This recurring feature, curated by Pilgrim Soul, directs Harpy readers to important feminist thoughts and concepts as spoken by some of her favourite feminists on and off the web. The appraisal of the value of these snippets is, of course, entirely Pilgrim Soul’s, and does not necessarily reflect the views of other Harpies. Feel free to discuss in the comments here.
As is, I imagine, the case for many of you, I often have the misfortune of speaking with men who appear to think I was born yesterday. I am not sure what gives off this impression, particularly because these are often the same sorts of men who, should our acquaintance be an extended one, find themselves some way to tell me that they feel I would make for a very intimidating girlfriend. (I assure you this opinion is not a solicited one.) In thinking about these men recently I was reminded of this op-ed by Rebecca Solnit, which has probably been read by fewer than ten of the men to which it is applies (since they would hate to have something explained to them by a woman). I would really like it if this became a primary text for many people, but then, I always was a dreamer. Describing a man who once took it upon himself to lecture Ms. Solnit about a book that turned out, in the end to be hers, and which he hadn’t even read, she observes:
Yes, guys like this pick on other men’s books too, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but 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.
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.)
Arrogance might have had something to do with the war, but this syndrome is a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to let Mr. Important and his overweening confidence bowl over my more shaky certainty.
Don’t forget that I’ve had a lot more confirmation of my right to think and speak than most women, and I’ve learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing — though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots, like the ones who have governed us since 2001. There’s a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.
I really doubt that any of our readers have been much accused of passivity, and yet, even I recognize myself in this a lot, because a lot of the time I don’t say anything.
Tell us if this happens to you.
I felt a definite shot of recognition when I read this. Some men simply regard it as their privilege to be the smartest person in the room.
My male boss at my last job used to Explain Things to me all the time. He was incredibly ill-informed about my area of expertise and so he tended to embarrass himself more often than not(as the explanations were usually pulled straight from his ass.) I worked for him for 8 years, and was known to openly contradict him in meetings, much to the amusement of my colleagues. Looking back, I’m extremely lucky he didn’t have much of a temper, or I probably would have been fired before the end of year 1.
My general response when a man tries to Explain to me is:
a) BE OFFENDED. Does this dude think I’m a stupid little girl?
b) GET ANGRY. This dude really thinks I’m a stupid little girl!
c) BE A BITCH. In which I let the man know that I am not, in fact, a stupid little girl.
A really dumb example of this occurred when I was 16 and my boyfriend at the time tried to argue with me about how many holes a woman has that comprise her lady parts. I was completely flummoxed that he though there were only two, like a dude, that he was 16 and STRONGLY believed it, and lastly, that he would not believe me, who owns said parts. He had the most self satisfied, smug tone the entire time too!
I dumped him the next day, but it still stands out as the most ridiculous instance of a man assuming I know nothing. IT IS MY BODY, I AM WELL ACQUAINTED WITH IT!
Hmm, it would appear I am still upset over that little conversation…
@betterfish: I once had a very similar discussion with one of my little brothers. He kept insisting that “girls pee out of their vaginas”. No matter how much I insisted that was not the case, it wasn’t until an explicit anatomical drawing from Our Bodies, Ourselves was produced that he conceded.
Did I mention that he was 14 and I was 28 at the time? Yes, apparently the need to Explain Things starts early and does not respect age or experience.
Sometimes we ladies do need someone to mansplain things for us. Tee-hee.
What a great op-ed.
I’m sorry. I still have steam pouring out of my ears from the thread on AnotherWebsite where men were coming out of the woodwork to explain to me, with absolute certainty, how false accusations of rape will ruin a mans life. Like what the hell? Have they done a study? No. Its just like you (and others) mentioned, they just are 100% convinced. One.Hundred.Per.Cent.
This was basically my entire adolescent experience: mini-jagoff after mini-jagoff trying desperately to prove that they were smarter than I was in math, science, history, English…the only subject where they immediately conceded was French, oddly enough.
It never worked. I pretty much pwned at middle and high school.
But I re-encountered it at my job over the summer. My boss, among other sexist bullshit, would literally print out a paragraph of writing, put it on a table in front of me, and then read it to me while I stared at him in disbelief.
Funny–not long ago, I wrote a poem about this very mansplaining. It is:
“Learning to Shut Up”
Cajoling and
explaining,
discussing,
not evading–
But then you
twist my words
with brute insistence,
So I resign myself
to mute existence.
Ruth Powers, copyright 2009
I’ve been enjoying this site for a few months now, as a lurker.
