Mansplaining and Femsplaining

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An indirect mode of discourse is sometimes best when dealing with highly intelligent people. Don’t tell smart people what to think. Drop a few hints. Arouse their curiosity and leave them some work to do.

You don’t have to connect all the dots. Just show them the dots. Smart people can figure out the pattern.

While commenting on a Megan McArdle essay, I made a series of self-deprecating “mansplaining” jokes because (a) I really do feel bad about my know-it-all tendencies, (b) I hate when friends do that kind of semi-praise/semi-criticism riff on anything of mine, and (c) the feminist “mansplaining” meme has been burning a hole in my brain for months. If you haven’t read Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, be warned that she is one of those deceptively persuasive writers whose skillful prose can make you almost believe she’s right. Proving her wrong would be a tremendous task, simply because Solnit is so clever in her sophistry.

Look: I’m a blogger and a professional journalist. Explaining things is what I get paid for. What feminists are doing — what the “mansplaining” meme is about — is an attempt to advance their own career interests by convincing women that feminists possess a monopoly on intelligence, knowledge, wisdom and virtue.

The consequences of accepting this worldview should disturb us.

The self-serving motive — i.e., feminists inoculating themselves against hostile criticism by pre-emptively disqualifying men from the discussion — is obvious enough. For a feminist writer whose stock in trade is All Men Are Swine, it is crucially important to persuade her female readership never to trust men’s protestations against this calumny. If a woman ever begins to doubt that men deserve to be hated, her blind faith in feminism might suddenly unravel and this would undermine the market value of commodities produced by the Man-Hating Industry.

Beyond this, however, we must recognize how feminism’s insistence that all men are untrustworthy creates a climate of suspicion that undermines the possibility of cooperation between men and women.

Mutual trust and respect are necessary to effective teamwork, and feminist discourse is calculated to destroy women’s ability to trust or respect men. Feminists relentlessly derogate males, per se, while celebrating the virtue of females, per se. To any woman who accepts feminist ideology, every male-female conflict becomes self-explanatory: He is the wrongful oppressor, and she is his victim. Because feminists believe this dynamic of male oppression and female victimization is ubiquitous under the system of male supremacy, there can never be a reason for a woman to consider any man trustworthy. She must view men with suspicion, hostility and contempt.

Call feminist rhetoric what it is: Totalitarian hate propaganda.

Now think about where this might lead.

You’re smart. You can figure it out.





 

52 comments

  1. Are you suggesting that being a man and a swine is a bad thing? To be perfectly honest it never occurred to me that I needed to defend being a swine let alone deny it.

  2. Exactly! Precisely!

    I’ve been thinking this for a while, and I’ve been too busy to do anything with it!

  3. Heh. “Lesbian Nation”.

    That’s actually not a terrible idea. Why haven’t the radfems started their own country yet? They could saddle up their lesbian horses, load their womyn-identified prairie schooners or Subarus, and head off into the sapphic sunset, to a society of their own making.

    Maybe take over one of the less populated US states, like Wyoming, the Equality State.

    The economy might be tricky for them, but I reckon they could start the finest Women’s Studies university in the world. And tourists would come to buy trinkets and beads and Indigo Girls CD’s.

    Hillary Clinton could be their President-for-life.

    Since men are evil rapists and whatnot, you’d think they’d be desperate to get away.

  4. I saw a feminist on Twitter insist that men were unqualified and unjustified to talk about feminism simply because they were men. Bree_mars challenged her on this and she responded by explaining what masculinity was (and why it was wrong, of course.) It occurred to me that, as a man, if I had no right to talk about feminism, how was it right that she could talk about masculinity? I guess “enlightened” men aren’t supposed to notice hypocrisy.

  5. I don’t get the pig hate implicit in calling us swine.

    Pigs are some of the smartest and friendliest animals on a farm. If they weren’t so delicious we wouldn’t have the heart to eat them. And Babe was delightful.

  6. I’m glad we eat them; they’re noisy and obnoxious. Their intelligence mostly manifests in being smart enough to break things and to second-guess the wisdom of walking through a doorway, over a threshold or into a semi trailer (that last one isn’t as stupid, but they don’t know that).

