Mansplaining

[justdrew]

What I carried on pondering after the movie ended (Moonrise Kingdom - REALLY great btw)

Masterpiece. Saw it three times. Only gets better.

indeed. really really great.

[Project Willow]

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/11/a-cultural-history-of-mansplaining/264380/

The Atlantic Home
Sunday, November 4, 2012

A Cultural History of Mansplaining
By Lily Rothman

The word is relatively new, but the idea has been around for decades.

Not all that long ago, an American statesman of considerable influence wrote an opinion piece for this very publication, about a political issue that directly affects women. It was perhaps the finest example of mansplaining ever published.

This election season, the idea of "mansplaining"—explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman—has exploded into mainstream political commentary. Hugo Schwyzer over at Jezebel noted its growth in September, writing that it has "moved beyond the feminist blogosphere." And, sure enough, these days pretty much every time a male politician opens his mouth about so-called women's issues he is dubbed, like so or like so, a mansplainer.

But the article in question wasn't written this year. Its author was Lyman Abbott, a prominent New England theologian, and it appeared in the Sept. 1903 issue of The Atlantic. The article was called "Why Women Do Not Wish the Suffrage." Abbott writes:

I believe it is because woman feels, if she does not clearly see, that the question of woman suffrage is more than merely political; that it concerns the nature and structure of society,—the home, the church, the industrial organism, the state, the social fabric. And to a change which involves a revolution in all of these she interposes an inflexible though generally a silent opposition. It is for these silent women—whose voices are not heard in conventions, who write no leaders, deliver no lectures, and visit no legislative assemblies—that I speak.

See, even though the women in question haven't said anything about it, Lyman Abbott totally knows what they want better than they do. Any woman in favor of suffrage just doesn't get the true female experience as well as he does.

Turns out 2012 isn't really the year of the mansplainer. The only reason we think it so is that the word itself didn't exist until recently.

The commonly cited birthday of the idea is 2008. That year, a portion of an essay by Rebecca Solnit, called "Men Explain Things To Me," appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Solnit didn't use the word "mansplain"; she merely, well, explained it, describing the time a man explained a book to her without acknowledging that she herself wrote it. (This August, she wrote that the men-explaining-things essay has been one of the most reposted pieces she's ever done.) According to Know Your Meme, the word first showed up online about a month after the LA Times piece, in the comments section on a LiveJournal community. Awareness increased slowly but steadily, mostly on feminist blogs, until it was suddenly all over the place: a Google trends graph of searches for the word is mostly a straight line until this past summer, when in August it appeared in a GQ political blog titled "The Mittsplainer" as well as an xoJane.com post critical of the word. There's another even larger jump in October, perhaps linked to the birth of Mansplaining Paul Ryan.

The idea wasn't political in origin, and mansplaining happens in academia and offices and dining rooms. But it makes sense that politics brought it to the general public's attention. When it comes to politics, it seems men have been talking about the female experience since basically forever.

John Adams, whose relationship with Abigail Adams is supposed to be a shining example of spousedom, mansplained the need to make husbands the legal masters of wives. In a March 1776 letter, Abigail told him that men who have absolute control over their wives are bound to use them cruelly, and warns that women might not feel obligated to obey laws made by a body in which they have no representation. He responds:

Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory...We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.

In other words, he tells his wife, who has expressed worry over the way men treat their wives, that he knows better than she does about the experience of being a wife.

And in a 1980 presidential debate, President Carter brought up the fact that, after four decades of support for the Equal Rights Amendment, the Republican party had removed that language from their platform. Reagan mansplains:

I would like to call the attention of the people to the fact that that so-called simple amendment would be used by mischievous men to destroy discriminations that properly belong, by law, to women respecting the physical differences between the two sexes, labor laws that protect them against things that would be physically harmful to them.

In other words, Ronald Reagan knows best what women can and can't do.

But just because it's been around so long doesn't mean mansplaining is a necessary condition of male politicians speaking about issues that women experience first-hand. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have avoided it, and eloquently. President Ford, a Republican, spoke in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment, making the point in 1976 that even instances of discrimination that may seem "petty and even ridiculous" to others hurt the people against whom the discrimination occurs. More recently, in his debate with Paul Ryan, Vice President Biden said that he can't know how a pregnant woman feels about her body. While both men were capable of a thought experiment about what they might do in a woman's place, they were also apparently capable of retaining the awareness that they could not know for sure.

