this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Don’t You Know Who I Am?
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I feel like "mansplaining" has lost all meaning. It used to be about men going out of their way to correct someone that didn't need correcting, particularly if they were wrong themselves, and most often with women. Now people use it on men just...saying things to anyone.
I get that people are touchy on the subject, and I respect anyone's right to not want or need help. I think how Mr. Solomon handled it was correct - ask if they want your input and respect their answer. It'd just be nice if people didn't use cultural memes to dismiss others out of hand.
We used to call these people patronizing but it got gendered for some reason
It's funny because "patron" in "patronize" comes from "pater" which means father.
And "condescending" is also available to describe this behavior.
Yeah in my books, "Mansplaining" has never had proper meaning. It was just a way of blaming men for a particular behaviour, which is generally neutral to begin with.
The people who came up with it just didn’t have a lot of real world experience dealing with people. Most likely college kids writing from their own, narrow minded viewpoint (with a dash of narcissism)
Nah, it came from a very real workspace behavior where men would explain things to women when the woman would be the expert.
It’s very well studied: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/it-s-man-s-and-woman-s-world/201603/the-psychology-mansplaining
Is an interesting topic of discussion, unfortunately, they always seem to attach these things to a specific gender or race and it makes the whole thing sound childish. It's like the concept of micro-aggressions, I like the idea of investigating the subtleties of human behaviour which can have covert but large effects, but they immediately attach it to race and racism.
Because it's a specific subset of patronizing, where it wouldn't have happened if the target were not a woman.
What about the other way around, what's that called? Like I've had women "mansplain" cooking to me because I am a guy.
Womansplaining I guess? It's not a popular phrase or even one I've ever heard anyone else use, but it somewhat fits as she explained it because she felt like you don't understand cooking as a guy. But it's missing the other context where mansplaining only became a popular term because lots of women could identify with their own personal experiences of being condescendingly explained to just because they're a woman.
Thought it was assuming someone you're talking to needs to be eli5 something like properly configuring a firewall. As a woman I always have to step on eggshells not to embarass guys doing that because every time I mention anything that indicates I have experience in IT and tech support they seem put off and stop talking to me lol... especially if then I try to share what I've done to fix an issue that has been plaguing say the office and they don't understand what I'm talking about. I think though intersecting into someone's conversation is very rude at least where I'm from. In public I don't expect to interact with a stranger unless they're about to warn me about a bobcat behind me lol. I don't interject in other people's conversations even though I may be knowgeable about it because who am I to them? They're having a friendly conversation and I walk up and go "xcuse me ma'am, actually, it was Jennifer Lopez that was being referenced in the taco kisses episode of South Park, not Shakira". Again, just awkward?
I have never liked the term. I am also in a technical role and feel like if I say anything to a women at work I will be yelled at.
Like okay I had to go to speech therapy for years the very fact that I can talk at all is a miracle of medical science. Any other time in human history I would be effectively mute. So now I am working with someone, I have to not only figure out the answer to their question I have to spend all this effort to get my mouth to move to say the answer and if I explain it even slightly wrong I am an awful person who deserves to have their life ruined.
I don't know what you don't know. Sometimes I am not going to simplify my answer not enough sometimes I am going to simplify it too much. I am going to make a mistake and for that I am sorry.
Frankly I do avoid it because I don't want to be accused of something. If I don't interact I can't interact incorrectly.
Everyone has their own expectations being in public. Like you said, it can even depend on where you're from, and in places like the US with multiple cultures crossing over, there can be clashes in those expectations. The key is to respect those expectations once they're made known. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to broach a conversation like this, nor do I think it's wrong to want to be left alone, but we should be able to have some degree of interaction without being insulting.
Like I said, I get people being touchy, and I don't think the people he's talking about were bad or anything, I just think it's a mistake to handle it quite like they did.
Wow, they sound like some insecure guys lol.
I get what you're saying about interjecting in stranger's conversations, but that actually happens all the time (initiated by men and women, to men and women) here in Canada. It's actually one of my favorite things about Canada! I've got into some spirited discussions with random strangers about all sorts of things, and bonding with strangers with immediate familiarity is something I've grown to really enjoy.
Unless I'm in an introverted mood, in which case I just mumble and run off lol
I definitely agree that you don't just butt into a strangers conversation in public. That's just weird.
When it comes to tech though you have to at least get where those guys are comming from. It's not because you're a woman, it's because it's tech. You can't assume people know anything about tech otherwise you'll be half way through explaining the thing before you find out that the person you're explaining it to doesn't know what a right mouse button is and they think the internet is an icon on their desktop. You can't know what everyone else knows so the easiest thing is to assume they know nothing. If you work in IT or any other tech field long enough it's really easy to wind up talking to everyone like they lick windows just because that's the safest thing to assume until proven otherwise.