    In my experience they’re a lot less endearing than Babe (and none of them have that ridiculous tuft of hair on their foreheads).

  7. Lady feminists have nothing on trannies when it comes to man-hate. The nuttiest feminists are men who’ve lost their nuts. Check out Brianna Wu’s Twitter sometime, it’s like a burst fire hydrant of gibbering lunacy about “male privilege”.

  9. Well, that’s one of the obvious weaknesses in the whole thing where only an X person can understand the experience of Xs. If a white person can never understand the black experience, as we are repeatedly assured, how can a black person make sweeping declarations about how white people are if he isn’t white? Surely he has no more ability to understand whites than whites have to understand blacks — and no less.

    The same holds with feminism and its whole “men can’t understand what it’s like to be a woman”/”believe women” idea. If humans are separated so far from each other by sex or race, that gap can’t be one-way. A gulf isn’t any easier to cross from one side than the other. But this is just one more of those logical inconsistencies which liberalism apparently accepts without thought.

  10. I stand corrected. Piglets can be adorable, when someone cleans them up and attaches tufts or glasses to them.

  12. So “she” (xe?) believes in “male privilege” and yet “she” chopped “her” male genitals off and decided to go through life as a “woman”? (Damn! So many quotation marks when discussing these people!)

    That’s like an Aryan German intentionally sewing a yellow star on his overcoat and saying, “I identify as a Jew! Let me on that boxcar!”

    I don’t think that happened once.

  14. Our esteemed host wrote:

    The self-serving motive — i.e., feminists inoculating themselves against hostile criticism by pre-emptively disqualifying men from the discussion — is obvious enough. For a feminist writer whose stock in trade is All Men Are Swine, it is crucially important to persuade her female readership never to trust men’s protestations against this calumny. If a woman ever begins to doubt that men deserve to be hated, her blind faith in feminism might suddenly unravel and this would undermine the market value of commodities produced by the Man-Hating Industry.

    If it is obvious enough, why did you have to continue and tell us what it is? 🙂

    Actually, I see it as more basic, and more pernicious: “mansplaining” disqualifies the points made by men, just as certainly as points made by a racist or sexist or homophobe or transphobe or whatever can simply be dismissed, without the need for refutation. More, “mansplaining” is a term which tells women that not only should the man’s perspective be dismissed without the need for refutation, but implies that the man is actually insulting the woman’s — and by extension, all women’s — intelligence by expressing a different point of view in the first place. It’s not much of a step further to hold that men’s perspective insult women even if the men keep their mouths shut and say nothing; anything other than silent, nodding agreement — verbal agreement might be held to mean that the man is insulting the woman by having to declare that he agrees with her, that adding his voice to hers might somehow make the shared view more important — indicates that the man does not necessarily agree, and his different view, unspoken though it is, insults the woman, and all women.

  15. Wyoming is rectangularly shaped, and its borders doubtlessly drawn by a man. Furthermore, while it does have Yellowstone, Wyoming has no seacoast, and we all know that liberals require a coastline.

    I’d suggest Delaware: on the east coast, decent beaches, and the farms are small enough for hippies to co-op them. Driving distance of shopping in New York and protesting distance of Washington, ‘twould seem almost perfect. Not a lot of snow, so not as many men needed to shovel the stuff. And plenty of luxury homes, once you get outside of the Wilmington ghettos.

    Of course, the Mason-Dixon line does run through Delaware . . . .

  17. As it happens, the theme of the 2nd International Conference on Men’s Issues — which will be held in Houston on October 30/31 — is “Building bridges between men and women in the 21st century.” They posted the talks from the first conference on YouTube and eventually released a DVD, so even if you’re like me and can’t really afford to go, that’s something to look forward to.

    Nota bene: I make an effort to avoid dragging the MRM in general (and AVfM specifically) into discussions here, because it’s a global, ecumenical, non-partisan, issue-oriented humanist movement, and this is primarily a U.S., Christian, Republican conservative blog. At the same time, they have a common interest in exposing the ugly truth about feminism and dismantling its misandrist project.

