You might have read about the recent response to one woman’s tweet about mansplaining. Tracy Clayton, a writer and co-host of the Buzzfeed podcast ‘Another Round’, asked the women of Twitter to tell her the “most infuriating thing” they’d had mansplained to them.
And the women of Twitter responded, to the tune of more than 4,000 tweets, detailing infuriating explanations from men on everything from “how to correctly insert a tampon” to “the difference between a screw and a nail in my own hardware store” to “once a man tried to explain an article to me. An article I wrote.“
@lizzieohreally @brokeymcpoverty one time a guy explained to me how prescriptions work. like…”first the doctor decides which medication”
— cat ferguson (@biocuriosity) March 21, 2017
Despite Clayton saying that the stories made her want to “bite her phone in two“, it’s pretty clear why women share these anecdotes with one another: because being on the receiving end of a blithely confident ninny trying earnestly to explain the menstrual cycle to you, a person who regularly menstruates, can make you feel fucking crazy, and it’s good to know that you’re not alone.
We don’t share these stories with one another in order to hear some blokes on commercial radio scoff about the whole concept of mansplaining, but lucky us! That’s what we got today on Nova!
“I heard another story about bloody mansplaining today,” says Tim or Marty on this afternoon’s drive-time show.
“Women have shared their most annoying experiences of mansplaining, in inverted commas. Bloody women are funny sometimes aren’t they, they get so funny about stuff!”
“Oh men, just ridiculous,” says Marty or Tim, in a giggling falsetto. “So hard to control.”
“Oh god, men this, men that – have a look at the figures. You should be taking a far deeper interest in how men are going.”
pictured: Tim and/or Marty
Throughout the segment you can hear Kate, the sole woman on the show, make the kind of noises anyone who’s contractually required to go along with their coworkers’ bullshit makes (they mostly sound like this). Tim and Marty do their best to read the news item about the response to Clayton, but can neither stop themselves from taking the piss, nor from being audibly revolted when Kate says the word “period”.
Look, I know commercial radio hosts are pretty low-hanging fruit when it comes to finding examples of casual sexism. But it’s still genuinely exhausting and disheartening to hear people with an audience of thousands so flippantly dismiss the honest-to-god lived experiences of so many women.
“Mansplaining” as a term hasn’t taken off because of some sort of global girl-conspiracy to annoy men; it’s a real thing that’s so common as to be instantly recognisable to literally half the population. That’s why people grabbed the term as soon as Rebecca Solnit coined it. It accurately describes real life.
And blokes, if you’re that quick to dismiss the entire concept – that many men make a habit of condescendingly explaining shit to women who already know as much as, if not more than, they do – then maybe it’s time to examine exactly why you’re having such a strong emotional response. Did you know that sometimes hearing difficult things makes people react defensively?
Here, let me explain.
Source: The Huffington Post / Nova 106.9
Image: Twitter.
