5dominoes

đź—Ł mansplaining is sometimes (but not always) innocuous

Visakan Veerasamy
October 9, 2018

If I had to do a “the difference between men and women” type of standup set, I think I would focus on the phenomenon of mansplaining, which to me is significantly (but not completely!) an eg of big misunderstanding + language/communication breakdown

The first thing to appreciate about mansplaining is that to some degree it’s the way that lots of men talk, period. It’s the way they talk to each other, & themselves. It’s the way they go through the world. It’s the way they talk to birds on the Internet

That said, it isn’t entirely innocuous. I’ve spent years observing, querying, listening, etc and I think it’s definitely true that women get mansplained to more than men. And men seldom realize that this is the case (and will often find a way to deny it if you suggest that it is)

Explaining why that is would probably take like a dozen really careful, surgically-nuanced tweets and I haven’t had any coffee yet so I’m gonna skip that for now

But my point is that there is a “different languages / communication styles” mismatch here going on.

A female writer friend was asking for suggestions on how to write a group of jocks discussing a girl, and I came up with this, which I think is both accurate and revealing.

  • it’s a two-way communication mismatch
  • that said, it’s not as simple as “both sides are equally to blame” because of a long laundry list of things that disadvantage women
  • even if it WERE equal blame (it isn’t), the rewards for men who make the effort are so outsized

Loosely I think of mansplaining as a sort of adversarial horseplay – it can be fun between consenting peers with a shared understanding of the norms, and it can also be a way to maliciously knock someone’s teeth out with the pretext of “just playing”

Some men question women’s credentials because they think it’s fun flirty horseplay

Some men question everybody they’re interested in, and don’t consciously realise they’re extra interested in women “because girl”

Some men just hate women & want to cause them pain and distress

In my experience, adversarial horseplay with strangers is generally a bad idea. Here’s an example I think about a lot, where an interesting conversation ended because two dudes needed to insult each other

Don’t wanna single out this particular person, but this would probably be considered an example of mansplaining if the OP was a woman:

Like, you think Neil doesn’t know that it’s good? He’s a published author.

And then you restate his point in a lengthier way.

This is just bad reply game.

Here’s a hilarious example of an argument on bodybuilding.com where two guys can’t see eye-to-eye on how many days there are in a week.