AtomicHjarta

mansplained:

In discussion online a man asked me a question about something I’d posted, and I explained this was to do with a campaign I was peripherally involved in - other people were running it, but I’d taken part in some actions. He’d never heard of the campaign, despite it being quite successful and…

SO I shared this in my social rss reader the other day, and have recently discovered this comment left on my share: 

“Thought experiment. If there is an “mansplained”, there must be a “womansplained”. If we were to define “womansplaining”, how might we do it? As the tendency of women to talk about their feelings, engage in dialogue until everyone has commented and every facet of a problem has been explored without anyone saying anything too concrete or assertive to hurt anyone’s feelings, or something else? Every definition I can come up with that tries to frankly address some of the fundamental cultural differences between how genders tend to communicate focusing on styles that are prevalent in female culture, every one of them would be described as sexist when extended to all women that “womensplained” would indicate, even if there is some truth to it being a general communication style that many women tend to use. Flip the script. When you use “mansplained”, you’re being sexist. ”

I’m thinking of a response to this circumstance in a “male” style, e.g., “I don’t think your ideas would work, and neither of us are in a position to implement them in the real world to test them. So, let’s consider this conversation over, shall we?” That’s direct and not that confrontational. However, how would that play if it were a woman “mansplaining” to a man - a seeming impossibility since it is “mansplaining” even though this happens occasionally too? 

The gender based communication preferences and styles is interesting territory, but it’s real easy to slip into sexism. Maybe that’s alright, but if we want to get to some kind of equality between the sexist, we aren’t going to get there on the back of female sexism any more than we would on male sexism.”

This person goes on to say:

““…equality between the sexes,…” Equality between the sexists being a tad different.”

My response so far:

“Um, I think you’re missing the point. “Mansplaining” is not a function of fundamental and inherent psychological/biological between men and women, (e.g. “Men do things this way, and women do things this other way”). It is a function of unawareness of privilege. The assumption that any women will react to something a certain way versus the way a man would react, or that a woman automatically knows about a certain set of skills and interests which are different from those about which a man knows.

“Mansplaining” is meant to indicate when someone (male or female, but someone who is participating in reinforcing the patriarchy) is making such an assumption. Your example of a “‘male’ style” of response is precisely the way I would explain and/or clarify an issue to which this response would be appropriate, as would many of my friends of all genders. I would probably leave the last statement off the end, because I do not believe that my opinion should have the privilege of ending a civil academic discussion before everyone involved has had a chance to bring up new points.

Finally, and I hope you will not take this statement personally, because it is not directed towards you personally, but towards a general tendency that I notice particularly in the United States, it is important to understand that if someone is pointing out something in a culture or society that is an unfair tendency that puts one group of people consistently in a position of power above another group of people, the group who has the upper hand cannot be relied upon to fairly assess the situation. That is how privilege works. That is how privilege denial works. A person or group says “Hey, this is not working for us. This tendency is prevalent, and it’s not cool, because it undermines our agency as people and it makes a bunch of assumptions about us that are not true for all of us”, and, when there is no such thing as privilege, other groups take a step back and say “Ok, yeah. We’ll try to modify our perceptions and language to keep that in mind”. 

But that is not what happens. Instead, bringing this up is usually met with “That’s ridiculous”, or an attempt to make it SEEM like it is equal and opposite when it is not: “Well, if you’re going to do THIS for women, then you have to do THIS for men”. And in a vacuum, that’s great. If we were starting from ground zero, with everyone being equal and no history of institutionalised discrimination (both on the macro and individual levels), that would be fine. If no assumptions about communication style, academic background, emotional response and life goals were made about a person based on their sex, then this would be great.

However, those things exist. They exist because the people who experience the short end of that stick say that they do, and the people who have the long end of that stick don’t get to define that for the rest of us. There are two responses to a call out. Either a person says “Ok, I owe it to myself to examine this without being defensive” and “No, you’re wrong”. The former is the hard road, but ultimately the more rewarding, because it facilitates discussion and eventually can lead to understanding.

The latter, to me at this point in my life, means that I don’t waste my breath further, other than to paste a few links for resources should the person want to read them.”

Thoughts? Can there BE “female sexists”? Because I don’t believe there can. This echoes the “reverse-racism” argument, a concept which I also find to be problematic because it implies that white people and non-white people are totally on equal footing and that everything is just dandy and any discrimination must just come right out of nowhere, which is clearly misguided. And “misguided” is the nicest way I could think of to describe that sentiment. 

Furthermore, this person’s argument is so based in “women do it this way” and “men do it this way” that it’s clear to me that our worldviews are so fundamentally different that I don’t even know if we can have this discussion without my caving in his brain with my wild and crazy “i don’t believe in a gender binary” ways (or an orientation trinary). I’m afraid to even touch on any level deeper than “men/women” in this discussion, and get into the different types and severities of discrimination faced by different sorts of women in situations because I am really REALLY not in the mood to hear someone bash my non-cis friends, or say something like “are you kidding? Black women have it better than anyone, look at all the scholarships out there” or something equally ludicrous.

So I guess I am asking for advice in how to keep this discussion civil and how to ease into the bigger stuff without completely freaking this person out, because I do not believe they are a totally lost cause yet. 

It kind of sucks that basically everyone who’s not a straight white American cis dude has to plan how to not make the straight white American cis dudes all butthurt when there is the slightest glimmer that they can be introduced to the world outside their bubble. And I’m totally not saying that all straight whine cis dudes are ignorant and live in a bubble, because I know SWACDs (I got tired of typing it) that have totally had their minds open and are good allies. But like, you know. The fact that they are still the default human being in situations of representation and in discussions like the one I’m getting caught up instead of doing my coursework is problematic.

So: Any good resources for helping to facilitate this discussion without either completely putting this individual on the defensive or ruining my own brain for the day? All thoughts welcome, even if you’re pointing out a flaw in anything I’ve said here, because if I’m getting it wrong on behalf of someone else, I totally want to know about it and fix it.