Althouse: Mansplaining mansplaining.

April 25, 2014

Mansplaining mansplaining.

Here (and it's a woman doing the mansplaining of mansplaining, which, she mansplains, women do too).

23 comments:

Saint Croix said...: That's a word that needs to die.; 4/25/14, 9:49 AM
kwenzel said...: Besides being an entertaining read, this was apropos for my morning, since I'm about to write a long document for our support folks. Here's hoping I can avoid tedious over-explanations!; 4/25/14, 9:55 AM
rhhardin said...: Men get to the point. Women don't.; 4/25/14, 10:05 AM
Jaq said...: I guess we had a pretty good word, "Bore," but it didn't contain a sufficient dose of misandry.; 4/25/14, 10:09 AM
Saint Croix said...: This is a funny article about Gene Hackman on the set of The Royal Tenenbaums, and how everybody was afraid of him.

What's funny about that article is he's not in it. Everybody's talking about him, but he doesn't say anything. He's the silent man, an old-fashioned man. And strong, silent man, that's an archtype.

So this complaint from women, about men who explain too much, is really reactionary. Women are not happy with the feminist society they have created. They crave strong and silent men. But instead of admitting that feminism screwed up our society, these feminists are all "stop talking."

They don't like what they've done to men, and yet they keep doing it.; 4/25/14, 10:27 AM
tim maguire said...: I would support a ban on the term "mansplaining."

Never mind that it's insulting, it's ugly. Looks ugly, sounds ugly, can;t we have some elegance in our bullshit misterogynistic feminism?; 4/25/14, 10:30 AM
Saint Croix said...: And note that you can't be a strong, silent man on the internet. If you're silent on the internet, you disappear entirely.

Our technology is changing men, as much as feminism has changed men.

And you might say, if men were men, they wouldn't change at all. They would refuse to change! But we want to get laid, so there you go.; 4/25/14, 10:30 AM
tim maguire said...: Saint Croix, that doesn't capture "mansplaining" as I understand the term. It's not overexplaining, it's not "shut up, you're talking too much." It's more like "shut up, you're a man so your opinion is obtuse."; 4/25/14, 10:32 AM
Wince said...: Have you ever tried mansplaining while playing the first side of Dark Side of the Moon?; 4/25/14, 10:36 AM
sean said...: It's interesting that the culture of the chattering classes, to which Prof. Althouse belongs, is deeply misandrist ("mansplaining"), while the culture of the streets is deeply misogynist ("bitches and hos"). Maybe one of them is reacting to the other? Though not very constructively in either case, for sure.; 4/25/14, 11:09 AM
Ron said...: All too often "You don't listen" means "You don't agree."; 4/25/14, 11:16 AM
David said...: "Rachel Toor is associate professor of creative writing at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers in Spokane, the graduate writing program of Eastern Washington University."

"God help her poor students," he explained.; 4/25/14, 11:20 AM
Chuck said...: I was just getting ready to ask to be given back the eight minutes of my life spent reading that drivel about "mansplaining" and the Wizard of Oz, until I got to the money quote, which made it all worthwhile:

"(You’re right: I’ve done some mansplaining in this essay.)"; 4/25/14, 11:35 AM
test said...: It's actually a pretty good article. It admits "mansplaining" is a feminist attempt to pathologize and associate as male a trivial communication breakdown -a speaker not exactly divining his audience's knowledge or interest.; 4/25/14, 11:55 AM
Saint Croix said...: Saint Croix, that doesn't capture "mansplaining" as I understand the term. It's not overexplaining, it's not "shut up, you're talking too much." It's more like "shut up, you're a man so your opinion is obtuse."

It's a made up word, so who knows.

To me it means you are dominating a conversation. Either through your wit and sharp intellect--which is how I do it--or through talking and talking and talking. And I've done that too, oops.; 4/25/14, 11:58 AM
mtrobertsattorney said...: After reading that article, I realized that almost all the mansplainers that I have run into have been liberal women.; 4/25/14, 12:13 PM
traditionalguy said...: This MAN has a new idea: listening to the other persons and replying to them about something they are interested in. We could call my great new idea " How to Win Friends and Influence People."

That is why sports are so culturally valuable, even slow ones like baseball. Everybody can understand the current conversation about the games and the players.

Camille Paglia says the best media to listen to today are the Jock discussion panels where men show their true thoughts.

A good psychologist could do a Dissertation on how men react to Johnny Manziel with admiration, and then with jealousy, and then with silly put downs. How dare he be that good?; 4/25/14, 12:23 PM
pcrh said...: Scarecrow: "“The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. Oh joy, rapture! I’ve got a brain!”

Rachel Toor: Once he gets his degree, the Scarecrow can’t even get the Pythagorean theorem correct. Any ninth-grade geometry student knows that he means right instead of isosceles triangle. Except the Scarecrow professes with such certainty that most people don’t notice.

Uh, it's the squares of the sides, not the square roots. But no one noticed because she said it with such certainty...; 4/25/14, 1:37 PM
Ann Althouse said...: "Have you ever tried mansplaining while playing the first side of Dark Side of the Moon?"

Exactly.; 4/25/14, 2:54 PM
rhhardin said...: A guy said I was mansplaining just today link, I suppose as a putdown of the opposing comments.

"Notice that this guy uses math and you don't."

So the word takes up connotations.; 4/25/14, 3:45 PM
stlcdr said...: It's not about the nail.; 4/26/14, 5:50 AM
Unknown said...: I, a white male, used to touch a black woman's hair all the time. I wouldn't even ask if I could, either!

Of course, I was dating/sleeping with her at the time. I guess that means I'm both racist and a predator, or something. Is there a word for that yet?; 4/26/14, 9:52 PM
Building Magic said...: "... she mansplains, women do too."

In the same way that Democratic Senator Robert Byrd pointed out the existence of "White N!ggers":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnO6ai0Ktro; 4/27/14, 4:56 PM