The concept of “mansplaining” is one of the best terms to appear on the internet for quite some time. It is, I believe, a term that crosses gender boundaries in many circumstances; though men, and particularly academic men, seem to be particularly guilty of it. I just had someone patiently mansplain to me that the concept of a warp drive is not a warp drive and does not make a real warp drive come into existence. Thank you, Captain Obvious! This has to be one of my biggest pet peeves among academics.
At any rate, from the Urban Dictionary:
1. Mansplain
To explain in a patronizing manner, assuming total ignorance on the part of those listening. The mansplainer is often shocked and hurt when their mansplanation is not taken as absolute fact, criticized or even rejected altogether.
Named for a behavior commonly exhibited by male newbies on internet forums frequented primarily by women. Often leads to a flounce. Either sex can be guilty of mansplaining.
2. Mansplaining
To explain something in an unnecessarily long winded way, so as to dominate the conversation, and to make statements that are not based on facts, assuming that people will believe and agree with him because he is male.
3. Mansplaining
Despite claims of superior strength in avoiding over-emotional reactions, when a man encounters even one iota of criticism of men on the internet, he must then mansplain why women suck by comparison or must be radical feminists.
Don’t be a mansplainer! If something seems obviously stupid to you, chances are you’re the one who has missed something. If you find yourself holding forth in a discussion, you’re being a bore. I hasten to add that I’m often guilty of mansplaining and need to stop it as well!
October 25, 2012 at 9:22 pm
Well goodness… my wife has been accusing me of this mansplaining for close to 20 years now. Now she has a signifier to hang her complaints on. I have no doubt that in time this will become a ‘point de capiton’ in our relationship. Not sure this is a good thing ;-).
I am very excited to have come across your blog!!
October 29, 2012 at 1:14 am
I think that the problem of mansplaining combines two ideas, the original one of people getting irritated with condescension, and a separate one relating to modes of speech based around stating the obvious.
The latter is something I frequently do myself, as do a number of other mathematically or philosophically minded people; define natural obvious things in enough detail, and you can set things up so that your conclusion is just a matter of following natural steps.
This is one of the aspirations of reason, performed most explicitly in the formal systems of mathematics, which are nothing but statements of incredibly obvious things and rules for building other statements from them.
This is incredibly easy to mistake for condescension, as it is not the obvious things, but the precise approach to them that contains the insight. Having a general category of mansplaining will only make that splash damage worse.
People feeling that they are an authority based on dubious grounds like gender is ubiquitous, and it’s also pretty common for people to assume people’s disagreement with them is because they make certain errors, have certain cognitive biases or unaccounted privileges that obscure their vision. It’s the argumentive equivalent of “have you turned it off and on again?”.
If you assume people have such blindspots then you can start explaining very elementary concepts to them, as a catch all solution to the ignorance that is very likely fuelling their disagreement with you.
Maybe they don’t understand some person’s thought that would clear this problem up immediately, maybe they’ve never been in a situation where x mattered, whereas you have, or maybe you’ve been struck with the brilliance of some idea recently and think you can use it to solve every problem.
Whenever this impulse strikes, I think you have to be very careful, because it’s very easy to fall into the arrogance of assuming that you are the educator, or even simply following the language patterns of a lecture you have seen or done, to the exclusion of consideration of the other party in the conversation, or even of conversation at all.
But I’ve had many happy conversations with friends where we “mansplain” to each other, in the sense of starting with the obvious and phrasing it in certain ways, almost as if we’re just rattling facts off at (or past) each other, and never really getting to the chains of reasoning. Ironically, it is the exact opposite of condescension that fuels that (this) kind of speech.
October 30, 2012 at 1:35 pm
[...] The Perils of the Academy: Mansplaining (larvalsubjects.wordpress.com) [...]