  21. You’re actually presenting it more positively than they do — as I understand it “mansplaining” is applied to the fact that a man feels the need to explain something to a woman in the first place (i.e. his fault is in thinking there’s anything he knows that she doesn’t). Even if he agrees he can be accused of this horrible microaggression or whatever it’s supposed to be; it isn’t only an accusation against those who have the temerity to disagree with a woman, you can be accused even for agreeing in an insufficiently deferential way.

  22. More, “mansplaining” is a term which tells women that not only should the man’s perspective be dismissed without the need for refutation, but implies that the man is actually insulting the woman’s — and by extension, all women’s — intelligence by expressing a different point of view in the first place.

    It is now sexist for a man merely to speak to a woman, except in response to a question.

  23. Not to go too far off-topic here, but don’t they largely accept the feminist concept that men and women are the same? A lot of what I’ve seen from them is from the perspective of “if women are equally capable, then they should [pay for their own meal, not have the option to stay home, be required to work like men are, etc.].” In that sense I feel like they’re on the feminist, equalitarian side. I don’t see them wanting to return to a society which rightly treats men and women differently due to the differences between them.

  25. There is a great deal of diversity in the MRM ranks. AVfM (for example) has more independents than the general population, with the rest roughly split between Democrats and Republicans. In order to stay focused on the issue, and not devolve into partisan squabbling, they primarily use basic fairness arguments and show the absurdity of feminists’ counter-factual premises by taking them to their unpleasant conclusions.

    However, you cannot refute the feminist mythology of the wage gap without pointing to how men and women have different preferences. The highly-egalitarian Scandinavian countries have more self-segregation by profession than the U.S., while impoverished African countries have less.

    There the MRM employs basic freedom arguments, since if feminists were honest, the only way to close the gender wage gap is by a modest proposal. Not that Ashe Schow is an MRA, but non-feminists (and even equity feminists such as CHS) inevitably come to the same conclusion.

  28. You’d think these childless male haters would be a bit more circumspect in prescribing how married couples ought to structure their families and raise their children. Especially since progressives make a great fetish of science and expertise.

    But intellectual consistency has never stood in the way of progressive thought. Nor has logic or reason or for that matter, facts.

  29. Men far outnumber woman in occupational injuries and fatalities. No feminist to my knowledge has ever demanded parity there.

    Likewise the logging, construction, commercial fishing, oil exploration and extraction, maritime and heavy industry fields are all male dominated. I have yet to see the feminists demand their fair share. They merely insist that an office clerk with a gender studies degree get the same pay as a roughneck on an oil platform who only has a high school diploma or maybe some community college.

  30. I will never forget that when the housing bubble burst and fewer men were dying on the job — because there were fewer dangerous jobs to work — this was presented as a problem for women, because their very small percentage of workplace fatalities had risen slightly.

    It was one of those telling moments, like those harpies on The Talk cackling over a psycho castrating her husband for wanting a divorce (when that actually proves he was right). Feminists can blow all the smoke they want, but every now and then their true nature will out.

  32. Remember way back in the early days of The Stimulus, which was supposed to “invest” in “infrastructure?” That might suggest to a careless and inattentive buffoon that meant money would go to the construction industry.

    Not so, but far otherwise. A handful of feminists objected at spending so much money to promote jobs for “burly men” and the program was redesigned.

    Another example of their true colors coming through. Jobs for men=bad. Even if it means fixing the roads and bridges you drive on every day.

  34. And now who can trust them, the progressives that cried wolf, the next time they say that our infrastructure is crumbling? They exposed themselves as radical Keynesians — not the sensible kind that would fill a demand gap with productive public investment, but the looney kind that think that government money is free and it doesn’t matter what you spend it on. It would only be another bait-and-switch.

  43. Your denunciation lacks fervor, Comrade. We will be along to your state provide apartment, All Hail the Dear Leader, shortly, in order to discuss the apparent lack of enthusiasm displayed by your insipid, reactionary, running dog lackey of the imperialists mindset.

    But do not fear. We are from the government, and we are here to help you.

  48. You wound me Sir! I would never denounce a well placed denunciation! I was merely saying that it lacked your normal elan.

  49. The McKenzie River Delta should have them sufficiently isolated to try their experiment without placing much load on the poor burdened souls west of Ontario.

    We know it will fail, but the feminazis don’t know that.

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