Would the world be better if men just shut up?

Should men-stop-splaining?

A few weeks ago, at the gym, I was doing rows when a man waiting for his turn at the machine told me that I was doing it wrong. I was pulling the bar towards my chest and apparently it had to be towards my hips. I thanked him, corrected my posture and went on to do my remaining 2 sets.

The same day, I happened to see a post on a social media platform. It was written by a woman and read something like this, “Hey ladies, how do you deal with mansplaining at the gym? Would love to know tips.”

Predictably, this took me back to my recent experience at the gym. Was the guy mansplaining rows to me? Or was he just trying to help someone he saw struggling with the exercise? Whatever be the case, was he wrong to do what he did ? 

I. Pop-psych and mansplaining

Pop-psych has generalised the crap out of the term. Today, a man explaining anything to a woman can count as mansplaining. I am not kidding. I have seen people throw the term around so loosely without bothering to do any kind of appropriateness check.

According to pop-psychers, a man disagreeing with your political views can be called a mansplainer. A man debating your stance on menstrual leaves can be called a mansplainer. A man having an opinion on childbirth can be called a mansplainer. A man giving you feedback on your driving can be called a mansplainer. A man commenting on your cooking can be called a mansplainer. A man offering to help you out in the gym can be called a mansplainer. It seems like all men are default mansplainers. Are they?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that mansplaining does not exist or that it does not happen. Of course it does happen. Many men feel that they always know better and they go out of their way to assert this feeling of theirs onto their women colleagues and family members. And as women, we have had enough of it. We feel it is time to take these know-it-alls down a peg or two. I get it. It makes sense. We are the daughters of Eve, it’s our time to pay back Adam for voluntarily tasting the apple and then blaming our mother for it. 

But here’s the problem with the hate against mansplaining: many of us go around accusing men of mansplaining without understanding what the term means. And when we use a term mindlessly, it loses meaning and value. If every man is a mansplainer, then nobody is a mansplainer. So before we describe the next man we interact with as a mansplaining prick, let’s make sure that we get the definition right.

II. What is mansplaining? (get ready for confusion)

When we actually get down to the task, we realise that ‘mansplaining’ is defined pretty hazily. 

I read several definitions available on the internet and here’s a summary: mansplaining is when a man tries to explain something to a woman in a condescending, patronising or arrogant manner. Unsolicited advice by a man is also seen as mansplaining. When a man who holds less experience/expertise in a subject tries to “educate” a woman with more experience on the same subject, that is mansplaining too. 

So, if a man is trying to explain something to a woman 1) rudely 2) about their area of expertise 3) without them asking for it, that is mansplaining. Got it. 

Now, what I don’t know is if all 3 of these have to be satisfied for a man’s explaining to become mansplaining. For example - what if Steven Pinker condescendingly disagrees with my theories of language acquisition? He’s a world expert on the cognitive sciences which makes him more than eligible to explain this stuff to me but that does not give him the right to speak to me condescendingly. So would he be mansplaining or not? I don’t know.

Let’s take another example. I ask a neighbour for directions to a dentist that my friend recommended. The man gives me directions but also advises me against going to this particular dentist from his personal experience. The first part of his response was solicited, the second part wasn’t. Was he mansplaining? I don’t know.

As you can see, I am left with more questions than answers when I try to understand what exactly is mansplaining.

There was a mansplaining chart (see below, source here) that went viral a few years ago that attempted reasonably well to help men evaluate their own  mansplaining behaviour.

It is a useful chart. But here’s my observation: this is not how a lot of us navigate life. A few things that this chart does not account for:

1. Personality traits, especially introversion: Some of us are a coy bunch. It is easy to tell women that they should ask for what they want but many of us struggle to do this. Introverts, in particular, find it really hard to ask for help/explanations in social settings. They often choose to live with the unknowns than have to deal with the internal pressure of initiating conversation even if to satisfy their own needs. An introverted woman like me might not always ask for an explanation and might even say no if somebody offers to explain it for not wanting to put them through the trouble. Sure, these are things that I need to work on and get better. In the meanwhile, should I label every man who observes my awkwardness and offers to help as a mansplainer? 

