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:
Overall, Pence spoke for 36 minutes and 27 seconds, while Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, spoke for 36 minutes and 24 seconds, according to a CNN count.
So what did Pence really do?
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.
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