As far as the IT guys avoiding you, they may just feel awkward for treating you like a window licker, or they may just be leaving you alone because now they know that you know what you're doing. I work in a different support job now but I still have coworkers that I don't really interact with because I know them and trust them enough to do most stuff on their own. However that also means that if they seek me out then something is very wrong and it's probably going to be a pain in the ass because if it wasn't then they would have fixed it themselves.
You're just gaslighting us!
:P
Donner–Kruger effect in action.
I'm pretty sure I had a woman mansplain something to me once in the meat aisle at Sam's when I was making a joke about a rib roast to my wife.
Yeah, they misused the term.
You forgot step #3! Not whine about it online.
He offered, they declined, we didn't need to hear about it. The only reason we heard about it is because he felt slighted, or is trying to make some anti-feminist point. I'm sad that he felt bad, but not everyone is going to want the free stuff you're offering. That doesn't make them bad people, or feminism a bad movement.
So if a female biologist who wrote a PHD thesis on the origins of RNA overheard some men talking about the origins of life and when the women wants to chime in because she is a subject matter expert, the men tell her they "don't need a black woman's explanation". And after being told this she is in the wrong for venting online? Please. Your just as sexist as the people you claim to be opposed to.
You cannot in good faith compare people who have suffered because if their skin color to those who have not, when talking about situations where skin color comes up.
Are both situations racist by pure definition? Sure. Just like punching a man and punching a child are both punching. One is much more wrong.
Fuck all that noise...
One racially motivated act (say hitting someone because of their skin color) is not any more or less racist depending on the race of the victim. If you believe that, it is by definition a racist value you're holding.
There's a difference when it comes to contextual, social and historical factors. Like the word cracker is insensitive but doesn't carry the hateful connotations and discrimination that the N-word possesses.
But anyone trying to say it's more or less appropriate to hate on any single group is just demonstrating their own implicit and explicit racial biases.
This is only true if you don't think the severity of the damage correlates to the severity of the racism. If we go with your definition, then all racism is equivalent, and we can't tell any apart. That seems like an arbitrarily limiting and useless way to think about it. Why would we not want to be able to compare how severe each racist act is?
This is only true if you think all groups are equally strong and equally oppressed by each other and the system. But if that's not the case, then I would say it's OK to be mean to the ones who are stronger or less oppressed. It's a means of coping with the inequality. Just like we normal folks like to mock billionaires, while they're actively causing suffering.
If one person engages in a racially motivated attack on another individual, it is not any more or less racist if the victim was black or white.
If a man was walking down the street and was beaten to death by an angry mob based entirely on the individual's race, is it less racially motivated if the victim was one race over another?
Are we punishing people for the sins of our ancestors? Does historic racism against one race justify mistreatment of another thru a retributivist mindset?
This backwards hypervigilant, hypersensitivity and hypocritically encouraging implicit and explicit racism as morally permissible retributivist actions needs to stop. Racism is racism. We need to respect each other as equals if we want racism to stop. You're calling for unequal treatment/enforcement of social policies based on one's race. Fuck that noise.
Ok, so you're conflating the terms "racist" and "racially motivated". Yeah, if you do that, then your point makes sense.
Two different actions with different impacts can be different amounts of racist, but both could be equally racially motivated. For example, it's way more racist for someone to want to murder a black person than it is for someone to be afraid of a black person and cross the street when they're coming. Both are equally racially motivated, but different amounts of racist. See the point? More impact = more racism.
And if we can agree that it's the 'impact' that makes something more/less racist, then we can see how a white person saying X and a black person saying X could be different amounts of racist, depending on the impact. If a Latino would call a white person the N word, that's less racist than calling a black person that. Right?
I couldn't tell you. All of the racism that's present today, and still ongoing, means we don't know the answer to that. Find me a place where this happens and I'm happy to learn.
It’s reductive to take that as saying “it’s more appropriate to hate on white people”. They worded it a bit poorly imo but the analogy they’re responding to is still crappy. There isn’t an issue of black women assuming white men don’t know the origins of RNA, but there is an issue of men assuming women don’t know anything about “nerdy” things like film. Obviously they assumed wrong with Ed Solomon, but the analogy is still in bad faith because it’s wouldn’t be for the same reason.
This specific situation described in this post is an issue of "women assuming that the man offering his take on a subject was ignorant about it and driven by machism" (as that's exactly what they accused him off when they called his offer one of "mansplaining").
