danielholter:

robot-heart-politics:

squashedcomments:

Your call.

I still plan to avoid it. It’s gendered and derogatory. I’m pretty sure if I started saying “womansplaining” to refer to, say, women talking pompously about a historically male-dominated field, say, football, it would be all kinds of Not Okay.

I read this aloud to my boyfriend, since he’s here and I like to use him as a sounding board before I get up on my soap box (he usually tells me when I sound like a complete douche, which I need from time to time), and he had some problems with your analogy. He tried to find a better one and struggled, because it’s very hard to find one that captures the same power dynamic involved in a man explaining to a woman why something couldn’t possibly be sexist.

The thing about mansplaining is not merely the circumstance of having a man condescendingly speak to a woman. Karen Healey did a great job of explaining exactly how someone being an asshole about something isn’t sufficient to call it “splaining”:

But I don’t like “douchesplaining” as a catch all. It’s not just people being ignorant and condescending, it’s people doing so through the mechanisms of privilege supporting their superiority in a given situation, even though, on the topic at hand, they have an inferior understanding. Using a term that notes the privilege is, I think, essential to calling out the perpetrator not just for bad behaviour, but for behaviour that is sourced in and enforces that privilege.

‘splaining, then, is about privilege. If you don’t have privilege, you can’t ‘splain something to someone. That doesn’t mean you can’t be a condescending asshole, but being a condescending asshole is not the same thing. So womansplaining is sort of a misnomer, kind of like “reverse-racism.” If the terms are defined by unequal power relationships, you know they don’t work in reverse.

So it’s not possible for a woman to speak condescendingly of men, or a black of whites, or a gay of straights?  Or there’s just no special terminology to describe such an act?

EDIT : I’m not picking a fight, I’m looking for clarification.  :)

Sometimes I am amazed at how some people view literally everything through the lenses of sexism, racism, power relationships, etc. It must get so exhausting.