I will reiterate whats been said: its starts young. This weekend I played poker with some friends. We play regularly, but occasionally someone will invite a new player to the table. We are usually a 50/50 mix of women/men and its a feisty game always. Gender rarely comes into the snark. But someone brought a 19-year old intern to the game this week who was, shall we say, very in love with himself. Very early on in the game he and I both went all-in. It was a poor move on my part, but c’est la vie. I had 2 pairs (Aces, queens) and I thought he was just being an arrogant kid. Which he was, unfortunately he was an arrogant kid with a an ace-high flush. Bastard. While I stared incredulously (this was the 3rd hand in a game that would likely go on for 3 hours and I was pissed at myself), he took my silence to mean stupidity and took it upon himself to explain to me that he had in fact won the hand, and since I was all-in that meant that I had to give him all my money and sit out the rest of the game. Srsly. I almost reached across the table and smacked the grin off his face. Instead I told him that I was well-aware, and actually, usually won these games, and that he could kiss my fucking ass. Fun times. Where do these man-children get these ideas, and get the cahones to talk like that to someone. I am a good ten years his senior, and he was a guest in OUR poker game, but he was so confident in his superiority. Is society so generous to men to give them this license in any situation. Head/desk.
I am a lurker reader here, but this post is prompting me to speak up. Namely, to say, “I hear you.”
I am a female scientist – a grad student in physics, specifically – and I encounter this ALL the goddamn time. Drives me up a wall. I have been among the smartest people I know my whole life. I’m just fucking smart, right? But people – men – who are not as smart as I am, who have not studied as much as I have seem to see nothing wrong in telling me what’s what about my area of expertise.
My father’s real big into Fox News crap, and he sits there and tries to tell me that global warming isn’t being contributed to by humans. Trying to tell ME! I live and breathe the scientific method. It’s not a matter of opinion, and you being a man with the Fact-Filled Phallus of Knowing isn’t going to change that.
My male colleagues aren’t much better. With them, my defense mechanism is to tell them loudly and confidently that they’re wrong whenever I am more than 70% sure. I have spent a lot of time and effort convincing myself that, yes, I am actually smarter than most people with whom I regularly have contact and it’s okay to believe in myself.
Of course, where this phenomenon most drives me up a wall is in conversations with my partner, where he likes to argue with me about matters of activism. Matters that I spend as much time as possible seeking out information online to read. Matters which he only thinks about randomly when I bring them up, but about which he still thinks his opinions are equal in credibility to mine.
Hmm. Guess this concept makes me a bit angry. Who’da thunk it…
I am so glad someone wrote so excellently about this. I get this all the fucking time.
On top of Explaining Things, they’ll never accept that you know something that they don’t. I’ll never forget the conversation I had with my FIL about the weather. He lives up north and loves to watch The Weather Channel, said something about how weird it was that it was usually cooler in Houston in the summer than in Dallas, which is a few hundred miles to the north (his kids live in Texas). I said “that’s because Houston in on the coast and the Gulf keeps things cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. He then proceeded to explain how weather works! “You see, when you go north, it gets colder/i>, and when you go south/i>, it gets warmer/i>” like he was talking to a five-year-old.
I used to work with a guy who was exceptionally bad about this. After I once said something sarcastic and he very patiently started explaining why I was wrong, I started to bait him. My all-male co-workers were in on the joke and loved it. I just hope they learned something.
There is one good thing about this syndrome, though. Guys don’t ask me to fix their computers.
Ack, broken tags! Guess I got a little excited.
There was a story in the paper awhile back with a headline along the lines of “College Funding Being Tied to Student Performance?” Close to the story was a picture of Jill Biden. I noted the headline, and my all-knowing, penis-bearing Republican relative went off on a rant about how the Democrats were proposing linking university funding to student performance in a manner similar to the No Child Left Behind paradigm. He went on about how stupid and hypocritical Democrats are because they slammed the idea it was Bush’s but then trumpet it as something great when they propose it. (Setting aside his ignorance on the legislative history of NCLB), I actually read the newspaper story. Turns out, it was just a few state legislatures (all Republican dominated) considering this idea for their state college systems. It had nothing to do with Democratic funding proposals at the federal level. Jill Biden’s picture went with an unrelated story about her efforts to raise awareness about the value of the community college system. He just saw the headline and Biden’s picture, jumped to conclusions and then spread them as fact. A little different than the mansplain, but nevertheless a man speaking with authority on something he was completely ignorant about.
This is the same relative who felt compelled to tell my bf, another male relative, and me how proud I should be of myself because even though I was the only girl amongst a bunch of guys, I hung in there and kept up with them when we were throwing the frisbee around in the park. Well thank goodness I’m out there making in-roads for all of womanity in the clearly male-oriented pastime of frisbee tossing!
Sometimes I’m glad my relatives live in a different state and only visit periodically.
I have been running into this ALOT lately in my dating life. NOTHING makes me hang the “you aren’t getting any” sign on my bedroom door faster than a guy saying I’m wrong about studies that I have read about gender/racial inequality. In fact, one, a feminist-raised med student, signed his own death knell when he told me that female surgeons didn’t get same pay for same work because they tend to be married to fellow doctors and don’t bother asking for raises, because the male doctor makes enough to make up for the pay gap. Not because the hospitals pay them less merely because they are women.
