I’m male. My male friends “mansplain” to me all the time. I “mansplain” to them. But most of my friends are highly intelligent, opinionated women—and all of them “mansplain” to me too.
The reason for distinguish this genre of discourse (which one might merely call “being an ass”) from mansplaining and its related categories (e.g., the other day I overheard in a Starbucks a guy solicit two Asian students, ask them their “ethnic origin”, and then reassure them in all seriousness that “We’ll send that Dennis Rodman guy back to patch things up.”) is that the explanation revolves around the minority party’s everyday life. Therefore, e.g., your male friends don’t mansplain to you (provided you’re not a woman) because you all live in the context of being male.
Calling it all merely “being an ass” conceals the political and social mechanisms lurking under the surface of the exchange.
It’s a bad epistemic habit and often disrespectful.
The latter—sometimes. The former? Carving reality at the joints is a good epistemic habit, and I think this does the trick.
But I think it’s really absurd to suggest it is something only men do—to the point of referring to it as “mansplaining”.
Of course “being an ass” isn’t something only men do but because of the power differential, it’s socially acceptable for men to call women out on being wrong, and not the reverse. If you refuse to see the politics, then of course it all looks the same.
Perhaps we could use a new word “blackstealing” for describing when a black person steals something from a white person.
I assure you that I am fully aware that sometimes also black people steal from black people, or white people from black people, or white people from white people, etc… but that is irrelevant here, because those acts just don’t have the same qualia. Blackstealing is a specific phenomenon and deserves its name in our discourse.
(To avoid misunderstanding, this comment is not meant seriously, it just serves to illustrate the offensiveness of “mansplaining”. I just had to use an analogy, because offending men is not considered an offense.)
(More meta: This comment is probably just another example of mansplaining. It would have to be written by a woman to deserve a serious thought.)
Nice try, but “black crime” (see 1st paragraph) is actually a thing that people study.
Now, if you wanted it to mean specifically racially motivated stealing, there’s that too:
Also published by the federal government is the Known Offender’s Race by Bias Motivation, 2009.[22] According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Report database, in 2010 58% of hate crime offenders were white (including latinos), 18% of offenders were black, 8.9% were of individuals of multiple races and 1% of offenders were Native Americans.[23] The report also reveals that 48% of all hate crime offenders were motivated by the victim’s race, while 18% were based on the victim’s religion, and another 18% were based on the victim’s sexual orientation.[24] The report states that among hate crime offenses motivated by race, 70% were composed of anti-black bias, while 17.7% were of anti-white bias, and 5% were of anti-Asian or Pacific Islander bias.[24]
Oh well.
(To avoid misunderstanding, this comment is not meant seriously, it just serves to illustrate the offensiveness of “mansplaining”. I just had to use an analogy, because offending men is not considered an offense.)
It is a pity your satire fell flat.
EDIT: Also, regarding:
I assure you that I am fully aware that sometimes also black people steal from black people, or white people from black people, or white people from white people, etc… but that is irrelevant here, because those acts just don’t have the same qualia.
“Qualia”? Goals, motivations, and revealed preferences (that is, the things that separate “explaining” from “mansplaining” and from “splaning” in general) aren’t qualia.
And because base rates are important, according to the CIA factbook, the US is
white 79.96%, black 12.85%, Asian 4.43%, Amerindian and Alaska native 0.97%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.18%, two or more races 1.61% (July 2007 estimate)
My Yvain-inspired view of this is that there are several different levels of power, and social justice dogma tends to conflate them. This sometimes results in things like trying to solve things like institutional, situational poverty using discourse, and in pushes that will leave one side without self-respect and the other side no better off materially than before.
If they push intersectionality to its logical conclusion, they’ll actually be paying attention to what’s happening in individual lives. I don’t have a strong opinion about whether this is likely to happen.
I’ve noticed a tendency for groups to join a very specific political cluster (Kind of blue-green-ish maybe?) once they find out about and internalize intersectionality. This happened with New Atheism, and while I think it’s for the better, I don’t like it. It also seems to result in Inclusivity Wars being incredibly messy and inordinately high-stakes.
My notion is that intersectionality allowed people to bring more of their identity into a discussion than previously—for example, allowing that a person could be both black and homosexual rather than having to choose one.
