I did my best to avoid the debates. I knew that they would test my blood pressure, but unfortunately, avoiding any discussion of them has proven impossible.
The thing that I learned is the Pence mansplained to Harris and kept running over her. Except that:
So what did Pence really do?
Who won the vice presidential debate? #VPdebate
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) October 8, 2020
Yup, that’s what happened.
I hate the word mansplain.
According to Merriam-Webster:
Mansplaining is, at its core, a very specific thing. It’s what occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he’s talking to does.
Well, Mike Pence is the VP so arguably he knows more of that that she does.
Merrian-Webster continues:
The word’s death knell has been sounded—it’s so broadly applied that some say that any time a man opens his mouth he’s accused of mansplaining—but mansplain is clearly not going to be dropping out of use any time soon.
This is true.
Slate. Fucking Lefty Slate published this article:
RIP “mansplaining”: The Internet ruined one of our most useful terms
And the word “mansplain” — a useful neologism with a proud history, whose definition was once clear as a window pane — has increasingly come to mean “men saying things to, or about, women.”
The word “mansplain” can been traced to Rebecca Solnit, a writer whose 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me” laid out the mansplaining fundamentals (though the actual term only began croppping up on feminist blogs months later). In its early incarnation, it had a straightforward definition: when a man condescendingly lectures a woman on the basics of a topic about which he knows very little, under the mistaken assumption that she knows even less.
But along the way, mansplaining has morphed from a useful descriptor of a real problem in contemporary gender dynamics to an increasingly vague catchall expression that seems to be inflaming the Internet gender wars more than clarifying them.
It wasn’t a useful word. It is a terrible, one-sided word. It felt like the linguistic/semantic equivalent to the argument about job parity. Where feminists would demand an equal proportion of women to men in the board room, C-Suite, or partners, but not want equal proportions in jobs that lead in workplace injuries and deaths on the other end of the spectrum. You never see feminists argue that women need to make up half of America’s truckers, roofers, or trash collectors.
Mansplaining was always something done to women in white-collar positions on technical subjects. I.e., one man explaining to a female scientist a topic she knows a lot about. It finally took until 2020 and the COVID for the converse, Karening, to enter the popular lexicon. The equally prevalent phenomenon of predominantly upper-middle-class women to harangue men, especially men in subordinate roles, over overly-emotional or petty bullshit.
But I digress…
In the world of identity politics, throwing out mansplaining to cover for Pence’s superior performance is just fucking annoying precisely because it suffers from the connotative drift of meaning “anytime a man talks to a woman.”
I have concluded that whenever a talking head on TV uses that word, they should be punished by banishment to the cursed earth. By that, I mean pulled out of their NYC/DC bubble, cut off from their wealth, and forced to live in a small town in Oklahoma or Arkansas as a Denny’s waiter.
“The use of the word ‘mansplain’ should be punishable by banishment into the cursed earth.”
So, are we talking Seattle, Portland, NYfC, LA…?
Oh, it’s a relative perception thing. Got it.
But do you really want to subject the average small town diner patron to that? I mean, we want those small businesses to stay in business, right? Besides, that would be taking jobs away from the local teens.
Can’t we just wash their mouths out with soap?
Poorly made lye soap.
One thing about all these man hating liberals that makes me smile- after a while no REAL man will come near them or speak to them. They will die old and alone wallowing in thier self riteous feminism.
Id say fuk em but no thanks, hand me the sandpsper glove….
One problem with that: they’re still alive and still vote. They’re completely toxic at that point and not worth anything, but they maintain the ability to screw with you.
Moral of the story: raise your daughters right and forgo all the feminism bs
There is the actual offensive action of “explaining something he knows little about to her when she knows much more about it.” and the much more common action of “He explains something that she needs to know and has demonstrated she doesn’t know.”
I’m a computer geek. I do web services, hosting services, application development and a host of other things. I’ve been doing it so long that I’ve actually been a part of some of the major advances in internet technology. I.e. I was part of the team in the federal government/US Army that determined it was safe, security wise, to use the original web server. At which point we started publishing to the “web” before it was the web.
I was also there as we migrated from “host files” to Domain Name System (DNS). I was part of the team that did the initial evaluation for the federal government/US Army. I was part of the team that installed one of the first root servers. I was part of the team that created the Zone Files from our massive hosts files. I actually know this stuff.
The “account manager”/daughter of the boss needed to be able to sell “Domain Management” which meant the company took control of the domain from the client, then charged the client on a yearly basis to keep the domain registered, and provided all the DNS servers to publish DNS records. She also needed to sell “Domain Services” which was us providing DNS servers to publish DNS records and for us to update/maintain those records. AND she needed to be able to sell “DNS services” which was us going into their DNS servers and updating records.
To this end she needed to know the difference between a Domain Registrar, A DNS Server, and DNS services.
Because she was touchy about “not knowing” I had to give the briefing to the entire staff but it had to be written and presented at her level. She just zoned out at the briefing because “It was to complex”.
I had to explain the same three concepts to her about once every other month. At one point she yelled “Stop Mansplaining!” My answer “Then stop making mistakes.”
She didn’t like that answer, went to her daddy who told me I had to treat her with more respect because she was the best “account manager” we would be able to find. Doh. No wonder I don’t do that level of work for them anymore.