My boss also has a habit of Mansplaining the simplest things to myself and my co-workers. Like how to make a sign that says we are open/closed on holidays, etc. He also seems to not understand health insurance or the ‘medical savings account’ idea. I had to tell him he was wrong three times, then show him the pages in our insurer’s packet to at last get him to acknowledge he was wrong. He almost signed us up for a program he didn’t understand, and we didn’t want, because he couldn’t handle that I was correct and he was wrong.
Oh God, this is so familiar. A while ago my friend and I were lectured by a guy sitting beside us on a plane on a Very Important European Writer, and had we ever heard of him, here were his big themes etc.. My friend had to say twice: ‘she has written a book on him’, before there was the faintest flicker of recognition. His reaction though was a classic case of what I termed ‘patriarchal pressing on’ – a short pause, then moving on as if nothing had happened.
Is there anything I can add here that won’t fall into the category of mansplaining?
About ten years ago, my first day on the job installing a particular computer system I was working with another man and a woman. We were having a problem with a terminal and LL (the woman) asked him if he had checked the cabling. I heard LL and assumed he had too, until he spent another 30 minutes trouble-shooting everything BUT the cabling. LL asked about the cabling again and again he completely ignored her. So finally I asked, “Hey dude, did you check the cabling?” and he immediately checked the cables and found out they were jacked up.
I tell this story now like I knew what was happening at the time, but it wasn’t until later when LL and I were alone that she explained what happened. I was initially reluctant to accept her analysis of the situation (I tried to mansplain that he hadn’t heard her, I had a stronger tech background, etc.), but LL was patient with me and explained it to me more than once until I finally got it.
Even knowing what I know, it still amazes me how easy it is to fall into gendered patterns of communication.
I think of that Solnit anecdote often. I understand why women (myself included) are more likely to doubt themselves, even when they know they’re right. I don’t understand how some guys can be so sure of themselves when they clearly have no idea what they’re talking about. Are they like that with each other–unwilling to listen/rethink their position? Or is there something about a lady-voice that makes them completely dismiss any challenge?
Are they like that with each other–unwilling to listen/rethink their position?
In general, yes. As bad as men are to women, we can be even worse to each other.
It really depends on who the “alpha” in a given situation is, the alpha sets the rules. If the alpha is kind and thoughtful, then the group will (generally) be kind and thoughtful. If the alpha is reckless and cruel, then the group will (generally) follow his lead.
I am only commenting to say that I am too angry to actually comment about this! It happens to me all the time and it makes we want to slap people… hard. GAAAAAAH!
Happens to me pretty frequently, both at work and at home, and never fails to make me fume. When I was pregnant with my second child, I spent weeks researching and selecting a car seat. I had to balance quality with afforadibility, and since we were on a tight budget I obviously couldn’t pick up the top of the line, highest rated seat. I found a safe, serviceable seat available locally, and my partner and I went to pick it up. I pointed out the one I wanted and asked him to put it in the cart since I was large and awkward. All of a sudden, he had an opinion! But it looks cheap! But I don’t recognize that brand name! Maybe we should shop around some more?
I admit, I lost it. I had already dragged my heavy, tired, swollen self all over town without him because he was “busy”. When I had pulled up information online and asked what he thought, the answer was always, “Whatever you think is best”. But here we were in the store, and suddenly he was reading the details and comparing models and making it clear that he didn’t trust my decision.
@Clare: Randomly, with no assumption that I know more because I am a man, but rather because I spent a summer near Houston, isn’t the Gulf Of Mexico more of a warming agent than a cooling one? I know most bodies of water provide a cooling effect, but in the case of Houston and the Gulf of Mexico, doesn’t the warm stickiness of the water apply to the atmosphere in Houston? Thus making it far far hotter than Dallas? Or is it that Houston is just more humid, and thus it feels hotter?
I’ve run into this a lot over the years, and my mental process has always been to shrug and file the man in question under “dim-witted”. Whether due to traumatic brain injury or a recent stroke or whathaveyou, that person is now permanently down in my memory as mentally deficient, since he can’t handle logic most 10-year-olds have no problem with.
So it occurred to me recently to wonder why it seemed that observable indicators of basic mental incompetence seemed to be so much more common in the men I run into than the women I run into. Has somebody been feeding all the baby boys stupid juice? Evidently they’ve all been feeding it to each other.
I’ve got one along the lines of the ‘how many holes’ debate and “girls pee out of their vaginas”.
I once listened to a guy try to convince me that anal sex would be a great idea because it would stimulate my prostate gland. When he wouldn’t take my word for it that I did not have one/need one/want one and that it was definitely a boy part, I grabbed an anatomy book and showed him.
I still don’t have a prostate gland and that guy still doesn’t have a clue.