Perhaps I Just Live on a Different Planet

[akirlu]

Or perhaps it's something I'm tone deaf to, but it just doesn't seem that "mansplaining" is something that happens to/around me much, if ever.

Comments

[kaffy-r.livejournal.com]

Sadly, it's happened to me more than once or twice; and almost never by two-dimensionally crayon-drawn SexistMenz. Some of my nearest and dearest have done it upon frustrating occasion. I have manfully resisted the impulse to slap their foreheads, or shriek in annoyance. Mostly. Because, as irritating as it is not to defenestrate them immediately, the sad truth is that continuing to talk to them quietly and upon dozens of subsequent occasions, acting like the waters of the Bay Fundy upon really, really hard igneous rock, is the best way to reach understanding.

Open windows, do, however, continue to look really good to me when I'm caught in a mansplainin' shitstorm.

[seawasp]

Sorry, in context it jumped out at me: "Manfully resisted".

[kaffy-r.livejournal.com]

Apparently my attempt at humor was rather badly constructed. Heh.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

"Oh Lucy. You've got some manspainin' to do."

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

*snicker* I like it. Makes it sound like a term that applies primarily to bedroom farce. Like, what you need to do when your S.O. comes home and finds a naked man in the coat closet, when zie didn't request one and it's not zir birthday.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

You beat me to this. :)

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

(Although mine was going to be, "Lucy, give me five minutes to mansplain!"

[greyorm.livejournal.com]

I've always seen "mansplaining" as a gender-conscious overreaction to an often genderless behavior inflicted on others by a certain type of people, one that occurs quite aside from what kit they're toting in their pants...As the cultural and social underdog, I've certainly been "mansplained" to by other men on any number of occasions.

That certain folks created from this a gender-specified bubble around the behavior as part of a socio-political statement about oppression makes me think 1) there's a rather large amount of seeing nails everywhere because you have a hammer and 2) wonder if there's such a thing as "whitesplaining" and "Christiansplaining" and "heterosplaining" and "Americansplaining"? And just exactly what the point of having that fine a level of detail would be?

Seems more like some people noticed other people were kind of uppity assholes to other people based on certain social or cultural or interpersonal assumptions, and then presented it as a male-only behavioral trait that males only inflict on females. Yay for fighting sexisms!

But I'm probably mansplainin'.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Looks to me like you're just stating an opinion, which surely can't be "mansplainin'" if the definition is to be believed. It's an opinion I'm much inclined to share, so that may be clouding my perceptions a bit, but I don't think so. I see a lot of people who are very worked up about one rights issue or another getting into what looks to me like "man with a hammer" mode. Worse, I see a lot of truth claims about how people are and what the world is like which cannot be verified or disconfirmed because they are experiential in such a way as to be inseparable from observer bias.

[greyorm.livejournal.com]

Yep. That's my big issue with this particular term--and with a whole lot of the stuff that comes out of the post-modernist/critical theory thinking in modern identity politics--the criteria for what is and what isn't are pretty "loose", subjective and experiential. Thus (were I female) anytime I wanted to accuse someone of mansplaining (and thus being sexist, and thus bad, and thus you should be quiet), I could.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I've usually seen it applied to a man diving into a feminist (or at least, feminist informed) forum and attempting argument while being more or less ignorant of the basic concepts of feminist discourse - and with a little Dunning-Kruger effect on display, in that they aren't letting their ignorance stop them. In that sense, I've seen it often enough to think it is a real thing, but not as broadly applicable or reliably gendered as regular users of the term might think. But in the pure form, perhaps encountered less outside public yet specifically feminist online forums.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's why I haven't seen it so much. I tend to avoid feminist online forums because I am the wrong sort of feminist, and in my view, too many of the supposedly basic concepts of feminist discourse owe way too much to suspect aspects of Post Modern theory and Continental philosophy generally, and therefore make me itch. But yeah, my skepticism of the term comes from a deep suspicion that the genderedness of the behavior in question is a product of observer bias rather more than actual gender bias. I think there are patronizing, prating, boorish assholes of all genders and colors, and attributing the boorishness to sexism (or racism, or able-ism, or whatever) requires a degree of mind-reading skill which I don't happen to possess.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I am not surprised. It doesn't happen to me, either. The reason is left as an exercise for anyone who knows both of us.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I have my theories, but I'd love to hear you voice yours.