don't like the term "mansplaining" because it's a nuanced issue around gender and socialization. I can't get behind the "men are assholes" rhetoric any more than "bitches be crazy."
However. HOWEVER. This is an image of a man explaining something basic and condescending to a woman. It was literally an affront.
Now. You could say the initial message was in bad faith and used a shitty gendered term. And yet—statistically—women are talked over, devalued and objectified in the workplace, and everywhere else, more than men. There are so many studies on this it's not worth posting a link. And there are studies on how this constant pressure and down talking increases stress, anxiety, depression and burnout. And yet more studies on how women seeking medical help for mental health have their symptoms disregarded or minimized, further reducing their ability to manage these stresses.
So when I see someone pointing out the ironic coincidence of a woman trying to find some humor and power in a shitty situation that isn't changing any time soon(though, again, I still don't like the term) only to be immediately proven correct, it's dark comedy to me. I feel it because I live it, and I only have so much patience before meds and therapy get more expensive. I do not give a shit what you do or how you manage stress.
When I see a hundred comments where men need to put themselves in a picture that isn't supposed to be about them, because again, this is a real issue with some dark consequences(and a bad term,) well, that's just fucking Shakespearean.
Men trying to put themselves in the picture is just a symptom of having our issues brushed aside "because women have it worse".
It's shit for everybody out there at the moment.
There is a song in my language that says, more or less:
"Say what you want, [but] the evil of the century is loneliness. Each of us immersed in our own arrogance, waiting for a little bit of affection."
It's what I see and experience every day.
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I had an experience with a male coworker. I am a man too.
He asked me because he had a USB and he wanted to put the windows iso onto it but it didn't work. Eventually he used the media creator (or whatever it is called) but he asked if I knew what the issue was. After a lot of questions, I had figured it out.
He wanted to create a bootable USB by drag and drop the iso onto the usb and the usb was formated in fat32, so the iso was too big for the filesystem.
In that conversation, he said multiple times that he knows about this or that and that he knows computers, e.g. when I asked about the size of the usb (maybe it was a very old USB with like 4gb storage). And I could tell how he was slightly offended by some questions.
Also please note, he was "following" the Microsoft tutorial
Edit: typos fixed
Yea, tons of stuff like that is why I did things the way I did. If I start at the beginning instead of trying to jump around and figure out where you messed up it's usually much more efficient. There were people who I was confident in their ability enough to skip around but if they were new to me we were going to cover the entire process to be sure.
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I feel like you're just not paying attention to what I'm saying. I don't know how to make it more clear. The "immediate personal vibes" is really misunderstanding me. You seem to be taking what I'm saying as someone making a quick, possibly inaccurate snap judgement. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying people only have their own perception. They aren't telepathic. You seem to want to differentiate between people's opinions and what is objective. I'm telling you there is no objective way to interpret a social situation and that obviously people use their own interpretation of a situation when talking.
Re: expert, again, it doesn't really matter. If the woman believes she is correct about something she believes is obvious and that the man explaining it is being condescending, she's using the term mansplaining correctly as you described it should be used. If the woman is factually incorrec, not an expert, and the man was being polite then she still used the term the way you said people should use it.
The real question isn't what it means, but whether or not it's being overused. Even if the person using it knows its meaning and intends to use it that way, I think it's still reasonable to ask if it's being overused. Because we're really asking if the existence and support for the term is creating a social environment where its use does more harm than good. If it's mostly drawing attention to bad behavior so we can correct it, then it's doing good. But if it's causing people to see malice where there isn't any or being used itself as a weapon, then we can say it's being overused. I can't answer that question, but it does seem worth thinking about.
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Neurodivergents be like:
"Wait people don't want to know this? That's absurd. So anyway, what I was saying was..."How many "Men" are just ND?
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It's being upvoted, but the vast majority of comments are not in agreement with the person in the screenshot.
There also seems to be a consensus that the term is misused a lot.
We probably shouldn't use "agreement" as the guage of success?
Discussion is way more valuable
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I don't really see people use the term mansplain to mean anything other than men being condescending. While I do see it used "incorrectly" sometimes, I have no reason to believe the person using it doesn't believe the man is being rude/condescending. Just because I personally believe something isn't condescending doesn't mean the person doesn't view it like that (and whether the person is actually being condescending is a totally different topic). I see people call people assholes when they're not being assholes. I see people call people jerks when they're not being jerks. It's not really a new thing.
In short, I don't believe anyone is using the term differently, it could be that you don't think the man doing the explaining is being condescending but they do, or it could be that the term really is used differently and I just haven't personally seen it (always a possibility).
