Difference between revisions of "Mansplaining"
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Revision as of 03:13, 18 May 2025
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Mansplaining is an example of casual misandry.
In its original use, mansplaining differed from other forms of condescension in that it was said to be rooted in the assumption that a man is likely to be more knowledgeable than a woman. However, it has come to be used more broadly, often applied when a man takes a condescending tone in an explanation to anyone, regardless of the age or gender of the intended recipients: a "man 'splaining" can be delivered to any audience.
In 2013 Dictionary.com said it was adding both mansplain and the suffix (libfix) -splain to its dictionary. Its announcement read in part: "In addition to being creative, this term, particularly the -splaining part, has proven to be incredibly robust and useful as a combining form in 2013." Mansplaining has also engendered parallel constructions such as womansplaining, whitesplaining, rightsplaining, and goysplaining.
As the word became more popular, several commentators complained that misappropriation had diluted its original meaning. Joshua Sealy-Harrington and Tom McLaughlin wrote in newspaper The Globe and Mail that the term has been used as an ad hominem to silence debate.
Origin and Usage
The term mansplaining was inspired by an essay, "Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn't Get in Their Way", written by author Rebecca Solnit and published on TomDispatch.com on 13 April 2008. In the essay, Solnit told an anecdote about a man at a party who said he had heard she had written some books. She began to talk about her most recent, on Eadweard Muybridge, whereupon the man cut her off and asked if she had "heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year"—not considering that it might be (as, in fact, it was) Solnit's book. Solnit did not use the word mansplaining in the essay, but she described the phenomenon as "something every woman knows".
A month later the word appeared in a comment on the social network LiveJournal. It became popular among feminist bloggers before entering mainstream commentary. Solnit ascribed the phenomenon of mansplaining to a combination of "overconfidence and cluelessness". Lily Rothman, of The Atlantic, defined it as "explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman". Solnit later published Men Explain Things to Me (2014), a collection of seven essays on social issues and human rights themes. Women, including professionals and experts, are routinely seen or treated as less credible than men, she wrote in the title essay, and their insights, or even legal testimony are dismissed unless validated by a man in some countries. She argued that this was one symptom of a widespread phenomenon that "keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence."
In 2010, it was named by the New York Times as one of its "Words of the Year". The word was nominated in 2012 for the American Dialect Society's "most creative word of the year" honor. In 2014 it was added to the online Oxford Dictionaries.
A phone line has been set up in Sweden so that women can report male colleagues for mansplaining.[1]
Mainstream media routinely use the term.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ftm/comments/pest9i/im_a_transgender_man_ever_since_ive_transitioned/
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