A Refresher: How to Make Sure You Are Never Guilty of Mansplaining

Four years ago, during the presidential election of 2012, a powerful idea took hold of America. Or some of us, anyway. It was simple, it was effective, and it was absolutely revolutionary: Maybe dudes shouldn’t be such bossy know-it-alls all the time! This was a shocking reversal of like 95 percent of human history, which is mostly built on insanely self-regarding men writing down their ideas and then making everyone do whatever they say (see: Bible, Koran, U.S. Constitution, board game rulebooks). This especially applies to when men talk to women, especially online. It’s called mansplaining.

Given how much time has gone by since we first learned this lesson, and how generally crazy this election has been, and that this year's debates are sure to feature insane amounts of mansplaining, we thought you could use a refresher.

What is it?

This is actually a really good question! It’s simple on one level, but actually pretty complicated on another.

It’s generally agreed that the idea of mansplaining actually goes back one more election cycle, to 2008. That year, Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times titled “Men Who Explain Things.” It is largely a story about a man at a cocktail party fatuously explaining a book to Solnit that she really ought to be familiar with — it turned out to be her own book, and it further turned out that he hadn’t actually read it. Though in that piece she never actually uses the word mansplaining, she encapsulates the idea well: “Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about... It's the presumption... that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.”

Over at The Atlantic, Lily Rothman defines it as, “explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman.”

Marin Cogan, writing at GQ, calls the mansplainer “the supremely self-impressed dude who feels the need to explain to you — with the overly simplistic, patient tone of an elementary school teacher — really obvious shit you already knew.”

On Twitter, it’s even easier to spot. If you @ someone, and you start your sentence with “actually,” you’re mansplaining. You lose! Go home.

Okay, but!

This might start to sound like it’s basically impossible for men and women to disagree politely, but that’s not the case, points out Laia Garcia, an editor at Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter.

“If it’s a mistake, you can correct a mistake,” she said. “But that’s not what mansplaining is. It’s mostly assuming people don’t know what they are talking about — and providing extra information that shows the man does — whether or not its relevant.”