Yeah, I get the idea behind the “joke” and in some cases, it would have been a nice little nudge for thought, but in this case it is stupid:
The whole point of art in the first place is to make every viewer/listener/reader come up with his/her own ideas and interpretations. That’s what art does and what it is for.
Explaining to somebody else, what an artwork is about, is pretty stupid and quite pointless since the own ideas are the point.
Discussing your interpretations with others and comparing them is a big and important part of the process. So not talking about it is just as stupid.
In my opinion, that comic has nothing to do with male/female, but is just about two people, where you know at least one of them has to be stupid and it’s your own little game to think about which one it may be.
I only wrote “possibly”, and I got that sense not from a fragment, but from following the conversation, I felt you were a bit defensive, yet approachable so I dared reply. My mistake fellow Internet stranger. I apologize.
Mansplaining is such a newly minted term. I notice in various conversations, even as soon as it is introduced as a concept men tend to be immediately against it, trying to reframe, redefine or rename it as this or that. Give me a break.
Nice to meet you, and thanks for the apology, which was not really necessary either, as i’m neither upset nor angry.
What’s interesting is how whippy internet-people’s reactions can be, which i ascribe largely to the hyper-heterogeneity of internet culture, where people have difficulty accurately inferring the intent of others. I didn’t help by making very terse statements up there, unless the ambiguity was intentional for purposes of stimulating discussion, which it may have been. Whereas if you spend some time in a strongly homogeneous culture, whether online or IRL, the norms are familiar, people kid around, there might even be fisticuffs, but the big hammers don’t usually get whipped out on first provocation.
It pertains to the cartoon in the main post too. If either the “mansplainer” or the speaker (or, indeed, internet commenters) had softened their statements with a kind/thoughtful word/gesture rather than being presumptuous/confrontational as implied, there’d be no hullaballoo at all, just people getting along. Except that isn’t usually as funny or interesting as conflict can be.
Ok, I don’t think I totally misunderstood you, because my main point remains the same. With some people, if they tell me “You are sad” without any additional qualification, I’ll understand “You seem sad. What can I do to make you feel better?”.
Some other people would mean it in a condescending way.
If they say, “I get the impression that you are feeling sad at the moment”, it can be just as condescending, only it’s harder to defend against it because they are just talking about their own impressions, and you can’t deny that…
My point is that it is very hard to link the condescension to some superficial “syntactic” criterion. I’m happy with my friends using absolute statements of fact to voice their impressions of how I feel, and people can be very condescending without ever making a falsifiable statement of fact about the other person’s feelings.
Sweeping generalizations are sweeping.
Also the irony in this thread is going to kill me.
Mr.Pants is incapable of keeping any stray thought out of his mouth. Half the time he’s unaware of what he’s saying as he’s saying it. He’s a verbal thinker. Also, he identifies as a “feminist” (a label I assume you don’t ascribe to yourself? why not?) - how do my anecdota fit into your sweeping generalizations?
When I read about your experience in the kitchen, I think at least some substantial part of it is cultural. I bet Austria is way ahead in some ways, but I just can’t even imagine that happening in Toronto.
I feel pretty comfortable generalizing a lot of my observations about gender interactions to, as I said, English-speaking western culture - USA, Canada, UK. You can’t even take it globally to English-speaking nations, though. I remember the video of the woman walking in New York and getting catcalled an absurd number of times. Some New Zealanders repeated the experiment and got zero catcalls, because apparently men don’t do that in New Zealand.
It’s probably something we (Americans, and American-alternatives like Canadians) could be more conscious of, that when a group of mostly American people get together and say, “Men so often do X,” it is cultural, and we should assume you find the same thing in other places.
Well, I should take my own advice and not rule out genuine cultural differences, but if someone expresses to me, “Women are always saying one thing and meaning another,” I would interpret that statement largely to mean, “I don’t communicate well” or, at the very least, “I’m broadly generalizing from one very disagreeable person I know.”
It pertains to the cartoon in the main post too. If either the “mansplainer” or the speaker (or, indeed, internet commenters) had softened their statements with a kind/thoughtful word/gesture rather than being presumptuous/confrontational as implied,
You know, I don’t actually get that the characters in the cartoon are being confrontational, from here it looks like part of an actual conversation, and the woman is not shooting the man down for failing to read her intent, though I recognize he may feel this way and that’s probably where the controversy comes from.
The cartoon attempts humor by showing a situation where a stranger doesn’t give the mansplainer a pass, and this is his comeuppance, to realize he is failing to read the situation. I believe men who are upset fail to see a way out of that faux pas and double down on mansplaining the intent of the woman, even though it’s irrefutable.
Whether one or both parties are being rude is irrelevant if neither can de escalate the situation then their both wrong and if, as is my interpretation, the man feels rebuked and fails to continue engaging then there is no choice for him but to take umbrage.
When I find myself in this sort of situation the answer is always clear, I just say “I’m sorry I understood this… Now, what did you mean?”
Would this cartoon work if the gender roles were reversed? How about if they were both the same sex?
I can think of memorable times over the years when both men and women “condesplained” stuff to me (including stuff that was in my field of expertise) – neither sex has a monopoly on being patronizing. But if men are upset over this cartoon is that proof they are really sexist mansplainers, or are they just annoyed at seeing their gender stereotyped, like anyone would be?
I disagree.
The use of the words “tend to” is what makes it a sweeping generalization. Not as sweeping as “All men do X” but still general enough and without any other modifiers make it a broad generalization. #notallmen, but enough.
That would certainly imply a self-awareness that seems to be missing from the original statement. If I were to start a statement that way (or with “It seems to me that…”) I would be making an admission that I am only dealing with a subset of facts based on my own perspective, but that I am open other interpretations.
