Manterrupting is about to trump mansplaining

IF a man mansplains in the forest, do the trees roll their eyes? 

The absurd pertinence of such a question, asked by Salon.com in 2012, has not gone away. It’s gotten worse. You’ll have seen what the Washington Post dubbed the Mansplaining Olympics — the Clinton / Trump debate, where, to be fair, Hillary did most of it to her blustering, fact-free orange opponent — but this is a rarity. Mansplaining is a man thing. Allow me to womansplain. Or as one mansplainer put it, to womanipulate.

The word — but not the concept — was born in 2008 (the reality has been around since we fell out of the trees). In a Los Angeles Times essay titled “Men Explain Things To Me”, writer Rebecca Solnit recounts being at a party where a man tells her all about a very important book on the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge. She has briefly mentioned she has written about Muybridge.

He goes on and on, “eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority”, instructing her all about both Muybridge and this new book, until Solnit’s friend, unable to bear it any longer, interjects to tell him that it is Solnit who wrote the book. The man pales momentarily, before quickly recovering and continuing his lecture at a gallop. That the woman he is addressing is an authority on what he is talking about is of little relevance; he keeps talking.

Within the online reaction to this story, the word mansplaining was coined — by 2012 it had gone mainstream, as one of the New York Times words of the year, and in 2014 it was included in the online Oxford Dictionary. Mansplainers come in all shapes: the ones more educated than you, the ones more senior than you, the ones cooler than you, the ones more rational and less emotional than you. And ladies, even if you are Hillary Clinton or have travelled to the far end of outer space, you are not immune.

The most recent prominent example was a bloke on Twitter manplaining to a comparative physiologist and Nasa astonaut about how water boils in space. It was a lady astronaut comparitive physiologist, you see. Laughed off the internet, the poor man had to delete his Twitter account. Then there was another chap who suggested to an astrophysicist worried about climate change that “maybe you should learn some actual science”. Her response was rather splendid: “I dunno, man. I already went and got a PhD in astrophysics. Seems like more than that would be overkill at this point.” Worse than mansplaining — which can be laughed at, politely bounced back, or furiously ridiculed, depending on your social skills / rage levels — is manterrupting. Shouting down, cutting in, talking over, taking over — manterruptions can be boorish and rude (see Republic candidate above) or chummily patronising: “Hold on, I think what she is trying to say here is….” Gosh, thanks, all you mansplaining manterrupters — where would us gals be without you?