What We Talk About When We Talk About Mansplaining
Note: This was originally included in my weekly newsletter, Puppies & Politics, on July 27, 2018. To see the newsletter archives, or to subscribe, visit jillianivey.com/newsletter.
I’ve been in the photo pit at a lot of rock shows.
From roughly 2005 to 2012, I took photos of everyone from Hayley Williams to Marcus Mumford to accompany concert reviews I was writing. I would never have called myself a professional photographer, but I have a decent eye and I always knew how to make the best of the equipment I was working with. Which is in itself an important skill, because while the other people in the photo pit carried heavy DSLRs, I usually had to make do with a point-and-shoot digital camera. The photos usually came out well — a couple even wound up on the artists’ Wikipedia pages (and not because I put them there). I don’t get press passes to concerts anymore, but once in a while I still get a good enough vantage point to sneak a few snaps, even though it’s just with my iPhone X.
I am telling you this because recently, I went to see Natalie Prass perform at one of WXPN’s weekly “Free at Noon” concerts. I arrived early specifically because I’d heard she was a great performer, and I wanted to take a few photos. She was and I did, but then I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Here, let me show you something,” the middle-aged man standing behind me said. Then he took my phone — still raised from the photo I’d just taken — out of my hand and showed me how to adjust the camera’s brightness.
Reader, I know how to use my phone.
I’m not under any sort of illusion that this man would know I’m the same Jillian Ivey whose photo of Daniel Andriano standing on a speaker stack once graced the Alkaline Trio’s Wikipedia page. But I’m also not under any sort of illusion that, if I were a man, the guy would have assumed I didn’t know how to use the camera on the device I specifically bought because of the camera.
This is why, when I recounted the event later, I called what happened mansplaining.
Earlier this week, for reasons that have nothing to do with the story above, I found myself having to clarify — not for the first time, either — that yes, mansplaining is a real thing and no, we can’t just write it off to someone being an asshole, and yes, lots of people “-splain” but no, that doesn’t mean mansplaining isn’t its own, specific thing. Over the course of the conversation, this flowchart was brought up, first as an explainer of mansplaining and then with the argument “but anyone can be guilty of doing this,” which is a fair point. Yes, the chart outlines behavior that’s rude and condescending regardless of who it’s coming from. What’s missing is an initial question: would you feel compelled to offer this explanation if you were talking to a man?
Mansplaining isn’t imaginary. Even Merriam-Webster says it’s real. Rebecca Solnit wrote about mansplaining before it even had a name. It happens to journalists. To CPAs. To academics. (Quite frequently.) It happens to scientists and comics and actors and CEOs and just regular women and my god I can’t provide any more links because I’m going to throw my computer out the window.
Mansplaining — like whitesplaining, cisplaining, and other now-common-to-the-vernacular “-splaining” constructions — is about power. It’s about saying “your knowledge or expertise or experience or identity is secondary to my opinion.” It’s not a sexist term. It’s the pure, distilled essence of patriarchy. And every time a man tries to argue that it doesn’t exist, he is, in fact, proving that it does.
So while yes, a woman can “-splain” to another woman using the exact argument — hell, even the same words — that a man would use to “-splain” to a woman, it is, at its core, very different indeed.