It's a fine line, but seeing mansplaining everywhere—especially once you know it's been around so long—is perhaps as dangerous as allowing it to go unnoticed. It's a bad idea to discourage the valuable exercise of putting oneself in another's shoes, regardless of gender. And even an inveterate mansplainer can have a moment of clarity. It turns out that, even in his trophy-worthy mansplanation of suffrage, Lyman Abbott captured the mindset required to acknowledge that—while no one can know what someone somewhere else on the gender spectrum feels about being there—humans are still capable of empathy: "Man is not an inferior woman. Woman is not an inferior man."

[Allegro]

[82_28]

I was reading this thread last night with the TV on and a commercial came on for some casino and the concerts they're going to have. One was the Righteous Brothers and they played that line "You never close your eyes when I kiss your lips". But how would the man know if her eyes were closed when he was kissing her if his eyes weren't open in the first place? It struck me as an example of mansplaining through the ages and how much it is embedded in how we view ourselves differently from one another just by gender alone.

[Krysos]

Why should I have to pay for a woman's birth control? Serious question. Is there a better argument than if I don't pay for her birth control I'll wind up paying for her kid?

[82_28]

Why should I have to pay for a woman's birth control? Serious question. Is there a better argument than if I don't pay for her birth control I'll wind up paying for her kid?

WTF, bro? How did you even get here? You got here by being fucking in a uterus that went to term. I think we all can agree that's enough reason not only for "pro-choice" but also, they've kinda paid their way to begin with and women's issues are unique to them. If we are to remain a somewhat civilized place these are the things we pay for.

Have you had your taxes taken out for a war or stadium?

It's not an us VS them thing. Women and men are just the same and this "mansplaining" thing raises the question -- what has happened to the wisdom of women and its place in a place no good?

I'm a man and I mansplain quite a bit. Has it neutered me? No, it has made me forceful when dealing with people who have shit tons of problems. But this whole thing about why should I pay for it is bullshit. She's paid enough and is entitled to work for more should she want or the necessity arises.

Sure, it's complex. But does squirrel generation A worry about having to pay for generation B and so on? No. Welcome to being a human, I guess. We all as living creatures are dealt the cards we are dealt.

[compared2what?]

Why should I have to pay for a woman's birth control? Serious question. Is there a better argument than if I don't pay for her birth control I'll wind up paying for her kid?

If you aren't her health insurance provider, there's no reason. Unless you're having sex with her, of course. But I'm assuming your remarks were prompted by the Paul Ryan thing. And that refers to whether or not comprehensive health insurance for women should properly include coverage for birth control.

Which Medicaid already covers, if you want to get thoroughly all up in arms about the cost to the taxpayer, whatever it is, though I doubt it's all that much.

[jlaw172364]

And it's back! The mansplaining thread!

Can I coin the term womansplaining now? I can start by applying it to women who womansplain my thoughts and feelings for me. That way, the acrimonious, energy-sapping gender wars can continue unabated!

Applying this term to someone living hundreds of years ago is ludicrous. The author may as well apply it to Abraham and the other Biblical patriarchs.

[Krysos]

Perhaps I should have more properly asked, why should women not have to pay for birth control when men have to? Privately paid for insurance is one thing, publicly funded birth control is another. If men have to pay for condoms why should women not have to pay for their pills? I mean assuming that they are equal and all.

Edit: Thanks to c2w for agreeing (sort of) that I shouldn't have to pay for strangers birth control, but isn't that a huge part of what the supposed war on women is about? That they not have to pay for birth control pills? If the cost is so little, why can't they pay for it themselves? It's not like they don't have the choice to not get pregnant.

[Krysos]

Why should I have to pay for a woman's birth control? Serious question. Is there a better argument than if I don't pay for her birth control I'll wind up paying for her kid?

WTF, bro? How did you even get here? You got here by being fucking in a uterus that went to term. I think we all can agree that's enough reason not only for "pro-choice" but also, they've kinda paid their way to begin with and women's issues are unique to them. If we are to remain a somewhat civilized place these are the things we pay for.

Have you had your taxes taken out for a war or stadium?

It's not an us VS them thing. Women and men are just the same and this "mansplaining" thing raises the question -- what has happened to the wisdom of women and its place in a place no good?

I'm a man and I mansplain quite a bit. Has it neutered me? No, it has made me forceful when dealing with people who have shit tons of problems. But this whole thing about why should I pay for it is bullshit. She's paid enough and is entitled to work for more should she want or the necessity arises.

Sure, it's complex. But does squirrel generation A worry about having to pay for generation B and so on? No. Welcome to being a human, I guess. We all as living creatures are dealt the cards we are dealt.