(In fact what makes this a bit of a story is that rather than just saying "No thanks", they instead explicitly accused him of offering an ignorant opinion driven by sexist)
Surelly both the "men assuming women don’t know anything about 'nerdy' things like film" and "women assuming that men offering their own take on a subject are ignorant and driven by sexism" are equally wrong?!
How is instantly presuming such bad things about other people purelly on the basis of the number of Y chromossomes they were born with, less sexist if its acting/voicing prejudice (quite literally: they prejudged the other person) from XX persons towards XY persons than if it is from XY persons towards XX persons?
It's kinda the whole point of this whole comment thread: prejudice is prejudice and its discriminatory to excuse it for some people but not for others purelly on the bases of some having being born with certain characteristics and the others not.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about what I said. It doesn’t excuse it, I directly said they were wrong in this instance. My comment was directed towards the absurd comparison of women incorrectly assuming a white guy was mansplaining and a black woman who knows about the origins of RNA being dismissed. It’s really ignorant to equate the widespread, discriminatory assumption of women and black people being stupid and uneducated to two women not giving credit to the MIB writer lol. The former affects your education, livelihood, and career and the latter is funny at best and manufactured rage at worst. They are not at all equivalent.
I just want to clarify this again because this is just a Reddit-tier mentality that’s super brain dead: just because I’m saying this guy isn’t a tragic victim doesn’t mean I’m a crazy radical feminist that hates men.
I think I see what you mean.
That said, "some discriminations are not all that bad compared to other discriminations out there" doesn't look like a hill worth fighting on, as excusing some discrimination (as long as it comes from people who genetically look similar to victims of discrimination) isn't exactly a moral high ground.
If you really are against discrimination then surelly you are against treating and judging people differently based on being born with some characteristics or others, rather than seeking to excuse (or at least lighten the blame) for some because they just so happen to share some genetic characteristics with other, unrelated, people who were victims of discrimination in the past.
You stop discrimination by going against discriminatory acts and practices, you don't do it by keeping the framework of categorizing people on their genetics and treating and judging them based on such categories, and just switching around the categories deemed implicitly "worthy" and "unworthy".
The story here is that two people acted in a discriminatory, prejudiced way towards a third person and that action turned out to be the pinnacle of being wrong AND showed them as massivelly sexist (those two thing were what made it a story). Their actions speak for themselves and trying to use their genetic makeup to lighten the judgment of those actions is the dictionary definition of discrimination. Had they been victims of discrimination previously from the other person, then absolutelly, but they were not, they just prejudged the other person on his genetics and then proceeded to accuse him of sexism.
As a brown person. It doesn't matter what color you are. Someone's race shouldn't matter at all when comparing how fucked up something is unless it's directly culturally relevant.
A white guy vs black woman RNA paper writing PhD being told gtfo is equally offensive. Race only matter like if you told the white guy vs black woman something like a joke about picking cotton or the white guy a joke about him fucking his sister.
Telling someone "you don't matter / you are the enemy" for over a decade and to millions of people is how an actual white nationalist movement became a thing. You can only tell people how horrible and evil they are until they start to believe in it.
What if that person is white of Jewish origin? Or Irish? Heck, I know a Lebanese guy who's whiter than me and has red hair...
Mocking a culture that has been abused because of their culture (Jews) is worse than mocking a culture that has not been abused for their culture (Karens). But mocking white looking people for being white isn't the same as their culture. It matters what you mock.
Don't punch down. It's not more complicated than that. And if you're not sure if you're punching down, don't punch.
It’s not anti-feminist to laugh at the irony of saying no to the MIB writer clarifying the origins of the story. It’s just a goofy story lol.
And if he wrote it to be a goofy story, then I'm with you. I don't know his intent.
I was just saying that bc it seemed too cynical when you said we didn’t need to hear about it at all. I guess I don’t 100% know his intent either but there hasn’t been any reason to doubt it so far.
It's a funny anecdote from the creator of Men in Black about being shut down for mansplaining the origins of Men in Black. Yikes.
Yup, and it's fine, until the guy above me starts to comment on their choice of words.
It can either be a funny note where we all laugh, or it can be an analysis of people's word choice and reaction. When it's the latter, his whining will be met by my whining, until all the whining stops :-P
They could have ended at "No thank you." They decided to go all in on being an asshole to a complete stranger. They should have been called out.
I never said anything about feminism or that they were bad. I'm just making an observation on the situation here. I also don't think it's unreasonable for a person to share an interesting personal experience on a forum designed to share exactly that. And he doesn't sound "slighted" to me. More amused than anything, because it's an amusing story.