If the process is allowed to go to its logical conclusion (not something you should count on with human beings), then a person’s whole experience becomes relevant.
I have a notion that one of the things that goes wrong in social justice movements is that they don’t allow enough for specialization—everyone is supposed to care equally about a huge list of injustices.
I’ve wondered about the history of the acceptance of the idea of intersectionality. This seems like a safe place to ask.
The New Atheists: this is just my perspective: Started out with becoming aware that New Atheists should cooperate with other social issues, and should try to appeal to people outside of white, educated, ex-Christians, combined with (correct) realization of problems within community: Elevatorgate, skeptics uninterested in actually useful applications of skepticism to social issues, Dawkin’s Islamophobia, etc.
Meanwhile, New Atheism ceased to be lonely dissent. Bunch of talk happened, some factions adopted intersectionality and kind of just merged with the rest of modern quasiradical/moderate Social Justice, others went contrarian on other stuff and became (un-thoughtful) reactionaries, etc.
My (somewhat fuzzy) criticism of intersectionality is basically that it discourages keeping ones identity small, specifically on stuff that is usual Social Justice fare, and tends to encourage the congealment of a big body of politics where somebody can always spam ‘but that doesn’t include ’ or ‘but that wouldn’t work for ’ whenever they run into an idea they disagree with.
That said, I do think that the basic concept is important and needs to be understood.
As far as I can tell, some of the leading New Atheists decided to expand their identity to include certain political stances, as well as certain political labels. By doing so they formed a distinct in-group, and immediately became embroiled in an escalating series of in-group vs. out-group skirmishes. At present, as far as I can tell, New Atheists in both groups spend more time on inter-group fighting than on advancing their original goals.
The reason for distinguish this genre of discourse (which one might merely call “being an ass”) from mansplaining and its related categories (e.g., the other day I overheard in a Starbucks a guy solicit two Asian students, ask them their “ethnic origin”, and then reassure them in all seriousness that “We’ll send that Dennis Rodman guy back to patch things up.”) is that the explanation revolves around the minority party’s everyday life. Therefore, e.g., your male friends don’t mansplain to you (provided you’re not a woman) because you all live in the context of being male.
Calling it all merely “being an ass” conceals the political and social mechanisms lurking under the surface of the exchange.
I understand that this is the position of those who like using the term. But my comment was explicitly denying that there is any obvious political or social import lurking under the surface of the exchange. My position is precisely that what is called “mansplaining” is just “being an ass” and that there is no need to attribute any darker, oppressive content to the exchange. Your reply is begging the question.
The latter—sometimes. The former? Carving reality at the joints is a good epistemic habit, and I think this does the trick.
I actually wasn’t talking about “using the term ‘mansplaining’” here. I was talking about the behavior the word refers to. Obviously, I don’t think it carves reality at the joints, though.
Of course “being an ass” isn’t something only men do but because of the power differential, it’s socially acceptable for men to call women out on being wrong, and not the reverse.
I’m aware there are parts of the world where this is the case and I’m sure there are retrograde parts of the West where it is true as well. But this claim is totally and hilariously laughable in my social circle and demographic. Most of my friends are women. I get called out for being wrong all the time.
I sense a fallacy of gray coming.
The reason for distinguish this genre of discourse (which one might merely call “being an ass”) from mansplaining and its related categories (e.g., the other day I overheard in a Starbucks a guy solicit two Asian students, ask them their “ethnic origin”, and then reassure them in all seriousness that “We’ll send that Dennis Rodman guy back to patch things up.”) is that the explanation revolves around the minority party’s everyday life. Therefore, e.g., your male friends don’t mansplain to you (provided you’re not a woman) because you all live in the context of being male.
Calling it all merely “being an ass” conceals the political and social mechanisms lurking under the surface of the exchange.
The latter—sometimes. The former? Carving reality at the joints is a good epistemic habit, and I think this does the trick.
Of course “being an ass” isn’t something only men do but because of the power differential, it’s socially acceptable for men to call women out on being wrong, and not the reverse. If you refuse to see the politics, then of course it all looks the same.
Perhaps we could use a new word “blackstealing” for describing when a black person steals something from a white person.
