What is Mansplaining?
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| Image Source: Feminism In India |
Mansplaining is a term given to the act on men when they try to explain anything and everything, especially to women even when it isn’t asked for. They often try to explain in such a way that it may seem condescending to women and make them feel embarrassed.
Generally, mansplaining happens when men
explain a concept to women which they don’t even know. For example, a man
suggesting a book to someone even when he didn’t read it first hand. Maybe
they try to look cool or want to put a good impression in front of the woman
but they don’t realize that they have become a victim of mansplaining and most
of the times men didn’t even really knew that they were a mansplainer in a
conversation.
Some Instances of Mansplaining
- Suppose in a meeting, a discussion is going on for the launch of a mobile application and to that a female employee says that the interface of the application is not too user friendly and to that a male employee responds, “Ma’am, do you even know how to use this app? Let me explain you….”
- A male editor once called a fellow female subordinate and told her to change the angle of the article on a certain topic to which the female author thought that because it is her article, she will be able to understand the angle better.
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| Image Source: MPR India |
If we
analyze both of the situations clearly, we can conclude that the first instance
is definitely the case of mansplaining because the female employee never said
that she doesn’t know how to use the app. She just didn’t like the interface of
the application and the male employee didn’t have any right to come to her and
try to explain the application’s working to her.
The second case is slightly different in the way that the male editor is the female editor’s
senior and maybe he genuinely thought that the article’s angle can be improved.
Whether he is mansplaining or not will depend on what tone he used while he was
having a conversation with her.
So, are men
always mansplaining things to women?
Certainly
not. All men are definitely not mansplainers. Most men genuinely want good for
women and want to see them succeed and women also don’t have an issue with it.
Women get hurt when men try to downgrade them, even when both of the parties
have the same level of expertise and experience.
This brings
us to our next point.
Is There a Thing Known as Womansplaining?
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| Image Source: Musings of an Uneducated Savage |
Why there
cannot be? If we agree that there is mansplaining, then there is nothing wrong
in saying that there is a thing called womansplaining also. After the infamous
“Me Too” moment, lot of allegations were raised on men. Some of them were true
and some were superfluous. It definitely gave a chance to women to blame men
even when they weren’t at fault. Many women saw it as an opportunity to
condescend to men and downgrade them, hence, womansplaining. Because this “Me too” moment was so in trend, nobody gave importance to men’s side of the story.
This is what
gives rise to inequality between men and women. Women don’t need empowerment,
because when we say that women need to be empowered, that’s when we are
concluding that women are lower than men.
It is
because of these concepts of feminism, pseudo feminism, mansplaining and
womansplaining which give rise to movements like “Me Too” and “Not All Men’,
that the world is facing so many societal barriers even in the 21st century and the sad truth is nobody knows the solution for these problems.
Written By
– Anamika Malik
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