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.

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.

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.

Ex: knowing you’ve done physics phd research, and still starting an explanation like “you see, there’s this field called *quantum mechanics* that says that energy comes in tiny pack—“ (I just have not seen men do this to each other at nearly the rate I’ve experienced it)

the thing is, men are incentivized to talk like that because girls want it -- just on a topic that they truly don't understand. it only feels demeaning when they assume a prior level of knowledge that you actually have.

physics phd girl wants a man who can mansplain her the latest advances in quantum field theory -- then she feels like she's got somewhere