2. Collectivist cultures: In countries like India, consent as we now understand it is a novel concept. For the longest time, family was the basic unit, not the individual. Up until a few years ago, Indians lived in joint families (many still do). We are talking about uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces, grandparents, in-laws all living under the same roof invading each other’s space guilt-free. It used to be and often still is considered extremely natural for a father or a male relative to advise the women in their family about all kinds of things - their education, how they spend money, who they choose as partners, their parenting choices. A man advising a woman unsolicitedly is considered normal in these cultures. The new world calls for new rules and new ways of being with each other. Previous gender norms have now fortunately become archaic and discriminatory. Things definitely need to change but many men never got the memo. How can we get upset at somebody for not dressing according to the theme for our party when we did not mention that in the invite?

3. One has the right to disagree even if they are not an expert: Debating, critical thinking, scepticism needs no expertise. It is not wrong for somebody without a uterus to have an opinion about periods. What is wrong is if they think that their opinion is the only truth and this is not necessarily a gendered issue. We have lots of overconfident people walking around thinking that their views are absolute and their opinions final, that everybody else is a fool but this behaviour is not restricted to just men though sure, they may be more prone to it than women.

4. Pressure to perform: A question that rarely gets asked is why do men try to hog the spotlight in workplaces or even homes for that matter? What is their incentive? Here’s what I think is happening: men, like the rest of us, are under tremendous pressure to perform. Everybody is trying to secure that promotion, get tenured or gain more face time with the boss. Acting out of self-interest is human. If appearing smart and articulate can get you ahead, most people will take that chance. Men do it to other men and ever since women have entered the labour market, men do it to women too.

I read somewhere that men doing it to other men does not make it okay for them to do it to women. My observation is that it is not one gender trying to outsmart another gender- that is not what is happening. It is people trying to outsmart other people. Competition is brutal at most workplaces and everybody, including men, are simply trying to climb up that ladder.

III. My experiences with mansplaining; links b/w mansplaining and wellbeing

There are two that come to mind. I’ll talk about one right now. It was during the first wave of COVID. I was living in a village in the hills of India. The place where I stayed had a small kitchen space that I was sharing with 4 other people. One morning, one of my neighbours, a 30ish something man came to the kitchen with his breakfast ingredients and saw me getting ready to boil an egg. He greets me and I greet him. Then without missing a beat, he proceeds to tell me that I should be careful to not leave the egg for too long in the water because something (I can’t now remember now what it was) will happen. He even offered to boil it for me. I was offended. I  have been living by myself since I was 18 and am fully capable of bringing an egg to any kind of boil (soft boil, firm hard boil, soft boil with set white, hard boil with soft yolk). My head pinged, “Mansplainer in the room!”. 

But after I calmed down, I had questions for myself. Yes, he assumed that I didn't know how to boil an egg. That is such a crazy assumption to make though, especially about a woman in India. Most people assume the opposite, that women need no help in the kitchen because cooking is their forte. This guy thought no such thing. My dilemma then became: Should I be upset at him for trying to teach me how to boil an egg when I didn’t need it or ask for it? Or should I appreciate him for viewing cooking as a non-gendered skill and one where anybody, even women might need help?

Added context to this is that he was from a rural part of India and I spent a majority of my life in cities. It is possible that he thought city girls might not know their way around the kitchen. To be fair, this is not a wrong assumption. I have plenty of women friends who don’t know how to break an egg and they don’t care to know either. I myself am not very interested in cooking beyond the basics. So he was not wrong to assume that I might need some help in the egg-boiling department. His assumption was wrong but I now think that it was okay of him to have assumed that in the first place.

It is close to impossible to navigate life without assuming. We cannot possibly gather enough evidence for every single view that we hold. Forming assumptions and hypotheses in our quest to learn is the way of science. Based on the information that we have, we make a set of assumptions. When our assumption is challenged, we dig deeper and based on what we find, we revise it. Men hold assumptions about women (many of which are true) and the reverse is also true. We are (pleasantly) surprised when we see a man cry or express his desire to be a stay-at-home dad or reveal that he doesn't know how to drive a stick. None of these are undesirable traits. But they challenge what we previously thought were true of most men and these encounters are great opportunities for us to fine-tune our model of the world.

