[FRIAM] Mansplaining the ManSplainOverse: 2024 Rusty Razor award

[glen]

Along these same lines (I think, anyway), I heard Candice Owens strawman "toxic masculinity" such that the descriptor "toxic" translates across all masculinity. I.e. she thinks when people use the phrase, they're saying that all masculinity is toxic. Of course, that's not what they're saying. But if it *were*, her inference is reasonable, if vapid: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

To me, mansplaining is the same as it ever was boorish behavior of the know it alls we all know ... and love. I've come to lump all this deceptive fine-graining under the concept of the (Jungian?) "integrated self". We've trod this road before with Strawson's Against Narrativity. But people just don't seem that well integrated, to me. And when I meet someone who does seem to have it all together in that way, they exhibit narcissistic or psychopathic tendencies ... like their natural intra-personal diversity has been sacrificed to some unitary ideal of some kind.

Given that, some lecturers are fantastic and I could listen to them all day long rant their gospel. Some are good, but insist on explicit consent. Once you say "Yes, that's what I'm here for ... to listen to you drone on for hours", the string is pulled and they do what they're good at. So the key to the denigrating use of "boor" and "mansplaining" has something to do with implied consent and Dunning-Kruger. There's a sweet spot in there somewhere that's difficult to hit. And continuing in the Gellmann amnesia vein, when you navigate these waters a lot, you're gonna be sensitive to the uncanny valley. E.g. while Curtis Yarvin sounds, to the untrained ear, just like any other blathering dork, if you spend a lot of time around *competent* blathering dorks, you can hear the difference.

On 10/21/24 09:55, steve smith wrote:
> glen sed
>> Yes. It can be frustrating. My latest pet peeve are the foodies. No matter where I go, what group I'm hanging out in, the discussion of food absolutely dominates. They'll talk about which pizza place is the best in town for like, an hour. Or they'll talk about risotto for a half an hour then move on to some other obscure dish. It's exhausting. It's even worse when the foodies start mansplaining beer to me. I've been home brewing longer than most of these people have been alive. But they'll yap to no end about it while I remind my self of Gellmann amnesia <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect>
> 
> (apologies to Gil for (also) not helping to answer his original plea for help with archive.org and lost-data retrieval, and kudos to Glen for offering the Gell-Man reference, new to me)
> 
> Let me offer some mansplaining about mansplaining:
> 
> My favorite 3rd wave feminist (my numbering scheme, starting from 1 not 0) is Rebecca Solnit and I credit her both with the mansplaining adjacent precedent in an essay ( circa 200x) titled "Men explain things to me" where she recounts the experience of attending a cocktail party invited by a friend (in San Francisco I think) where the hostess introduced her to a man who had just read the (first?) book she had published on Edward Muybridge.  The man was head over heels in love with the subject and the book but didn't listen to the introduction well enough to realize he was being introduced to it's *Author*, and proceeded to explain everything he had learned from the book about Muybridge and his work.   My understanding of Solnit is that she is nobody's fool an anything but a wallflower, but being "third wave" not known to be a "firebrand" styled feminist.   I don't know if she deliberately kept paying out rope to hang himself with or not but by the time she extracted herself 
> from the conversation, I think she never interrupted him (effectively?) enough to correct or inform him on the nature of his travesty of the moment.
> 
> I do believe that "mansplaining" as a verb grew popular out of that incident/recount (maybe not, "all anecdotes are wrong, few are interesting, none are useful?")
> 
> She also coined (FWIW, more self-fact-checking indicates she did not coin but merely amplify) the hashtag #yesallwomen in response to the #notallmen hashtag of roughly 2013(fact-check sez 2014)... I was not a hashtag-kinda-guy but knew the idiom at the time... it was after the (before the name existed?) incel living with several (asian-american?) roomates (he being pasty-white) knifed three to death, drove to a sorority house (where he had been ignored/excluded), shot several women, then went on a shooting/hit-run rampage until he self-anhillated.
> 



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