Sometime in August 2022, we were planning Avon’s Breastfeeding Forum, a CSR for new and expectant moms. The panellist line-up had four people – three women, one of whom is a medical doctor, and one man, a consultant paediatrician.
Since we were driving awareness, we posted banners online to let people know and get registrations. All was well with the world till a woman showed up to criticise the presence of a man on the panel.
Why are we inviting a man to come and ‘mansplain’ breastfeeding to women?
Perhaps, this might be a sensible take, but it wasn’t just a man. This was a medical professional specialising in the healthcare of children – you know, recipients of the breastmilk.
At this point, men are like:
And this brings me to the meaning of mansplaining: the act of a man explaining something to someone (Typically a Woman) in a manner perceived as condescending or patronising.
I’m torn between two emotions when the term ‘mansplaining’ pops up in conversation. One emotion takes the form of weariness, like ‘here we go again’. The other takes the form of unbridled disgust.
Disgust, because it’s often lazily used out of context, and it can derail any otherwise meaningful conversation. Mansplaining is not when a man explains something to a woman. Mansplaining is when a man explains the said thing in a condescending manner.
Disgust because mansplaining is not really a gendered issue. Men catch a lot of smoke for trying to explain stuff to women who are already sufficiently qualified to know that stuff. However, women do it too and this largely stems from one innocuous possibility: those people, male or female, don’t necessarily know that the object of their explanation knows that stuff.
This phenomenon is not exclusive to men. It is largely based on conversational confidence between people. If I were to guess, it would be that the reason this became known as a gendered issue is because of male confidence. When a man doesn’t know something, they’ll usually shrug and say that they don’t know. However, when they know something they’re usually quite eager to explain it. They are confident in their own competence, and this leads to conversational confidence.
Of course, this can indeed lead to condescension or interruptions, but it can happen in any situation where one party perceives themself or is perceived as more competent than the other. And by this logic, I’d reckon that women who are at a similar level of conversational confidence or competence will also interrupt other women in the same way. More confident women have absolutely no problem ploughing through the opinions of other women. It’s just power dynamics at work.
Unfortunately, the term mansplaining is often used in a derogatory and gendered way that isolates men from the issue. We all have two ears for listening but only one mouth for speaking and this suggests that we can all benefit from listening more. However, this term and the isolation of men only serves to make them defensive. Not just that, but the vast number of innocent men being accused of mansplaining makes it seem like legitimate cases do not exist.
At the end of the day, we need to see each other as humans. Too often, we ignore the individual and unconsciously subscribe to the idea that a particular demographic always experiences something a certain way. That’s stereotyping and we’re human beings, not caricatures. In reality, we still have to make decisions about people on a case-by-case basis. We all have biases, but we don’t have to let them rule us.