Since the gendered nature of the term has been brought up, your comment makes me think of the word "bitch" compared to asshole or jerk. All three terms get used entirely subjectively, but I think most reasonable people agree that "bitch" is at least a bit more crass and tasteless due to its more gendered nature. I know we'll never get rid of ugly words when using words to hurt and offend, but I think it does show that it matters if a term is gendered. So maybe when people are offended by a term being gendered, we should listen no matter their gender. And I think people who like using those terms, especially when told they're hurtful, should have a long think about what feelings they get from using them.
It just made me think so I wanted to write that out.
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Neurodivergents be like:
"Wait people don't want to know this? That's absurd. So anyway, what I was saying was..."How many "Men" are just ND?
wrote last edited by [email protected]That's always been my issue with this whole mansplaining shit. Like yeah, it is a real thing that exists, but it very quickly just morphed into "a man (whom I didn't want to talk to me) told me something" most of the time.
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Thank you! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear!
So, what's the latest topic you want to info-dump about? I'm curious and invite an info-dump.
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Neurodivergents be like:
"Wait people don't want to know this? That's absurd. So anyway, what I was saying was..."How many "Men" are just ND?
How many “Men” are just ND?
None. Men are cool to hate, get with the program.
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I hate how the term "mansplaining" has mutated from "When a man condescendingly explains a subject to a woman who is an expert in that subject, because he assumes being a woman makes her ignorant", which is certainly a valid thing to be upset about, into "Whenever a man explains anything to any woman" , which is sexist and divisive.
The term is still pretty sexist as originally used though. It inherently implies that it's a characteristic masculine behavior. If you disagree, allow me to demonstrate:
I just came up with this term, "womancomplaining", it's when a woman exaggerates a minor inconvenience into a targeted victimization.
How does that term make you feel? Does it seem to imply that I'm talking about a specific, isolated behavior? Or does it seem more like I'm implying this is a characteristic feminine behavior? Would it feel less sexist if I insisted I wasn't talking about all women, but if you take offense then maybe you feel defensive about being a womancomplainer? What if I told you to calm down, because if you aren't guilty of it then I'm not talking about you?
It still seems pretty sexist, doesn't it.
Misogynists and misandrists are both awful. It's kinda funny cuz they're essentially the same type of person but on opposite sides
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Tbh, that's the main reason I stopped talking about things that matter to me with women unless they are asking me for it and keep asking during the conversation.
If I infodump on a guy, that guy thinks it's because I'm maybe overly excited about my thing.
If I infodump exactly the same way on a woman, it's because I'm mansplaining.
The only way I know around that is to not infodump on women. I pretty much trained myself to become an introvert around women.
Yup, i do the same, avoids bullshit.
I kinda overdo it though. Woman's about to cross a road with her headphones on, running the pedestrian red light with intense traffic, not bothering to look either way? I'm not gonna mansplain, that's offensive, she knows what she's doing.
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That often doesn't really work though.
Take for example the classic tech support situation.
- Person with problem: "The remote connection to the device doesn't work!"
- Tech support: "Are you sure the device is turned on?"
- Person with problem (getting angry): "Of course it's on. Do you think I'm stupid?"
- Tech support: "Is it the device I see on the background of the video call?"
- Person with problem: "Yes"
- Tech support: "The lights are not on. Please double check if it's turned on."
- Person with problem: "Oh, I forgot to plug it in."
A soft check would have lead the tech support to accept that the device is on, instead of digging further, and it would have lead to potentially hours of wasted time.
The same thing often happens in such situations. The person infodumping does so to clear up potential underlying misunderstandings that a soft check cannot catch. That's not evil or mean or condescending. It's done with the clear understanding that the person you are talking to likely knows 95% of the things you are saying, but that the remaining 5% might be an issue and a soft-check fails every single time for that kind of issue.
But it's also a reverse issue. Many women reflexively assume that any time someone infodumps that person is only doing that to them, because they are women and because that man thinks that women are dumb. Even if that man does the same with other men.
The amount of times i had to explain to phone company customers that their phone line malfunction, which they were reporting from said phone line, was monetary in nature...
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Hahaha, my wife puts up with that same shit. I'm building drones on Veroboard. She'll ask how the electric octopus is coming along and then instant glazed eyes when I tell her how I accidentally let the smoke out of a TL072 but at least I used sockets for all my ICs. She did buy me a JP-8000 a couple of years ago though. She's a good one.
I love to hear people nerd out on their passions. Personally I view it like a gift.
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Actually, no. I love explaining things, it's part of my personality. But soo many women told me that I should stop mansplaining, that nowadays I just don't talk to women anymore because of the fear that they see me as a mansplainer. My girlfriend has to live with that, but otherwise, I hate talking to women because of the stupid mansplaining thing. It's sexist as fuck and I hate the term.
So there are woman irl that really stop a dude talking with the id he is msng
