Daily Archive

On the experience of women in society:

“Like most women, I currently live in a society where violence, harassment and scary shit can break out at any moment, just because I told some random asshole “no” without bothering to be nice about it. Doing that is so dangerous that most women don’t dare; after a few scary incidents, they learn to make up excuses, to smile, to be sweet and welcoming, to act as if every single random asshole on the street is a precious new friend that they would just LOVE to stand outside of the Chipotle and chat with FOR HOURS, if only cruel fate had not intervened. That’s what it’s actually like, being a woman: Playing nice with every random asshole, because this random asshole might be the one who hurts you. And then, if he hurts you anyway, they’ll tell you that you led him on.”

And of course, some basic facts about sexism and mansplaining from tigerbeatdown (and the above quote as well).

It’s a dude appropriating feminism in order to silence women who identify things as sexist. Here’s how it works:

• BASIC FACT #1: Sexism is, on its most basic level, the privileging of men over women. It’s more complex than this, of course, because gender is more complex than “men” and “women” in the first place, and we do live in kyriarchy, so not every man experiences male privilege in the exact same ways. But, basically, sexism goes, “man/manliness = good, woman/womanliness = not so good.”

• BASIC FACT #2: All women have a better chance of understanding sexism than cisgender men do. This is because women are targeted by sexism, in their day-to-day lives, whereas cis men have spent their entire lives being socialized not to see the ways in which they perpetrate or benefit from sexism. Again: It’s more complicated than this, because gender is more complicated than this. But all women have experienced sexism, whereas only some men have; women can learn about sexism from both lived experience and study, whereas cis men primarily have to study and work toward a level of self-awareness that the culture simply doesn’t support. Non-gender example: If I want to know more about the food at Momofuku, I can read the Momofuku cookbook, but that won’t make me David Chang. In fact, reading the cookbook won’t even really teach me what the food tastes like; to know that, I have to eat there. Lived experience is knowledge; if you can’t have the lived experience, you can’t have total knowledge of the subject. That is a very basic part of How Shit Works.

• THE COMPLICATION: Where man=good and woman=not so good, men are presumed to always be smarter than women, no matter what the subject at hand is. Hence the phenomenon of Mansplaining, in which a woman — no matter what her credentials, intelligence, or base of knowledge may be — can automatically be cast as ignorant and treated as such by a man, who assumes Real Expert status he does not actually possess. When it comes to Mansplaining sexism, the problems of the man’s credentials as compared to the woman’s are immediately apparent to anyone who gets How Shit Works.

• AND YET: The odds are high that, at some point in his life, a man will hear a woman identify something as sexist, and that he’s not going to like it. Perhaps it is something that makes him feel particularly defensive, such as his favorite book series, or his personal actions. What can he do? Well, he can Mansplain. He can use the powers of the man=smart, woman=less smart assumption to explain away her perceptions and thoughts, by casting himself as the One True Expert on this matter.

• COMPLICATION #2: But the matter at hand is sexism! And this gentleman fancies himself an enlightened sort! He’s not the sort of mansplainer who mansplains sexism away without caring whether or not he looks sexist in the process. He’s got to convince people that he just knows more about sexism than a woman does, in spite of all the evidence and basic logic pointing to the contrary, while still retaining his Liberal Dude Credits. “How can I achieve this impossible thing?” The man wonders, more or less unconsciously. “Perhaps if I… EXPLAINED MY SUPERIOR UNDERSTANDING OF FEMINISM????? Yes, that should do it!” And so the nightmare begins.