Everyone is wrong about mansplaining and it's very annoying. Mansplaining is a failure to negotiate a common conversation protocol, resulting in an annoying mismatch. This can be due to sexism but it isn't necessarily so.
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People talk about how mansplaining is just "how men talk to eachother" and this isn't true - mansplaining is what happens when you talk to someone in a particular male coded way that they are not prepared to engage with.
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Mansplaining is like talking to someone in French when you know they don't speak French - it's probably a dick move, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's reasonable for them to expect you to speak to them in English.
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When men talk to eachother in this way it's a conversation in a way that it's not when you end up doing it to someone who is not prepared to engage with it. It's not some deep sin, it's just being a bad conversationalist, but that can be for any number of reasons.
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As I apparently didn't make it clear enough: When mansplaining happens, that is always bad. My claim is not that mansplaining is good. It's that: 1. There are multiple possible underlying causes. 2. There are multiple possible appropriate solutions that vary by cause
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Additionally, without understanding the underlying dynamic, just trying to solve the problem by attempting to shame men into not mansplaining will mostly not work and will make things worse more often than it makes things better.
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But this is why my claim is that *everyone* (OK, almost everyone) is wrong about mansplaining, because I think the two camps are basically "mansplaining is because you hate women" and "mansplaining is good, actually" and they're both bad takes.
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Reasons why you might explain something to someone that aren't that you think they don't understand them.https://twitter.com/GeniesLoki/status/1301934471214780417 …
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This incidentally is the thing that most regularly trips me up. I'm very into most feminine communication patterns but those are *good reasons* to explain things, and it's actually very frustrating to constantly litter these explanations with check ins and questions.
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I accept that in many circumstances I have to do it anyway, but the conversation would go so much better if I could just assume that both parties respect the other's expertise and are prepared to assert their own where relevant. It's a very effective communication protocol.
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End of conversation
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FWIW, I had an almost opposite working definition of mansplaining? It seems more common that they are assuming you know much *less* than would be reasonable to assume, given the same contextual info.
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I agree about the mismatch— it’s just that, IME, they’re assuming an embarrassingly *low* level of prior knowledge. It’s not that they use too much technical language (which is almost a compliment?) it’s that they explain what would be taken as shared by almost anyone else.
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