It’s the night of my younger son’s wedding. Ceremony over, knot tied, glass stomped, hors d’oeuvres served. We are now in the reception hall, seated at long banquet-style tables. Across from me sits a woman I’ll call Robin, my son’s best friend’s mother, whom I find delightful — quick, well-read, the kind of person who actually listens when you speak.
Robin and I are engrossed in conversation. She’s a smart cookie with a great head on her shoulders. I am telling her about a book I am writing — Men Can Be Dicks, All Men Have One, Some Men Become One — which always gets a laugh. I wait for hers.
The book is about the tendency for men to behave, as advertised, in a dick-like fashion. One chapter is on mansplaining. I’ve just dug up the term’s origin and a funny backstory, which I’m about to share with Robin when she cuts me off mid-sentence.
“Oh — Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 essay.”
Damn! She took the wind out of my sails, the words right out of my mouth! I wanted to show her what a clever lad I am but ended up clever by half. I’d been caught in the act of doing the very thing that mansplaining entails: explaining something to a woman who already knows about it.
Who Invented the Term Mansplaining?
Though Solnit didn’t coin the term — that appeared a month later in a comment on the social network LiveJournal — she described the phenomenon to a tee. It went viral. In 2010, The New York Times named mansplaining “Word of the Year”; four years later, it was added to Oxford Dictionaries. It has since been translated into dozens of languages, which says a lot.
I assume most readers aren’t as informed as Robin, so — at the risk of mansplaining yet again — I’ll retell the tale.
Mansplaining refers to a man adopting an authoritative stance and explaining things to another party (often, though not invariably, a woman) who hadn’t sought instruction — and who may, in fact, be better informed than the man doing the explaining (“if you must, tell me something I don’t know”). The man comes across as condescending, patronizing, and overconfident. Whether this is invariably the case is a question I’ll come back to.
In her 2009 essay, Solnit relays an anecdote all women know firsthand. At a party, a man learns she has written a book that had just come out. As she begins to describe it, he interrupts to ask whether she’d heard about the recent release of an important book on Eadweard Muybridge — the inventor of sequential photography, forerunner of cinema. He is, of course, talking to that book’s author.
What Counts as Mansplaining?
Mansplaining involves a well-known male habit of interrupting or talking over women, as if the man doesn’t credit what the woman has to say, assuming she is uninformed or lacks authority. It discounts the voice and credibility of women. It is rude, and it reveals underlying assumptions about who gets to be the knower, and who ends up silenced as the man waxes on. Implicit in the act is the conviction that women, by virtue of being women, are the receivers rather than the originators of knowledge. Women are to be edified by men who introduce sperm-like germinating ideas into their heads.
The mansplaining man is a proud sort. He assumes he has an expert grasp of the subject at hand. He may earnestly believe his lecture — which often is what it amounts to — will benefit the listener, who typically is female. He comes across as superior, which strokes his male ego, a point we’ll return to. The woman may feel talked down to, treated as if stupid or ignorant. The man’s intent, conscious or unconscious, matters less than the effect his behavior has on others.
Is Mansplaining a Form of Misogyny?
Misogyny means many things. It needn’t always be visceral hatred of women, the sort that involuntarily celibate men (“incels”) harbor toward women for allegedly rejecting them. It can also be a more subtle, dismissive attitude — casting women in the role of the object that (not who) is seen and interpreted. More to the point are times when the woman is unseen, denied her subjectivity — the fact that she is a living, breathing, and feeling human being. Often women are “read” before they are listened to.
Such attitudes translate into ways men interact with women, whose ideas are often not heard, or — if heard — forgotten or appropriated, later attributed to a man. Anyone who has worked in a meeting room knows the routine: a woman makes a point, the room moves past it; a man makes the same point ten minutes later, and the room nods in recognition.
What’s With Interrupting Women?
Being interrupted or talked over is a common female experience. Workplace studies tell the same story across industries: women in mixed meetings are interrupted at substantially higher rates than men, are credited less often when they do speak, and are more likely to find their ideas adopted only after a male colleague restates them. The dynamic operates at all levels of society and has even been observed in the highest echelons — including the United States Supreme Court. A 2017 study by legal scholars Tonja Jacobi and Dylan Schweers found male justices interrupted female justices at three times the rate they interrupted one another. Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were interrupted repeatedly — sometimes 10–15+ times by individual male colleagues in a single term. The pattern extended beyond the bench: male attorneys were also more likely to interrupt female justices. When the Court imposed stricter turn-taking rules, interruptions dropped off.
Is There Another Way to Look at Mansplaining?
It would be a mistake to leave readers with the impression that mansplaining is universally villainous. To see it that way risks the charge of man bashing, which is a thing. In 2014, Solnit herself wrote: “I have doubts about the word and don’t use it myself much; it seems to me to go a little heavy on the idea that men are inherently flawed this way, rather than that some men explain things they shouldn’t and don’t hear things they should.”[1]
Not every instance of mansplaining amounts to the same thing — a subtle way of robbing women of their rightful and acknowledged authority. We need to think about it with more nuance.
My proposal doesn’t negate the explanations above; it adds another, which suggests the behavior is most likely multi-determined. After all, I have the utmost respect for Robin, the woman who beat me to the punch — and while I hadn’t credited her with knowing the origin story, few men or women are as knowledgeable as she was about this matter.
Mansplaining can be driven by a different set of dynamics and psychological needs — namely, male pride and the innate male tendency to peacock one’s way about town. Men are a proud lot. Sometimes mansplaining amounts to a man’s attempt to show off his intellectual command, to narcissistically display the impressive extent of his grasp. Men as a whole like to show off what they’ve figured out — it is in their nature. They like to impress others with their fund of knowledge, but the way they go about doing so can inadvertently convey disrespect for whomever they’ve chosen to educate.
Summing Up
So where does this leave me, sitting across from Robin at my son’s wedding, caught red-handed in the very act I’d come to dissect? Sheepish, certainly. But also instructed, which is the irony Solnit herself might appreciate. Mansplaining isn’t a single thing. It can be a quiet act of erasure, the soft bigotry of assuming a woman doesn’t already know. It can be the louder offense of interrupting, talking over, and appropriating. And sometimes — maybe more often than men like me would care to admit — it’s the plumage of a peacock who confuses being heard with being admired, who mistakes the spreading of his tail feathers for a gift bestowed on his audience.
If we want to understand what’s happening to men — why being male no longer works so well — we must be willing to look closely at the small, daily moments in which maleness can subtly go awry. Robin, to her credit, didn’t roll her eyes or shame me. She simply finished my sentence, and in doing so handed me the opening paragraph of this very post. Which leaves me wondering whether the antidote to mansplaining requires not the silencing of men but something a bit harder: the willingness for men to be interrupted, corrected, and — on a good day — taught something we didn’t already know. Certainly, there’s a need to rein in the certainty of men who sometimes operate like know-it-alls.[1] Solnit, Rebecca (2014). Men Explain Things to Me. Chicago: Haymarket Books. p. 14.