GeniesLoki

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’d be down with this in a power vacuum but men are privileged in a way women aren’t. Even if mansplaining is ‘just how men talk’ it would still be sexist in this cultural context I think.

Certainly I think there's an obligation to be a good conversationalist in many contexts but I think there's a wide variety of stable and useful conversation norms and insisting people always use your own rather than adapting to local ones is a doomed move.

Also power is more complicated than that and "men always need to do things womens' way in any mixed group" is a nonstarter of a general solution.

Does this change if you frame it in terms of accessibility? ‘Men have no obligation to make their comms intelligible to women’ feels icky and ableist kinda?