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.

I am still clinging to the idea that mansplaining is when someone talks down to you in a way they DON'T talk down to men. And conversational norms of "explain what you know, someone more expert can add to it" may look the same to the recipient but is a different problem.

That is, both arseholes and mismatched conversational norms exist, but I don't know which is more common. But I assumed/hoped it was arseholes because conversations with arseholes will usually be a problem and conversations across culture will sometimes be a problem

On the one hand, I may be off base because I find it hard NOT to blame myself for everything. On the other hand, if a lot of people complain about being patronised at, I assume they're probably right unless there's clear indication that the explainer actually wasn't patronising

IDK I see people getting mad at each other over simple miscommunications causing them to read bad intent from the other party so incredibly often that it doesn't seem like a weird complicated theory so much as the default explanation.

Yeah, I agree that happens too. I guess I'm thinking, when I've seen things described as mansplaining, most sounded like, "he assumed she wouldn't be competent at that and didn't have any way of updating his assumptions" and only a few sounded unfortunate but nonmalicious.