Mansplaining ~ Wednesday Words

Woman:

"I think we should change the word mansplaining to correctile dysfunction."

Man:

"But then we would have to replace menopause with ovary-acting."

Bystander:

"Many paws.  Isn't that when older women start collecting cats?"

* Mansplaining = (noun) the explanation of something by a man, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.

In a 2008 article "Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn't Get in Their Way" (scroll down at that link to read the whole article), Rebecca Solnit tells about a man who interrupted her and said:

"And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"... So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book."  Or tried to interrupt him anyway.   But he just continued on his way.  She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in.  And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen.  That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless — for a moment, before he began holding forth again.

In other parts of the article, she says:

"Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about.  Some men."

"Men explain things to me, still.  And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't."

That story provides the opening of Rebecca Solnit's 2014 book, Men Explain Things to Me.

In her scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women.  She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters.  She ends on a serious note — because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!”  This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women.