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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI consider myself enlightened, evolved, and a long time feminist. Yet I have mansplained.
To those who often do, please note that NOTHING I will say in this thread is to defend or deflect. Mansplaining is NEVER okay.
I was born in the 1940s and, like any human, am a product of the environment in which I grew up. I have mansplained. I am not proud of it. It has been a considerable time since I did that. But did that, I did.
I can't make any excuse for mansplaining for myself. But in the end, I am just another schmoe in a nation of schmoes. I am not a US Senator mansplaining a colleague. And not just mansplaining, but shutting down her conversation.
Who else here will admit to mansplaining?
To do it is an error. To persist is a character flaw.
Nonhlanhla
(2,074 posts)Men need to admit to their patriarchal tendencies; white people to their racial prejudices, etc. It is not the mistakes we make that define us in the end, but whether we're willing to admit them and try to correct them.
nolabear
(41,991 posts)It's insidious. It's hard for many (if not most) men to do it and it's hard for us women to push back, or even to recognize it. If you're taught all your life that you're not the authority it's natural to step aside and listen, even to someone who knows less and just feels more entitled to do it.
I hope we can learn to step up compassionately and insist on being respected without shaming the men who do it without awareness. And to call out the ones who don't care.
LOL Lib
(1,462 posts)Example: "Pay no attention to "Buttercup" Bob. He is under a great deal of stress. His little sack of family jewels has become quite chaffed."
Cracklin Charlie
(12,904 posts)Hubs and I went golfing with another couple.
I watched quietly while he mansplained her how to hit a ball with a stick for the first three holes. But on no. 4 tee box, when he walked up behind her again, I said "hey random man, let this lady hit her own ball". He got mad and stomped off to the cart. I said Kim, grip it and rip it!
She out hit him thirty yards.