Explaining mansplaining

Ten years ago, someone finally came up with a name for the phenomenon ‘every woman knows’: ‘mansplaining’.

In 2010, the New York Times named ‘mansplaining’ one of its words of the year and in 2014, the Oxford Dictionaries added it to its online version. This is probably why ‘mansplaining’ isn’t flagging up as a spelling error right now. If nothing else, this just proves how common this behaviour is.

Mansplaining is a pejorative term with good reason: it describes the way a man ‘explains something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner.’ Note the adjectives here: labelling something as mansplaining is not a passive aggressive move to devalue anything a man may have to say on a topic, but rather it points out the gender stereotype that the man is assumed to be more knowledgeable on any given subject than a woman. Author Rebecca Solnit, with whom the inspiration for the term is credited, ascribes the phenomenon to a combination of ‘overconfidence and cluelessness’, telling an anecdote about her experience with mansplaining: she was talking about her most recent book on Eadweard Muybridge, when she was interrupted by a man who began to talk about the ‘very important Muybridge book that came out this year’—a book he’d not read but still attempted to explain—without considering it might be Solnit’s book. It was. This man cannot be blamed for wanting to talk about a topic, but rather should be held to account for the interruption (always rude) and for assuming the ‘very important book’ could not have been the one Solnit had written.

Solnit herself has said the word ‘mansplaining’ seems ‘a little bit more condemnatory of the male of the species than I ever wanted it to be’ but what woman hasn’t experienced a dose of good old- fashioned mansplaining? There’s plenty of criticism of the term by people misunderstanding the context behind a case of mansplaining: while it’s true it uses ‘man’ as a derogatory prefix (as stated by Cathy Young in 2016), ‘categorising everything a man says as mansplaining’ (as Meghan Daum wrote in 2015) is simply not the meaning or intention behind the term. Every definition includes the prerequisite of condescension and ignorance: Lily Rothman, in her Cultural History of Mansplaining, elaborates that mansplaining is ‘explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman.’

‘Mansplaining’ is an important portmanteau in a world beginning to wake up to the pervasiveness of gender inequality. When a man explains something to a woman in a mansplaining manner, he reinforces gender stereotypes about a woman’s presumed lesser knowledge and intellectual ability—if said woman had asked for an explanation, the man would then not be mansplaining—and it’s here that any criticism can be attributed to the misuse of the term. But mansplaining has caught on like wildfire precisely because it provides a label for a common social reality: women are often assumed to be ignorant on a topic compared to men.

This certainly does not suggest men actively consider women lesser or unintelligent—after all, men do not have a monopoly on arrogance or condescension—rather, it is a justified outrage to the gender inequality in many domains. We can assume Matt Damon meant no harm when he ‘explained’ diversity to black female film producer, Effie Brown, but really; did he think he knew more on the topic than she did? Or was he trying to offer his perspective? Regardless, any explanation will have been unsolicited by Brown and this is a high-profile example of the mansplaining women encounter every day. Not only that, but when mansplaining covers topics that are unique to the female experience, it’s just offensive.

Men also do not hold the monopoly on interruptions or unsolicited explanations, but mansplaining remains a gendered issue. The condescension arises from the assumption women are less knowledgeable, with this assumption perpetuated through continued acceptance of this quirk of conversation as the norm among men and women.

Call people out when they mansplain. It’s not sexist—it’s justified outrage to a social problem. ■