Mansplaining — An Alternative Perspective

This morning, a woman on my Instagram feed decided to share a diagram about whether or not mansplaining has occurred. The diagram assumed that the person doing the mansplaining was male. Ok, no problem.

Before I continue the story, let’s quickly define mansplaining. Mansplaining is the act of arrogantly explaining something to someone who knows a hell of a lot more about a subject than you do. It’s an amateur explaining to a professional how to be a professional.

Most of the time, the mansplainer has no idea that they’re mansplaining. And the person receiving the mansplaining is clearly annoyed and irritable that they have to listen to someone talk about something they know little about.

Clearly the term is sexist at its roots: mansplaining can be done by women as well as men, and just refers to a particular type of odious communication. To say that it is men doing this to women, which may often be the case, is a form of man hating. We have accepted this misandrist term in our vocabulary, and I’m not one to fight against social norms. It is what it is.

But in my experience, I have been mansplained more by women than by men. And this makes sense considering that I have, for most of my career, worked in women dominated industries. So, odds are that, because I work around more women, then women would be the ones to explain to me things that I’m an expert at. No big deal.

But for some people, reading what I wrote IS a big deal to them. Somehow, me stating that women have been the arrogant explainers in my experience undermines their experience with men doing the same thing to them.

And this is exactly what occurred with the woman who opened up a dialogue with me about this subject. She instantly went on the attack and said that I must have done something to trigger those reactions of those women. I triggered something deep inside her that went firmly against her strongly held beliefs that Men Mansplain, Women Victim.

And I’m fine with that. I have no control over how people choose to react to me. I can only share my experiences and hope that people have the necessary empathy to realize I’m only talking about myself, not their experiences. Invalidating someone’s experience is one of the worst things you can do to people, so it’s something I consciously choose not to do to others. I can’t help it, however, if my experience is triggering for someone else to the point that they would choose to invalidate what I’ve been through. Not my problem.

And so, here we are. I’m sure many angry people will read this article and attack my experience as false. And therein lies the problem with conversations around thorny gender problems. If you’re holding on tight to being Angry At Men and forgiving women, then you can’t see my perspective clearly and will attack. And this problem goes beyond this article to the world of (many) feminist blog articles and books, which come across more as shots fired in the gender wars rather than pleas to have an open, interesting, and engaging dialogue with many different perspectives.

I’m always open to different perspectives, and it’s a shame that peoples strong emotions don’t allow them to be the same. Mansplaining as a conversation topic is a symptom of a much larger problem in gender discussions, and I fear that we’ve jumped too far down the “anger first” rabbit hole to substantially move the needle in the right direction.