What is mansplaining?

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What is mansplaining?

Thanks for asking.

Have you ever noticed a man explaining something to a woman in a supremely confident way which suggests he absolutely knows more than her about the subject? Well, in that case, you were probably witnessing mansplaining. A recent thread on parenting forum Mumsnet invited women to share their worst examples of mansplaining. Among them were patronizing explanations of the offside rule, a gas man telling a qualified engineer to wait for her partner to get home so he could tell her how to fix the boiler rather than her, and a male doctor telling a pregnant woman not to worry as c-sections aren't painful.

Are you serious? God, yes, guys like that are the worst. How long has mansplaining been around? The practice itself isn't anything new really. You could say mansplaining reflects the patriarchy at work. By that logic, it's been around since the dawn of time, but the term only emerged in the 21st century. In 2008, American author Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay entitled Men Explain Things to Me, Facts Didn't Get in Their Way, which described the systemic way in which women's voices were being devalued in society. Solnit didn't actually name the phenomenon in the essay, but she was likely the first person to write about it in such detail. Use of the term became more and more commonplace in the 2010s. The New York Times made it one of its words of the year in 2010, while it was also added to the famous Oxford English Dictionary in January 2018 The OED definition reads as follows. To explain something needlessly, overbearingly or condescendingly, especially to a woman, in a manner thought to reveal a patronizing or chauvinistic attitude. Why do men do this then? Are they really all that bad? Some men always need to make themselves heard, being the center of attention during a conversation. They seem to want women to stay quiet and accept not being heard. They don't leave space for women to talk, and might even cut them off when they're speaking. Behind this behavior is some kind of an assumption that men are more knowledgeable than women. Of course, it's particularly grating when the topic of discussion is something that affects women more than men, or when the woman in question has a greater degree of knowledge or expertise. Despite that, some men persist, perhaps due to what Rebecca Solnit described as the intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness. Of course, the term mansplaining has negative connotations and it's clearly gender specific, which might lead people to see inherent flaws in all men. That's led to a backlash in some cases. Critics say it's often used in an overly dismissive way, or simply to silence debate. You won't find many people saying all men display such behaviour, or that men are mansplaining anytime they try to explain something. But the phenomenon is clearly a part of cultural conditioning, which undermines women's ability to understand and negotiate the world they live in.

There you have it.

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