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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: 7 [1]

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Date: 2022-07-02

Sometimes a word just drifts into the national lexicon without many people understanding where it came from. Most of us have either seen or heard the word “mansplaining” by now, to the point where it has become a mainstay in popular culture.

Dictionary.com provides us with the basic definition:

Mansplain ...: verb (used with or without object) (of a man) to explain something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner, typically to a woman already knowledgeable about the topic: He was mansplaining to her about female friendships! to explain something to someone in such a way: I know some women who are guilty of mansplaining, and even some men who mansplain patriarchy as a historical force for good.

In 2010 the New York Times called “mansplaining” one of its “Words of the Year.” By 2014 It was listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But this (by now) well-known term for a practice unfortunately very familiar to all women who have been on the receiving end of it didn’t just magically appear out of the ether; the overwhelming consensus is that it derives from an article written and published on Tomdispatch.com and in the Los Angeles Times in 2008 by Rebecca Solnit, titled “Men Explain Things to Me.” As Solnit has subsequently emphasized, however, she did not “coin” the word itself; its actual first usage (apparently) appeared “online about a month after the LA Times piece, in the comments section on a LiveJournal community.” Solnit’s original article was republished in 2012 in Guernica magazine, with a new introduction.

In the article she describes attending a stuffy cocktail party along with a friend at some elegant “rugged luxury cabin” somewhere in the foothills or slopes of Aspen, Colorado. As the party begins to wane their well-heeled host bids them to stay a while so he can enjoy a “talk” with them. After they’ve sat down he airily notes that Solnit is rumored to have written “a couple of books,” and proceeds to ask her what they were about.

It’s the kind of an open question that can prompt a multitude of answers, but Solnit searches in her mind and focuses on the one she’s written most recently, a “book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life,” about the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (the book subsequently won several awards and prizes).

Her host then interrupted her: “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?” And he starts pontificating …. about her own book.

Her friend then jumps in to clarify — several times — that it is Solnit’s own book their host was describing.

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. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.

She then describes some of the vapid and arrogant critiques — from men — which she endured after her book was published. And while as an experienced author she allows that such criticism can certainly be leveled by men at other men, the phenomenon she witnessed at the hunting lodge in Aspen seemed to illustrate and exemplify a pattern where “the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered.”

Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

While her article is premised on a more or less amusing anecdote, one of the more serious points Solnit emphasizes is how such arrogant “mansplaining” transfers over to the political and social world, and can end up seriously denigrating not just the women who have to put up with it for simply for the right to “show up and speak,” but in certain cases degrading our entire society in the process.

I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics since 2001 was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI woman who issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was certainly shaped by a Bush administration to which you couldn’t tell anything, including that Iraq had no links to al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to be a “cakewalk.” (Even male experts couldn’t penetrate the fortress of their smugness.)

At the end of essay Solnit notes that women have historically had to fight a two-front war: “Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.” She reminds us that credibility is a basic survival tool, and that women, thanks to male arrogance and condescension, are often --and unfairly -- required to establish that base credibility, something men take for granted from the outset, even before they can have their thoughts and ideas given a hearing.

The harsh, punitive laws that are now being codified against women’s reproductive choices in nearly half this nation’s contiguous land mass are being passed, in large part, by men who are convinced of their own rightness and essentially have turned a deaf ear towards any women who object. One can’t help but think of these draconian abortion prohibitions as arrogant “mansplaining” on a national scale— whether rooted in so-called notions of Christian patriarchy, male dominance, or outright misogyny — and now running completely, heedlessly, and disastrously amok.

Whether you accept that analogy or not, one thing seems abundantly clear: millions of men in this country are sorely in need of a severe lesson in self-awareness.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/2/2107967/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-7-2-22-Mansplaining

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