"mansplaining"

[jedusor]

[Poll #1574088]

Comments

[blue-estro.livejournal.com]

With the caveat that the man bit is based understood to be a generalization of socialized habits of masculinity rather than anything innately male..

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

It's not, in the discussions I've seen.

[palecur.livejournal.com]

what

[lemurtanis.livejournal.com]

What a ridiculous coinage. I'm all about pointing out irritating privilege, but we need a better word. :)

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's actually all that stupid--it makes me laugh, but it's not the sort of word I'd want to use in front of just anyone, and I'd rather that weren't true.

[gerald_duck]

I've not yet had an adequate explanation of what constitutes "mansplaining". My initial instinct is that the term feels like a loaded attempt to stereotype by gender and to blame some communication problem or other, when it occurs between men and women, on the man. If it catches on, I expect the next neologism to be "womunderstanding".

Note that I may be unduly tetchy about the word because I've only heard it used twice, and the second time was by an annoying reactionary trade-union type telling a friend that, because they were a woman and were sacked they should sue for discrimination. To me, it looked a hell of a lot like common or garden wrongful dismissal that could have happened to anyone.

[kaberett.livejournal.com]

Google.

[gerald_duck]

So… is this, for example, an acceptable definition?

I'm not comfortable with the concept as described there for at least three reasons:

• It conflates the manner of discourse with the correctness of the content: to me, whether someone's right and whether they're presenting their point of view in a reasonable and constructive way are quite separate issues. The link above suggests that whether what someone says is correct can make the difference between mansplaining and not.
  
• It draws no distinction between men behaving reprehensibly towards women because they generally behave reprehensibly and men behaving reprehensibly towards women because the target is female. Plenty of people do the things described there, regardless of the gender of either party. You've heard me complaining about people in the office doing things that would — but for gender — qualify as mansplaining.
  
• While it is, of course, possible for people to be reprehensibly patronising in their assumptions about what others know, it's also often genuinely difficult to gauge where to start in explaining something.

In recent incident I alluded to, where the unionist was telling someone to allege discrimination, I've not heard anything to suggest there was actually significant discrimination. Indeed, everything I hear points to the boss just being a generally nasty piece of work who bullies everybody. If so then either it was wrong to say that mansplaining was inherently discriminatory or wrong to say that mansplaining happened in that case.

By the precise definition I've just linked to, the boss did a wrong thing, it was mansplaining, but it wasn't discrimination. That seems to limit the utility of a label that concentrates on the issue that one participant was male and the other female.

[elgecko.livejournal.com]

I instantly and violently reject any compound neologism prefixed with man-

Name one I'll tell you how I loathe it. =)

[shoutingboy.livejournal.com]

"man-roma"

[elgecko.livejournal.com]

Sounds gay, Italian, and vaguely related to the Vatican.

[shoutingboy.livejournal.com]

...and your point is?

[ertchin.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's the most elegant portmanteau ever, but I wouldn't call it "stupid".

And you knew what *I* thought of the concept before you posted the poll, I'm sure. :D