I assure you that I am fully aware that sometimes also black people steal from black people, or white people from black people, or white people from white people, etc… but that is irrelevant here, because those acts just don’t have the same qualia. Blackstealing is a specific phenomenon and deserves its name in our discourse.
(To avoid misunderstanding, this comment is not meant seriously, it just serves to illustrate the offensiveness of “mansplaining”. I just had to use an analogy, because offending men is not considered an offense.)
(More meta: This comment is probably just another example of mansplaining. It would have to be written by a woman to deserve a serious thought.)
Nice try, but “black crime” (see 1st paragraph) is actually a thing that people study.
Now, if you wanted it to mean specifically racially motivated stealing, there’s that too:
Oh well.
It is a pity your satire fell flat.
EDIT: Also, regarding:
“Qualia”? Goals, motivations, and revealed preferences (that is, the things that separate “explaining” from “mansplaining” and from “splaning” in general) aren’t qualia.
And because base rates are important, according to the CIA factbook, the US is
It’s a patent absurdity of the social justice dogma that every man has power over every woman.
My Yvain-inspired view of this is that there are several different levels of power, and social justice dogma tends to conflate them. This sometimes results in things like trying to solve things like institutional, situational poverty using discourse, and in pushes that will leave one side without self-respect and the other side no better off materially than before.
If they push intersectionality to its logical conclusion, they’ll actually be paying attention to what’s happening in individual lives. I don’t have a strong opinion about whether this is likely to happen.
I’m… not sure what you mean by that.
I’ve noticed a tendency for groups to join a very specific political cluster (Kind of blue-green-ish maybe?) once they find out about and internalize intersectionality. This happened with New Atheism, and while I think it’s for the better, I don’t like it. It also seems to result in Inclusivity Wars being incredibly messy and inordinately high-stakes.
What happened with the New Atheists?
My notion is that intersectionality allowed people to bring more of their identity into a discussion than previously—for example, allowing that a person could be both black and homosexual rather than having to choose one.
If the process is allowed to go to its logical conclusion (not something you should count on with human beings), then a person’s whole experience becomes relevant.
I have a notion that one of the things that goes wrong in social justice movements is that they don’t allow enough for specialization—everyone is supposed to care equally about a huge list of injustices.
I’ve wondered about the history of the acceptance of the idea of intersectionality. This seems like a safe place to ask.
The New Atheists: this is just my perspective: Started out with becoming aware that New Atheists should cooperate with other social issues, and should try to appeal to people outside of white, educated, ex-Christians, combined with (correct) realization of problems within community: Elevatorgate, skeptics uninterested in actually useful applications of skepticism to social issues, Dawkin’s Islamophobia, etc. Meanwhile, New Atheism ceased to be lonely dissent. Bunch of talk happened, some factions adopted intersectionality and kind of just merged with the rest of modern quasiradical/moderate Social Justice, others went contrarian on other stuff and became (un-thoughtful) reactionaries, etc.
My (somewhat fuzzy) criticism of intersectionality is basically that it discourages keeping ones identity small, specifically on stuff that is usual Social Justice fare, and tends to encourage the congealment of a big body of politics where somebody can always spam ‘but that doesn’t include ’ or ‘but that wouldn’t work for ’ whenever they run into an idea they disagree with.
That said, I do think that the basic concept is important and needs to be understood.
As far as I can tell, some of the leading New Atheists decided to expand their identity to include certain political stances, as well as certain political labels. By doing so they formed a distinct in-group, and immediately became embroiled in an escalating series of in-group vs. out-group skirmishes. At present, as far as I can tell, New Atheists in both groups spend more time on inter-group fighting than on advancing their original goals.
I understand that this is the position of those who like using the term. But my comment was explicitly denying that there is any obvious political or social import lurking under the surface of the exchange. My position is precisely that what is called “mansplaining” is just “being an ass” and that there is no need to attribute any darker, oppressive content to the exchange. Your reply is begging the question.
I actually wasn’t talking about “using the term ‘mansplaining’” here. I was talking about the behavior the word refers to. Obviously, I don’t think it carves reality at the joints, though.
I’m aware there are parts of the world where this is the case and I’m sure there are retrograde parts of the West where it is true as well. But this claim is totally and hilariously laughable in my social circle and demographic. Most of my friends are women. I get called out for being wrong all the time.