In 2014, Rebecca Solnit wrote a groundbreaking book called Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of essays focusing on women and their experiences with the patriarchy. In one of her essays, which focuses on the silencing of women, she uses one of my favorite words: Mansplaining.
Now, you may be asking, what the hell is mansplaining? However, the odds are if you’re a woman then you know what mansplaining is, and you’ve probably experienced it more times than you could count.
Simply put, mansplaining is when a man explains something to someone, most likely a woman, in a condescending or patronizing way. If you’re reading this as a female then you’ve definitely just had a huge ah-hamoment. You’re also probably looking back on enough intelligence insulting conversations with men to fill a Harry Potter book.
Academic Men Explain Things to Me is a Tumblr account that collects stories from women in academia and elsewhere of being mansplained to. Just reading through some of these is enough to make you laugh, cry or hurl your computer out a window.
Women on any normal day can recall being mansplained to--if not that very day, then very recently. It’s not a once in a lifetime occurrence or even a rarity. It’s an everyday problem that women face and men continually perpetuate.
The best part is, men are completely unaware of their mansplaining. They don’t even realize that they are condescending and talking down to female peers because they’ve never been taught that it was wrong. Women are taught to quiet themselves in order not to seem too opinionated yet men are never told to hold themselves and their opinions back.
The idea that men are somehow superior to women can be easily spotted in places you would expect like politics, the workplace and Hollywood. However, people don’t realize that misogyny is so big that it infiltrates even the smallest of interactions.
Mansplaining not only puts a name to something that a woman faces in the time it takes to blink but also puts a spotlight on the fact that you can’t just look for misogyny in Republican debates or in the portrayal of women in media.
Everyday misogyny worms its way into something as simple as a conversation between a man and a woman. Woman are never taught that it’s okay to call this out.
It’s time that woman and girls started calling it out misogyny and simply saying, “Don’t mansplain to me.”