I have major concerns with Solsnit's essay and with the concept as everyone is describing it here. I can't see a way around viewing this word as a tool to marginalize a group of people.
Is it ever really appropriate to Other a group based on sex and gender stereotypes with a pejorative term?
No, it never is. But that's not what the term "mansplaining" does. It may be what some people do with it, but the term itself is applicable to a behavior, not a sex. It describes action, not a person.
Curious, what term would you use? (Kinda looking forward to it. Give us a meme, Haskins.)
I don't think anyone is disputing that. It's a question of two things: (1) subject knowledge and (2) sexism-and-female-related topics.
For example (1), I know very little about police work. Rugcat informing me of a mistake I made regarding the subject is not mansplaining, nor is his elaboration of a point I made or a hypothetical I posited.
I do, however, know a fair bit about accounting, economics, and fraud. Were Rugcat to interject my clearly lucid posts about the finer points of banking policy to inject an "Actually..." with a bunch of garbage that is clearly and obviously stupid to anyone who has taken freshman business classes, that would be mansplaining.
(Don't mean to pick on Rugcat, who would never do such a thing. Just illustrating an example.)
As for (2), take an equally intelligent man and woman - or an equally stupid man and woman - on the subject of actual issues that affect women much more, such as pregnancy and women's health, or sexism in the workplace, or rape, and have the dude come down from on high to 'splain the subject to a woman. That is egregious and offensive mansplaining. They are not equals in this topic - women, by default, have more knowledge on these subjects due to life experience. Even an intelligent man dealing with a less intelligent woman may only achieve equality on these subjects with intensive study.
Personally, I see (2) as more mansplainy than (1).
In the (1) scenario, what I see really happening is someone who is ignorant but thinks they're in the know copping a know-it-all attitude about something they really know nothing about. While that's always a jerk-move, it's not necessarily always hostile or motivated by prejudice. It doesn't need the element of sexism.
(2) on the other hand does seem to carry more of the element of sexist prejudice, so to me that seems more an example of mansplaining.
Here's an anecdote to add to the pile of examples. It was told to me by my sainted mother: Mother Mura is recently retired from a decades-long career at the highest levels of secretarial work. She has been executive assistant to the CEOs, general counsels, and other top brass of international corporations, large advertising agencies, PACs of major insurance holding companies, to the president and head of research at a globally leading cancer treatment hospital and laboratory, to the publisher of a major group of news periodicals, etc. She is an expert in that line of work. You may meet people as good at running an office as she, but you'll never meet anyone better.
Yet despite a resume that would make most HR directors gasp and squee, she once found herself being are-you-for-real?-splained by a woman executive who, on day one of Mother Mura's new job, decided to "train" her new "girl." She did this by leaning over my mom to show her hands-on how to do things at the desk -- thus invading mom's personal space in a dominating manner -- being extremely, insultingly, almost aggressively and challengingly condescending. At one point, my mom told me
this woman actually manually demonstrated for her how to use a paperclip to hold two sheets of paper together. At that point, my mom asked the woman to take the conversation into her private office, where my mom told her that her behavior was unacceptable and how it was unacceptable. My mom did not mention that she would not be staying in that job but she did quit for a position elsewhere a couple of weeks later, after only a couple of weeks on that job.
Clearly, this sort of thing is shitty behavior, but it's not necessarily sexist. There was nothing sexist about this female boss being such an absolute asshole. It only becomes sexist and mansplaining when the motivation and purpose behind it is clearly sexist, imo.