Maybe I'm confused but you seem to be arguing something along the lines of "if it weren't for cheap and available birth control I wouldn't have been carried to term, and thus wouldn't exist." Which of course makes no sense whatsoever, at least if one assumes that my existence has been more enjoyable to me than my non-existence might have been. So I'm gonna have to bounce that "wtf bro" right back at you. WTF BRO. Whether I'm for or against my labor ultimately being used to fund wars that I don't agree with has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not my labor should be used to fund birth control for one gender and not another. So I don't know why you even brought it up. I don't know what you mean by "she's paid enough and is entitled to work for more blah blah blah" either. The point is that if women's birth control is paid for by taxes and not men's there's an unfair advantage for one gender over the other, and feminism supposedly teaches us that this is wrong.

But since you did bring up the wars-haven't you ever noticed that your liberal anti-war friends kind of soften on our military adventures in Arab countries specifically BECAUSE of how awfully women are treated in these countries?

[jlaw172364]

@Krysos
"Why should I have to pay for a woman's birth control? "

Wouldn't a better question for you to be asking is why the vast majority of your tax dollars go to building WMD, prisons, police forces, armies, surveillance networks, corporate empires, etc. etc. etc. instead of begrudging women a pill it theoretically could cost as little as pennies to manufacture, hmmmmm???

[Krysos]

@Krysos
"Why should I have to pay for a woman's birth control? "

Wouldn't a better question for you to be asking is why the vast majority of your tax dollars go to building WMD, prisons, police forces, armies, surveillance networks, corporate empires, etc. etc. etc. instead of begruding women a pill it theoretically could cost as little as pennies to manufacture, hmmmmm???

In the grand scheme of things, yes, all of what you cited is more important. But the topic at hand is (more or less), institutionalized gender inequality. From what I can tell these gender discussions do a lot more to obsfucate what you're talking about than they do to illuminate other, more important issues. I suppose I'm kind of playing into this by participating in these discussions, but I guess my hope is that pointing out that institutionalized gender inequality is a two way street I might steer those who fixate on gender issues towards issues of a greater import. Of course, I do have a penis, so it's probably just MANSPLAINING, and as such not worthy of any real consideration whatsoever.

[82_28]

And it's back! The mansplaining thread!

Can I coin the term womansplaining now? I can start by applying it to women who womansplain my thoughts and feelings for me. That way, the acrimonious, energy-sapping gender wars can continue unabated!

Applying this term to someone living hundreds of years ago is ludicrous. The author may as well apply it to Abraham and the other Biblical patriarchs.

Jlaw, this itself is ludicrous. Why? Because of simple empathy. You can't tell a woman as a man "FUCK YOU" in total empathic disagreement. Especially about the death of a baby they held within themselves for nine months and lived with her outside of her for another two. Constantly fucking aware there is another being in you now and now it is outside of you now. And now is off planet Earth.

Dude, wyminz be nutz and I will be the first to say so. But I see why. I would be nuts too! We need to support and not mansplain support.

Yes, it is highly difficult and I have not succeeded once.

[justdrew]

in my experience most people most of the time don't much care for having things explained to them. I don't know why, I guess everyone already knows everything.


anyway, the mansplainer in the OP article, he just had Not-fuckin-Listening syndrome, which, if standup comedy is anything to go by, is a not entirely uncommon problem for men. Particularly at the end of a party, while trying to impress a younger woman with his knowledge of a shared interest.

[82_28]

Perhaps I should have more properly asked, why should women not have to pay for birth control when men have to? Privately paid for insurance is one thing, publicly funded birth control is another. If men have to pay for condoms why should women not have to pay for their pills? I mean assuming that they are equal and all.

Edit: Thanks to c2w for agreeing (sort of) that I shouldn't have to pay for strangers birth control, but isn't that a huge part of what the supposed war on women is about? That they not have to pay for birth control pills? If the cost is so little, why can't they pay for it themselves? It's not like they don't have the choice to not get pregnant.

OK, to both Krysos and Jlaw, let me explain:

There is a person in my life who I have really stuck my neck out for. She fell into my lap about May. Nothing has gone on. I think I have finally pissed her off tonight in my insistence that she clean her shit up and I will not let her die or anything on my watch. She carried a baby to term. Baby born. Baby dies when drunk dad rolls over on top of her. Girl, person I know, wants to die and I cannot revive her.

But if she dies she dies. She is very, very, very depressed and she won't contact me after this evening. I perhaps went too strong at her.

I am simply doing what I can.

It never occurred to me what it means to carry a life within you until I stopped myself from saying "you'll get over it eventually". I knew once that thought crossed my mind that I am a man. But I am also me. THERE IS NO GETTING OVER BEING A WOMAN. You can be the best friend in the world. They'll hate you for it. You can get them pregnant. They'll love you for it. It's all in the emotions.

I have met many a depressed dude. But a really, really depressed woman, is something else. It means there is nothing more.

Just for my friends here to know. I am trying to provide what I can and then some.