The same thing is true of mansplaining. Many men assume that they know better about certain topics. Instead of rushing to label them mansplainers, maybe we will all be better off showing men how they are wrong about us. If you are a better driver than a man who is constantly correcting your driving, challenge him to parallel park the way that you do or something like that (I’m not a great driver, I’m sure you can figure a better solution to prove your skills). If a man is trying to teach you how to boil an egg, plate that perfectly boiled egg and ask him to taste it (I should have done this when I had the chance). If a man is trying to explain to you what menopause feels like (most likely when you are on menopause), engage till he realises how little he knows of what he is talking about.

I’m not saying that the onus is on us women to teach men a lesson every time they are wrong about us. It is not. All I’m saying is that labelling or hectoring a man who thinks he is trying to help is not getting any of us anywhere. It will brew animosity between genders, men will continue to walk around like they are God Almighty and women will continue to hate them for it. Disagreeing, challenging, disproving, debating are better ways of combat and also navigation methods that foster better wellbeing (I have previously written about how venting psychologically harms us, see here).

An environment where women in service of feminism are waiting to jump at a man every time he opens his mouth and where men feel compelled to walk on eggshells every time they are around a woman leaves everybody feeling tense and defensive. It clouds our ability to work with each other and towards the greater good of the world we live in. Calling each other names and feeling the need to always have one up on the other gender often vitiates our own wellbeing and leaves us feeling insatiated even when we win. More importantly, it takes focus away from endeavours that do matter in the long term most of which we need all genders to contribute to.

IV. Final words

Instead of accusing men of mansplaining, why not just disagree with their opinion and proceed to tell them why? If they don’t let you get a word in because of their incessant chattering, why not give them that feedback? Sharing your space (personal or professional) with someone respectfully is the decent thing to do and an act that should know no gender. If somebody is hogging your light and talking down to you, that is not okay, be it a man, woman or a third gender.

The intersection of almost every other social issue with gender is real and there are times that making an issue gendered is necessary to cast the right shade of light on it and help facilitate the right kind of change e.g. girls' education. But sometimes, gendering issues can inhibit change too. Take the example of celebrating women in STEM. We want to prove that all genders are equal - women can go to space and men can enjoy being home nurses. Of course they can. But on an average, do women want to be in STEM? No. And there is nothing wrong with that. We think that forcing gender equality in career choices helps women but it actually does them more harm than we realise.

The trope that men are interested in things and women are interested in people is backed by strong data. Despite knowing this, we still direct funding and provide a host of scholarships to the few women outliers who choose STEM careers at the cost of the opportunities that can be provided to the majority of women who prefer to be in fields other than STEM. Everybody loses as a result. I think that mansplaining falls prey to the same blindspot.

With globalisation, individualist principles are permeating deep and wide. We now teach our boys the importance of consent, to respect a no and to learn to deal with defeat in healthy ways. But many men, especially those who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder remain unaware of the new ways through which their old world needs to be navigated. Things need to change, yes, women’s expertise needs to be acknowledged, yes, our voice needs to be made heard, yes, but here’s something else to consider: is getting pissed at a man every time he shares an opinion different from ours (correct or incorrect) the solution? 

Positive change and new learning comes when we create an atmosphere of safety and awareness. Men have a history of creating work and home environments that make women not just psychologically but often also physically unsafe. They have contributed negatively to our feelings of worth and esteem. They have stolen our ideas and made it their own. We are surviving not because but in spite of their actions. Just that experience and knowledge should be enough for us to realise that scaring men into shutting up is not going to help anybody. I can’t help but wonder if the noise around mansplaining is one of those classic cases of the oppressed becoming the oppressor. I hope to God that it is not. Our liberation can happen without it being at the cost of another’s, and I hope us women can find it in us to recognise that, overcome our impulse for revenge and work in ways that will get men to shut up when they need to but of their own volition. We need to show, not tell.