It’s the night of my younger son’s wedding. The ceremony is over—knot tied, glass stomped, hors d’oeuvres served—and we’re now in the reception hall, seated at long banquet-style tables. The DJ has just started up; the night is young and no one has yet to venture out onto to the dance floor to show what they’ve got.
I’m sitting across from Robin, deep in conversation. I admire her; she’s a smart cookie. I’m telling her about a book I’m in the process of writing—Men Can Be Dicks: All Men Have One, Some Men Become One. I deliver the title like the punchline of a joke to see how it lands. Usually, it gets a laugh and thumbs-up appreciation. I’m waiting to see how Robin responds.
My book is about the tendency for men to sometimes behave, as advertised, in a dick-like fashion. One chapter focuses exclusively on mansplaining. I’ve just discovered the term’s origin and I am about to share it with Robin when she cuts me off mid-sentence.
“Oh—Rebecca Solnit’s 2008 essay.”
Damn! She stole the wind from my sails, preempting me. I was hoping to show her what a clever lad I am and ended up seeming clever by half—caught in the act of mansplaining the term’s origin and meaning, explaining something to a woman who already knows all about it.
Who Invented the Term Mansplaining?
Solnit didn’t coin the term—it surfaced a month after her essay, in a post on the social network LiveJournal—but her essay aptly captured the phenomenon, which needed a name for reference sake. Once it had that name, it went viral. In 2010, The New York Times named mansplaining “Word of the Year”; four years later, it was included in the Oxford Dictionaries. It’s since has been translated into dozens of languages, which says something about how universal the phenomenon can be. Funny how we often can’t easily speak about a recognizable behavioral pattern until it’s given a title. The word did more than just label a preexisting thing; it made the thing sayable and arguable in a way it hadn’t quite been before.
I assume most readers aren’t as informed as Robin, so—at the risk of mansplaining yet again—I’ll retell the tale.
Mansplaining is when a man adopts an authoritative stance and explains something to another party (often, though not always, a woman) who never asked for instruction—and who may, in fact, know more about the subject than he does. Assumed superiority, and—with it—female inferiority—was the essence of the point Solnit was trying to make, though the Oxford definition leaves out that element, even though it’s commonly assumed to be implicit. The man can come across as condescending, patronizing, or overconfident. Whether that’s invariably true is a question I’ll return to shortly.
In her 2008 essay, Solnit recounts an anecdote that epitomizes something all women know about from firsthand experience. At a party, a man learns she’s written a book that just came out. As she starts to describe it, he interrupts to ask if she’s heard about an important new book on Eadweard Muybridge, inventor of sequential photography and forerunner of cinema, oblivious to the fact he is talking at that moment to that book’s author.
What Counts as Mansplaining?
Mansplaining is a relatively common male habit—instructing women, interrupting or talking over what they have to say as if women aren’t credited with being knowledgeable. Underneath this assumption is another involving the question of who gets to be the one in the know, often seen by men as their exclusive territory. Such beliefs and attitudes often leave women feeling silenced while the man holds forth. Implicit is the quietly held conviction that women exist to receive male-transmitted information rather than to originate it—vessels to be edified by men who plant their germinating ideas in her head.
The mansplaining man is a proud sort. He presumes an expert grasp of the subject at hand. He often comes across as superior, which flatters his ego. He may genuinely believe that his lecture (which is what it often amounts to) benefits the listener, usually a woman. In response, the woman may feel she’s been talked down to, treated as if she’s stupid or ignorant.
Is Mansplaining a Form of Misogyny?
Misogyny means many things. It needn’t always be the visceral hatred incels (involuntarily celibate men) harbor toward women for allegedly rejecting them. It can also show up more subtly, manifesting as a dismissive attitude toward women that casts them as objects to be seen and interpreted, rather than subjects with their own interiority worth knowing and exploring. Such attitudes often leave the affected woman feeling unseen, denied recognition as a living, breathing, and feeling human being.
These attitudes shape how men interact with women, leaving them feeling unheard—or, if heard, dismissed or appropriated. The pattern is familiar: in a meeting, a woman makes a valid point, and it goes down like a led balloon; ten minutes later, a man makes the same point, and the room nods in recognition.
What’s With Interrupting Women?
Being interrupted or talked over is a common female experience, and the dynamic operates at every level of society—even in the highest echelons. A 2017 study conducted by legal scholars Tonja Jacobi and Dylan Schweers found that male justices on the United States Supreme Court interrupted their female peers at three times the rate they interrupted one another. The pattern extends past the bench: male attorneys are also more likely to interrupt female justices than male ones. When the Court tightened its turn-taking rules, interruptions dropped off—which shows such behavior seems responsive to corrective structure. Change the rules of the room, and the room’s habits change with them.
Is There Another Way to Look at Mansplaining?
It would be a mistake to leave readers thinking that mansplaining is universally villainous—a view that risks tipping into man-bashing. 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 subtle robbery of a woman’s rightful authority, a dismissal of her standing to speak and be heard. Mansplaining deserves a more nuanced accounting. After all, I have the utmost respect for Robin, the woman who beat me to the punch—and while I had failed to credit her with knowing the origin story of “mansplaining,” few people, male or female, know it as well as she does.
Mansplaining sometimes reflects a different set of dynamics: male pride, and the innate tendency of men to peacock their way about town. Men are a proud lot. Sometimes mansplaining is less about silencing a woman than about a man’s attempt to show off his intellectual command—to narcissistically display the reach of his grasp, the impressive extent of his know-how. Seen from this perspective, the effect his behavior has on the listener is almost incidental. Rather than conveying information the woman might be grateful to have, the woman is being enlisted to serve an important function: to establish and reflect back the man’s worth and competence. Whichever it’s driving cause, the end result can feel the same: the woman disappears from the exchange whether erased by his assumption of her ignorance or absorbed into his need for an audience. Men, generally, like to impress others with what they’ve figured out—it is in their nature. But how they go about signaling that mastery 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, of appropriating. And sometimes—maybe more often than men 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.
To her credit, Robin 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. This leaves me wondering whether the antidote to mansplaining isn’t the silencing of men but something a bit harder: the willingness of men to be interrupted, corrected, and—on a good day—taught a thing or two about something they didn’t already know. There’s a real need to rein in the certainty of men who sometimes operate like know-it-alls, myself included.
[1] Solnit, Rebecca (2014). Men Explain Things to Me. Chicago: Haymarket Books. p. 14.