’MANSPLAINING” is a new jargon that essentially occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone—most likely a woman—about something he has complete knowledge of with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he is talking to.
Mansplaining was coined by a user in LifeJournal, a popular blogging site in the early days of the new millennium and is exemplified by Desi correcting Lucy in I Love Lucy in an imperfect Cuban accent. Mansplaining could also be exemplified by a lot of authority figures taking the microphone in any informal discussion.
Wherever it came from, mansplaining is a labeling and problematic word. Let me explain why I think so.
First off, it singles out men as having this characteristic. That alone signifies gender bias.
True, men do like to explain things but that is because it is in their nature to aim to be respected. Knowledge is one of the ways one gains respect from a group. A man explaining something is a natural way for him to do this. Labeling what they do as ‘mansplaining’ connotes antagonism to what that person is trying to do. More than likely, a man is just explaining something, period. It might be annoying to listen to someone speak about something you already know.
But is it offensive?
I think not. I think whoever thinks so has an ego problem. Why can’t someone just listen first, in the hopes of catching insight? Why would you in any way be lessened if the person is telling you something you already know? Explaining something isn’t encroaching on any of your rights or hurting you in any way. If it were viewed as hurtful to explain something, then we would all just shut up and communication on this planet would cease. The fault doesn’t lie in the explainer, it is in the listener.
Mansplaining is also derrogatory to men. You are basically saying that all men are annoying in that way when, in truth, women do it too. It’s like saying, “You hit like a girl” or “you drive like a girl” as an insult. It generalizes and creates a reason for you to think less about a group of people.
I think that’s what labels are. They are excuses for you to think of others as less than yourselves. It creates discord and hate. It creates a false and baseless sense of superiority.
It creates hurt feelings and disunity. You call people “stupid”, “fat”, “negro” or “nerd” you typecast their characteristics as a reason for you to feel superior to them. Benjamin Whorf proposed the “linguistic-relativity” hypothesis. This hypothesis states that the words we use to describe what we see aren’t just idle placeholders—they actually determine what we see. Many studies prove this.
More recently, Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford, and her colleagues showed white college students a picture of a man who was racially ambiguous—he could have plausibly fallen into the “white” category or the “black” category.
He was described as white to half of the class, and black for the other half. Consequently, their drawings of him later matched that of the label given on him. People who were told he was white drew him with white characteristics and people who were told he was black drew him with characteristics of black people.
This shows that if you label someone as an obnoxious person who “mansplains”, you sow the seeds of hate and derision for men and for that person. Any negative label creates animosity in you and the perception of others.
So choose your words carefully and, more important, choose to sow camaraderie rather than hate and separation.