(But perceptions of ‘splaining’ are)
Some predictable views from Michael Flood foregrounding an even more predictable article by Rebecca Solnit, who has featured in this blog here . As yet another misandrist English Lit graduate she has been listed among Lit Crit femsplainers. She was also the idiot who wrote in the Guardian that a tweet from Greta Thunberg about ‘small disk energy’ was one of the greatest of all time. I have no problem with the original tweet. which came from a teenager, but one of the greatest tweets of all time?
The accusation of mainsplaining is a crude tool to deligitimise male opinions, I could even have added it to my list of features of feminist rhetorical fortress. The implication is that men have a monopoly when it comes to talking to people, women in particular, in a condescending or patronising fashion. When it comes to matters of gender, you might reasonably argue that the opposite is the case.
What is the evidence that men are more likely to ‘splain’? As you might expect, there is none and the difference may lie in our gendered perceptions. Particularly useful in this regard is a paper published in the Journal of Business and Psychology – ‘Competence-Questioning Communication and Gender: Exploring Mansplaining, Ignoring and Interruption Behaviours’ An obvious attack might be that the study is itself an exercise in mansplaining. However, both authors, Danielle Gardner and Anne Marie Ryan, are female.
We all feel at times that our opinions are ignored, that we have been interrupted or ignored. If you add to that the distorting lens of feminism, it is perhaps not surprising that some women wrongly feel this is gendered and use it as a weapon to attack men with.
What these authors did was to compare the response of men and women to the same communications, but when presented by a man or a woman. What they found in their words was this,
The experimental design of Study 2 allows us to infer that women recipients of these behaviours view communication as more gender biased if the communicator is a man, but it is not the same case for the opposite scenario (a recipient who is a man and a communicator who is women). Furthermore, in cases of condescending behaviour, women see the communicator as questioning their competence more so than do men, and individuals in general feel more negative after a condescending explanation than being interrupted or not having ones voice recognised.
In short, ‘mansplaining’ was more to do with the gendered interpretation of the same words. The authors go on to observe
Across studies 2 and 3, we see evidence that women recipients are more likely to interpret the communication as competence-questioning, as attributable to gender bias and have greater negative reactions to it than men recipients.….. women recipients had the most negative perceptions (perceiving the greatest competence questioning, greatest gender bias, and most negative reactions. when the communicator was a different gender (ie., a man).
Like many feminist neologisms mansplaining and manterrupting should be consigned to the dustbin of history. The terms are themselves sexist. The behaviours are not gendered, but the perceptions of them are.
toxic feminism 