Mansplaining. It’s one of the trendy terms being tossed at men in the midst of the #metoo movement. Like most words that enter popular word usage, half the people lobbing it around don’t even know what it means. Men find it insulting, women find it hysterical because we’ve all experienced it.
I encountered it with my last serious boyfriend. I didn’t know there was a name for this phenomenon back then, other then, um, annoying. Basically, it’s this irritating way some men have of telling women they’re doing something wrong and then correcting them. Men enjoy this to some degree, because it makes them feel good. Correcting someone else, showing them the right way to do something, helps while at the same time asserting superiority. Men achieve self worth through competition, women achieve it through getting along with others. So, historically, women have often acted helpless and allowed men to correct us and instruct us on the right way to do things when it wasn’t needed.
For instance, the movie Mean Girls, when Lindsay Lohan’s character pretends to be bad at math so her crush can help her. Or endless amounts of women’s magazines that advise women to let men kill spiders and check their oil and pretend to be helpless because it makes men feel like men.
At first, when my ex used to take the time to show me how to do something, I found it sweet. Charming, even. By the end, I wanted to whack him over the head with the Nintendo paddle. Yes, his mansplaining most often reared its ugly head when we were playing Wii. No matter how well I played, he would always tell me I was doing it wrong and correct me. I could have just gotten a strike, he would still tell me I was standing wrong.
I tried talking to him about it. “It makes me not want to play because it’s not fun for me to nonstop be corrected and told I’m playing wrong. It’s a game. Let me play how I want to play.”
He agreed, and the next time we were playing, when it was my turn, he would say, “Oh, you should stand more towards the right and swing this way…”
I would glare at him and say, “Leave. Me. Alone.”
At one point his cousin intervened. “Not cool, dude, she’s talked to you about this over and over. Just let her play the way she wants to play.”
When he continued, I tried again to explain my position. “It’s no fun being constantly criticized when you’re playing a game. If I want your advice, I’ll ask.”
When he kept it up, my annoyance swelled into anger. “STOP!” I screamed at him. “I don’t want your advice!”
He yelled back, “Fine! If you want to suck, and you don’t want to be told the right way to play, go ahead!”
He couldn’t help himself. He could not let me play a game without constantly nitpicking what I was doing wrong and then trying to correct me. Since I tried to have several heartfelt conversations with him explaining my position, it was beyond irritating. I was getting angry. Like most things in relationships, this minor issue began to have major repercussions. This wasn’t just about him correcting me during a game. This was about him not listening and caring about me enough to stop doing something that was literally starting to drive me crazy.
The worst part? He really wasn’t any better at the games than I was. It was ridiculous to the extreme that he was trying to teach me how to play right. He couldn’t even play right himself.
The boyfriend before him was a mansplainer too. Upon hearing that I was a swimmer, he proceeded to demonstrate the “correct” way to swim to me. Meanwhile, we were not in a pool. We were sitting in his living room. How did he even know I didn’t swim correctly? Why did he assume I required instruction? What made him think he was the superior swimmer? It’s not like he was a former Olympic swimmer, he was just a guy who occasionally took a dip in his family’s lake.
Imagine that not only do we ladies have to endure constantly being criticized and being instructed on the “right” way to do things by men who wouldn’t know the right way if it bit them in the ass, we’re advised by other women to encourage this behavior.
And here’s the problem we’re all facing now: having been actively encouraged to mansplain to women, is there any wonder men are now confused and angry when abruptly told to knock it off?
It’s like everyone raves about your chili, so you always make chili, and then suddenly the same people that claimed they loved it, inform you that they HATE your chili, it’s absolutely disgusting, that in fact they detest it, and they’ve always felt this way but they lied to you about it. Because for some reason they thought they should. So now you've wasted hours upon hours making shitty chili when you could have been doing other things. That would piss me off too.
I’m a feminist. I’m one hundred percent behind the #metoo movement, but I get men’s confusion. We’re decided to change the rules in the middle of the game, and not only that, we’re scolding and taking men to task for following the old rules before the rules were changed. I get it. For many years you were encouraged to do things a certain way, and now you’re being told that despite all the approval and encouragement and validation you were doing things right, actually, everyone hated it and you were doing it wrong and now we’re mad.
What is going on in society right now is a gamechanger.
So, what exactly is mansplaining, so we can be clear?
- Automatically assuming that a woman isn’t doing something right and instructing her on the correct way to do it. Good rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t launch into a lengthy explanation on how to correctly light a barbecue to your best bud, don’t do it to a woman. Unless she asks.
- Jumping to the conclusion that just because something isn’t being done the way you would do it, it’s being done wrong. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And if you’re skinning cats, you’re a psychopath.
- Telling a woman how she should feel about something that happened to her. IE, telling a woman she should regard catcalling as flattering. (A lot of men say that. Sure. You walk past ten men screaming and hollering and hooting at you when you’re all alone, and then tell me me how the experience made you feel).
- Telling a woman how she should have handled something that happened to her. IE, telling her how she should have dealt with being raped, or assaulted, or harassed.
Yes, you can continue to talk to women. Yes, you can even explain things to a woman, if she asks and displays interest. Here’s the interesting thing...if you regard women as not very different from men, you may find them easier to talk to, because you can be yourself. You don’t have to impress us by pretending to know more about porpoises than we do and instructing us in the art of porpoise care only to be embarrassed to find out we’re zookeepers.
We’re not members of a separate species. We’re just like you.
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