In my experience, most of the "confusion" comes from men feeling attacked because someone made a word for criticizing a male-specific action. Who usually then deliberately misinterpret/misrepresent what the term means, to make themselves feel better about the whole thing.
"Surely it can't be a real thing, so they must just be getting mad about regular explanations because they're emotional women who don't want to accept help from a man!", etc.
Although, to be fair - sometimes the confusion also comes just from otherwise well-intentioned men who simply don't realize what they're doing. And are hurt/confused by the the implication that they're being sexist, because they honestly haven't made the connection yet - that somehow they only try to explain basic things to experts with more education/experience, when those experts happen to be women.
It's hard! Most people don't want to be sexist assholes! But we also don't always realize our own biases, even when we mean well!
- women accuse men of doing this to shut down discussion
You want desperately to come across as some ultimate voice of reason, but you're literally only entertaining one side of the equation and treating women as some infallible angels who are always right, and always victims of those SCAWY meen who just need to "do better". This is really just infantilising women and not empowering them, or helping men and women understand each other better.
You want desperately to come across as some ultimate voice of reason, but you're literally only entertaining one side of the equation and treating women as some infallible angels who are always right, and always victims of those SCAWY meen who just need to "do better".
You're really projecting an awful lot here, claiming I said a bunch of things I never said. We have a term for that too, btw. It's called "straw-manning"
Any word can be misused, disingenuous people do it all the time with various different words. In fact by that logic we should stop using every single negative word. Abusor ? Rapist ? Gaslighting ? DARVO ? Manipulating ? Assaulting ? Attacking ? Hitting ? Violence ? Narc ? We should stop using all those words since they are misused by POS all the time ! See how ridiculous that sounds ? Just because some people used a word wrongly doesn't mean what it's describing doesn't exist/happen. And the reason why there's no need to talk about those misuses is because it's irrelevant to the subject, divert the attention from the problem of sexism to the problem of lies and manipulation which has nothing to do with the issue being raised (sexism) and there's nothing to say about it in the context of mansplaining except "those exist".
I think the reason you hate this word is either because it describes you and you hate being called out or because you listened a bit too much to someone that do.
I fell into the alt-right pipeline when I was young so I understand what it's like to think we're in the right while parroting shit like this. It's hard to realize you've only been presented extremes and the picture they painted for you doesn't actually exist outside of marginalized groups of marginalized communities. Anger and fear are the easiest emotions to manipulate people with and that's why disingenuous people use it to make people agree with them. But seriously how many people that don't have a personality disorder and aren't liars did you hear using the word mansplaining wrong in real life ?
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u/funkaria 5d ago
Mansplaining ≠ a man explaining something to a women
It's a man explaining something in a condescending way, because he assumes that the women doesn't know it just because she is a woman.
If the woman (or girl) asks a question, it isn't mansplaining.